Note xxix — THE ART of POLITICKS, In Imitation of HORACE's ART of POETRY.
Reading edition
P. 20, line 8.
Polly Peachum is of course the heroine of Gay's
Beggar's Opera
. The role was played by Lavinia Fenton, who immediately became the toast of London. "Old Sir John" may be Sir John Hobart (1693-1756), although he was only fifteen years older than Miss Fenton (see Sedgwick, 2, 142). His name was sometimes spelled "Hubbard," and the following stanza appears in "A New Ballad Inscrib'd to Polly Peachum" (British Library C-116.i.4 #38), the cavalier typography of which perhaps indicates hasty composition:
Then came Sir J—— H—— Thundring at thy Cubboard: But you cast them like a Lubboard And did soon dispatch him.
Whoever he was, Sir John lost out to Charles Paulet, third Duke of Bolton, who kept Miss Fenton faithfully as his mistress, had three children by her, and married her on the death of his wife in 1751.