Sir Robert observing that all eyes turned upon him at these lines, parried the thrust by leading the applause. After an uninterrupted run in London of sixty-three nights, and emptying the Italian Opera House, the play spread into all the great towns of England, and was played in many places thirty or forty times—in Bath and Bristol fifty times. It made its progress into Wales, where it contributed some of its airs to national Welsh melody, to Scotland and Ireland; and last of all it was performed in Minorca.
Nor was its fame confined to the reading and representation alone, for the card-table and the drawing-room shared with the theatre and the closet in this respect; the ladies carried about the favourite songs engraven on their fans, and screens were decorated with scenes from the play.
Hogarth's painting representing the first scene on the boards, with noble dukes and earls on fauteuils upon the stage, is well known. His portrait of Polly Fenton is in the National Gallery.
The Beggars' Opera was revived by Messrs. Gatti at Covent Garden in the season 1878-9. On this occasion wrote Punch: "The house was literally crammed from floor to ceiling by an audience whose enthusiastic temperature increased in a graduated thermometrical scale, the over-boiling point being reached at the back row of the upper gallery; and this on a night when, in the stalls and boxes, wrappers, furs, mantles, and ulsters were de rigueur on account of the rigour of the cold. … Let those who do not believe in a comic tenor see Sims Reeves as Captain Macheath, and they will discover what magic there is even in a refrain of 'tol-de-lol, lol-de-rol, loddy,' when given by a tenor who is not impressed by the absurd traditional notion that he is nothing if not sentimental. His acting
