Mr. Gay, all the characters are just, and
none of them carried beyond nature, or hardly beyond practice. It
discovers the whole system of that commonwealth, or that _imperium in
imperio_ of iniquity established among us, by which neither our lives
nor our properties are secure, either in the highways, or in public
assemblies, or even in our own houses. It shows the miserable lives, and
the constant fate, of those abandoned wretches: for how little they sell
their lives and souls; betrayed by their whores, their comrades, and the
receivers and purchasers of those thefts and robberies. This comedy
contains likewise a satire, which, without enquiring whether it affects
the present age, may possibly be useful in times to come; I mean, where
the author takes the occasion of comparing the common robbers of the
public, and their various stratagems of betraying, undermining and
hanging each other, to the several arts of the politicians in times of
corruption....

"Upon the whole, I deliver my judgment, that nothing but servile
attachment to a party, affectation of singularity, lamentable dulness,
mistaken zeal, or studied hypocrisy, can have the least reasonable
objection against this excellent moral performance of the celebrated Mr.
Gay."

Of course, if "The Beggar's Opera" is taken as irony, there is really
nothing at all to be said against it; but the majority of any audience
do not understand irony, and to many the whole thing seemed vicious, an
approval of vice, and even an incitement to wrong-doing. Dr. Herring,
afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, preached against the Opera in, it
is said, Lincoln's Inn Chapel, and censured it as giving encouragement
not only to vice but to crimes, by making a highwayman the hero and
dismissing him at last unpunished. In the Preface to Dr. Herring's
"Sermons," it is added that "several street-robbers confessed in Newgate
that they raised their courage at the playhouse by the songs of
Macheath."[8] Others certainly shared the views of the clergyman. When
on September 15th, 1773, at the Old Bailey, fifteen prisoners were
sentenced to death, forty to transportation, and eight to a whipping, it
is recorded that the magistrate, Sir John Fielding, "informed the Bench
of Justices that he had last year written to Mr. Garrick concerning the
impropriety of performing 'The Beggar's Opera,' which never was
represented without creating an additional number of real thieves,"[9]
and that to this eff