[16] In Kane O'Hara's later and more popular transformation of Tom Thumb into a light opera, the song put into the mouth of the dying Grizzle by the first adapters was retained with minor changes.
"My body's like a bankrupt's shop,
My creditor is cruel death,
Who puts to trade of life a stop,
And will be paid with this last breath; Oh!"
Apparently O'Hara made no further use of his predecessors.
[17] S.P. Dom. George I, Bundle 22, No. 97.
[18] In spite of the fact that "Translated from the French" appeared on the title-page, Mrs. Haywood has hitherto been accredited with the full authorship of these letters. They were really a loose translation of Lettres Nouvelles…. Avec Treize Lettres Amoureuses d'une Dame à un Cavalier (Second Edition, Paris, 1699) by Edme Boursault, and were so advertised in the public prints.
[19] Probably a misprint. When the novels appeared, Idalia was the Unfortunate Mistress, Lasselia the Self-abandon'd. Perhaps because the work outgrew its original proportions, or because short novels found a readier sale, the five were never published under the inclusive cautionary caption.
[20]
E. Gosse, Gossip in a Library, 161, "What Ann Lang Read." Only one of
Mrs. Haywood's novels, The City Jilt, was ever issued in cheap form.
T. Bailey, the printer, evidently combined his printing business with
the selling of patent medicines.
[21] The latter may be read in Savage's Poems, Cooke's edition, II, 162. The complimentary verses first printed before the original issue.
[22] His poem To Mrs. Eliza Haywood on her Writings was hastily inserted in the fourth volume of Secret Histories, Novels, and Poems when that collection had reached its third edition (1732). In the fourth edition of ten years later it stands, with the verses already described, at the beginning of Volume I.
[23] In the Preface to Lasselia (1723), for instance, she feels obliged to defend herself from "that Aspersion which some of my own Sex have been unkind enough to throw upon me, that I seem to endeavour to divert more than to improve the Minds of my Readers. Now, as I take it, the Aim of every Person, who pretends to write (tho' in the most insignificant and ludicrous way) ought to tend at least to a good Moral Use; I shou'd be sorry to have my Intentions judg'd to be the very reverse of what they are in reality. How far I have been able to succeed in my Desires of infusing those Cautions, too necessary to a Number, I will not pretend to determine; but where I have had the Misfortune to fail, must impute it either to the Obstinacy of those I wou'd persuade, or to my own Deficiency in that very Thing which they are pleased to say I too much abound in—a true description of Nature."