Certainly the songs had much to do in the matter of pleasing the audience.  As a literary work, “The Beggar’s Opera” has no great claims, but there is a spontaneous humour about it that has charm.  But it was the milieu that, acting on the hint thrown out years before by Swift, Gay chose that appealed to the public taste.  Highwaymen and women of the town are not romantic figures, but Gay made the highwaymen handsome and lively, and the women of the town beautiful and attractive, and over them all he cast a glamour of romance and sentimentalism.  Even Newgate seemed a pleasing place, for in this fantasy the author was careful to omit anything of the horrors of a prison in the early eighteenth century.  Gay, in fact, did for the stage with “The Beggar’s Opera” what, a century later Bulwer Lytton and Harrison Ainsworth did for the reading public with “Ernest Maltravers,” “Jack Sheppard,” and the rest.

The morality of the opera was much discussed.  Swift took the field, and wrote in its favour in the Intelligencer (No. 3):—­

“It is true, indeed, that Mr. Gay, the author of this piece, has been somewhat singular in the course of his fortune, for it has happened that after fourteen years attending the Court, with a large stock of real merit, a modest and agreeable conversation, a hundred promises, and five hundred friends, he has failed of preferment, and upon a very weighty reason.  He lay under the suspicion of having written a libel, or lampoon, against a great minister.  It is true, that great minister was demonstratively convinced, and publicly owned his conviction, that Mr. Gay was not the author; but having lain under the suspicion, it seemed very just that he should suffer the punishment; because in this most reformed age, the virtues of a prime minister are no more to be suspected than the chastity of Caesar’s wife.

“It must be allowed, that ‘The Beggar’s Opera’ is not the first of Mr. Gay’s works, wherein he has been faulty with regard to courtiers and statesmen.  For, to omit his other pieces, even in his ‘Fables,’ published within two years past, and dedicated to the Duke of Cumberland, for which he was promised a reward, he has been thought somewhat too bold upon the courtiers.  And although it be highly probable he meant only the courtiers of former times, yet he acted unwarily, by not considering that the malignity of some people might misinterpret what he said to the disadvantage of present persons and affairs.

“But I have now done with Mr. Gay as a politician and shall consider him henceforth only as the author of ‘The Beggar’s Opera,’ wherein he has, by a turn of humour entirely new, placed vices of all kinds in the strongest and most odious light, and thereby done eminent service, both to religion and morality.  This appears from the unparalleled success he has met with.  All ranks, parties, and denominations of men, either crowding to see his opera, or reading it with delight in their closets; even Ministers of State, whom he is thought to have most offended (next to those whom the actors represented) appear frequently at the theatre, from a consciousness of their own innocence, and to convince the world how unjust a parallel, malice, envy, and disaffection to the Government have made.