The work bearing this alarming title was
his first work, and for the next six-and-forty
years Tom was a constant caterer for
the London stage and country squires. He
tried his hand at tragedy, comedy, opera, and
farce, and found favour with the public in all
four. Great actors and actresses played in
many of his pieces — Hart, Betterton, Doggett,
and Mrs. Bracegirdle. It was in a play by
D'Urfey that Doggett was first pre-eminently
distinguished as a great actor.

Tom lived and died a bachelor. He was
poor to marry, and the life he led was not
one particularly adapted to the state of matrimony.
He existed, we might say flourished,
for forty-six years and more on the chance
profits of the stage, on benefit nights, on the
money any bookseller would give for his copy,
on the sale of his songs, and on the bounty of
many patrons, from King Charles the Second
and Queen Anne, to the witty Earl of Dorset
and the mercurial Duke of Wharton. He was
a welcome guest wherever he went; for Tom
was funny and could stand a jest. And though
he stuttered, he could sing a song as well as
any one of the twenty-four fiddlers in whose
music the merry monarch took such rapturous
delight.

We have said that Tom stuttered, and we
have two anecdotes to offer in illustration of
what we state. Tom was cheapening a
shoulder of mutton in Clare Market (long
the resort of English actors), but the butcher
was immoveable — he would not take a penny
off.  Tom was importunate, the butcher still
deaf. At last, as if to get rid of a customer
he did not care for, the butcher said he should
have it for nothing if he would ask for it
without stuttering. Whereupon, Tom  — who
had words and music at will  — asked for the
shoulder in an extempore song, which came
from his tongue without a single stammer
or even a rough note. The astonished
butcher surrendered the mutton, and Tom
left Clare Market triumphant. This is told
by Goldys.

"There's nothing," says Tom Brown, " like
bearing an injury or a jest, heroically."

"The town may da-da-damn me for a poet,"
said D'Urfey, " but they si-si-sing my songs
for all that."

It is Tom (now of St. James's churchyard),
who gave us that very agreeable collection of
songs, in six volumes, called Pills to Purge
Melancholy. He was long the poet, as Pope
tells Cromwell, of tolerable reputation among
country gentlemen; and Pope significantly
adds, " Dare any one despise him who has
made so many men drink?"

When Rowe died, Arbuthnot wrote to
Swift, that his place as Poet Laureate should
be filled up thus suitably, — " I would fain
have Pope get a patent for the place, with a
power of putting in D'Urfey as deputy; "  and
Tom would really have made a good Poet
Laureate — of the kind — when required; for
Tom knew the humour of the town and what
was proper for diversion. His Joy to Great
Cæsar would have swelled the chapel-royal
throat in a true Laureate-like manner.

The muse of D'Urfey was not confined to
Whitehall; on court occasions it went into
the city; and Tom accompanied Charles the
Second to a Guildhall banquet, and sung a
song about an Ignoramous Jury and a Loyal
Lord Mayor.

Queen Anne was diverted with his witty
catches and songs of humour suited to the
spirit of the times, and gave him fifty guineas
for singing a song against the Princess Sophia,
then the heir apparent to her throne.

The crown is too weighty
For shoulders of eighty.

For Anne delighted in any compliment to her
own youth at the expense of her expectant
but more aged successor.  It was, however,
at Newmarket that Torn was heard to the
greatest advantage. There, as Gay observes,
he ran his muse with what was long a
favourite racing song, —

To horse, brave boys, to Newmarket to horse,
You'll lose the match by longer delaying.

But the three houses in which Tom D'Urfey
was happiest, were Knowle, in Kent, the
princely seat of the witty Earl of Dorset;
Leicester House, in Leicester Square; and
Winchendon, in Bucks, the stately residence
of the able but licentious Philip, Duke of
Wharton.  Dorset frequently put newly-minted
guineas under the plates of the poets
he invited to his table; Lord Leicester, when
in town, set Saturday apart for the entertainment
of poets; and Wharton, in his garden at
Winchendon, erected a banqueting-house,
called Brimmer Hall, where D'Urfey was a
favourite guest. " Many an honest gentleman,"
says the Tatler,  " has got a reputation
in this country by pretending to have been in
company with Tom D'Urfey.  Many a present
toast, when she lay in her cradle, has
been lulled asleep by D'Urfey's sonnets."
"Any man of any quality," says Pope, " is
heartily welcome to the best toping table who
can roar some rhapsodies from his works."

It was the fashion to laugh at D'Urfey's
dramatic efforts, and certainly his tragedies
and comic operas afford fit material for contempt.
He made Don Quixote the hero of a
piece in two parts, and, in a sad extravaganza,
called Wonders in the Sun, introduced comical
dances of blackbirds and parrots, and seems
to have dressed them and to have made them
sing in character.  When a gentleman, on returning
from one of D'Urfey's plays, the first
night it was acted, observed inquiringly to
Dryden, " Was there ever such stuff?  I
could not imagine even this author could
have written so ill."  " O sir," replied Dryden,
"you don't know my friend Tom so well
as I do;  I'll answer for him, he shall write
worse yet."

Pope wrote a drolling prologue for what
was said to be his last play; and Johnson has