of the stage as Mr. Bays might think proper to take. Much about this time, then, the 'Three Hours After Marriage' had been acted without success, when Mr. Bays, as usual, had a fling at it; which in itself was no jest, unless the audience would please to make it one. But however, flat as it was, Mr. Pope was mortally sore upon it. This was the offence: In this play, two coxcombs being in love with a learned virtuoso's wife, to get unsuspected access to her, ingeniously send themselves as two presented rarities to the husband, the one curiously swathed up like an Egyptian mummy, and the other slily covered in the pasteboard skin of a crocodile; upon which poetical expedient, I, Mr. Bays, when the two kings of Brentford came from the clouds into the throne again, instead of what my part directed me to say, made use of the words: 'Now, Sir, this revolution I had some thought of introducing by a quite different contrivance; but my design taking air, some of your sharp wits, I found, had made use of it before me; otherwise I intended to have stolen one of them in the shape of a Mummy, and the other in that of a Crocodile!' Upon which, I doubt, the audience, by the roar of their applause, shewed their proportionable contempt of the play they belonged to. But why am I answerable for that? I did not lead them by any reflection of my own into that contempt. Surely, to have used the bare words Mummy and Crocodile was neither unjust nor unmannerly. Where, then, was the crime of simply saying there had been two such things in a former play? But this, it seems, was so heinously taken by Mr. Pope, that in the swelling of his heart, after the play was over, he came behind the scenes, with his lips pale and his voice trembling, to call me to account for the insult; and accordingly fell upon me with all the foul language that a wit out of his senses could be capable of. How durst I have the impudence to treat
