Twenty-five years before it was not so.
He was then the gayest of the gay and in the heyday of his career.

Much had happened since then.

Disappointed political ambitions and political flirtations with the Jacobite party had ended in exile in France, from which, having been pardoned, he had not long returned.
Meeting Gay, the latter suggested a prowl in St.Giles, where life was in more than its usual turmoil consequent upon the execution of Jack Sheppard; so Viscount Bolingbroke revisited the slums of St.Giles, which had been the scene of many an orgy in his hot youth.
The nobleman returned no answer to Gay's question.

His thoughts had gone back to his early manhood when he took his pleasure wherever he found it.

In some of his mad moods St.Giles was more to his taste than St.
James's.