of him. His success offended nobody. He missed a fortune once or twice. He was talked of for Court favour, and hoped to win it; but the Court favour jilted him. Craggs gave him some South Sea stock; and at one time Gay had very nearly made his fortune. But Fortune shook her swift wings and jilted him too: and so his friends, instead of being angry with him, and jealous of him, were kind and fond of honest Gay. In the portraits of the literary worthies of the early part of the last century, Gay's face is the pleasantest perhaps of all. It appears adorned with neither periwig nor nightcap (the full dress and négligé of learning, without which the painters of those days scarcely ever portrayed wits), and he laughs at you over his shoulder with an honest boyish glee—an artless sweet humour. He was so kind, so gentle, so jocular, so delightfully brisk at times, so dismally woebegone at others, such a natural good creature, that the Giants loved him. The great Swift was gentle and sportive with him, as the enormous Brobdingnag maids of honour were with little Gulliver. He could frisk and fondle round Pope,† and sport, and bark, and

*

dedicated to Pope, and so made an acquaintance, which became a memorable friendship.

"Gay," says Pope, "was quite a natural man,-wholly without art or design, and spoke just what he thought and as he thought it. He dangled for twenty years about a Court, and at last was offered to be made usher to the young princesses. Secretary Craggs made Gay a present of stock in the South Sea year; and he was once worth 20,000l., but lost it all again. He got about 4007. by the first Beggar's Opera,' and 1,1007. or 1,2001. by the second. He was negligent and a bad manager. Latterly, the Duke of Queensberry took his money into his keeping, and let him only have what was necessary out of it, and, as he lived with them, he could not have occasion for much. He died worth upwards of 3,000l.”—POPE. Spence's Anecdotes.

"Mr. Gay is, in all regards, as honest and sincere a man as ever I knew." -SWIFT, To Lady Betty Germaine, Jan. 1733.

"Of manners gentle, of affections mild;

In wit a man; simplicity, a child;

With native humour temp'ring virtuous rage,
Form'd to delight at once and lash the age;

Above temptation in a low estate,

And uncorrupted e'en among the great:
A safe companion, and an easy friend,
Unblamed through life, lamented in thy end.
These are thy honours; not that here thy bust
Is mixed with heroes, or with kings thy dust;

caper, without offending the most thin-skinned of poets and men; and when he was jilted in that little Court affair of which we have spoken, his warm-hearted patrons the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry* (the "Kitty, beautiful and young,”

But that the worthy and the good shall say,
Striking their pensive bosoms, Here lies Gay.'"
POPE'S Epitaph on Gay.

"A hare who, in a civil way,

Complied with everything, like Gay."

Fables," The Hare and many Friends."

"I can give you no account of Gay," says Pope, curiously, "since he was raffled for, and won back by his Duchess."-Works, Roscoe's ed., vol. ix. p. 392.

Here is the letter Pope wrote to him when the death of Queen Anne brought back Lord Clarendon from Hanover, and lost him the Secretaryship of that nobleman, of which he had had but a short tenure.

Gay's Court prospects were never happy from this time.-His dedication of the Shepherd's Week to Bolingbroke, Swift used to call the "original sin” which had hurt him with the house of Hanover :

"Sept. 23, 1714.

"DEAR MR. GAY,-Welcome to your native soil! welcome to your friends! thrice welcome to me! whether returned in glory, blest with Court interest, the love and familiarity of the great, and filled with agreeable hopes; or melancholy with dejection, contemplative of the changes of fortune, and doubtful for the future; whether returned a triumphant Whig or a desponding Tory, equally all hail! equally beloved and welcome to me! If happy, I am to partake in your elevation; if unhappy, you have still a warm corner in my heart, and a retreat at Binfield in the worst of times at your service. If you are a Tory, or thought so by any man, I know it can proceed from nothing but your gratitude to a few people who endeavoured to serve you, and whose politics were never your concern. If you are a Whig, as I rather hope, and as I think your principles and mine (as brother poets) had ever a bias to the side of liberty, I know you will be an honest man and an inoffensive one. Upon the whole, I know you are incapable of being so much of either party as to be good for nothing. Therefore, once more, whatever you are or in whatever state you are, all hail !

"One or two of your own friends complained they had heard nothing from you since the Queen's death; I told them no man living loved Mr. Gay better than I, yet I had not once written to him in all his voyage. This I thought a convincing proof how truly one may be a friend to another without telling him so every month. But they had reasons, too, themselves to allege in your excuse, as men who really value one another will never want such as make their friends and themselves easy. The late universal concern in public affairs threw us all into a hurry of spirits: even I, who am more a philosopher than to expect anything from any reign, was borne away with the current, and full of the expectation of the successor. During your journeys, I knew not whither to aim a letter after you; that was a sort of shooting flying: add to

of Prior) pleaded his cause with indignation, and quitted the Court in a huff, carrying off with them into their retirement their kind gentle protégé. With these kind lordly folks, a real Duke and Duchess, as delightful as those who harboured Don Quixote, and loved that dear old Sancho, Gay lived, and was lapped in cotton, and had his plate of chicken, and his saucer of cream, and frisked, and barked, and wheezed, and grew fat, and so ended. He became very melancholy and lazy, sadly plethoric, and only occasionally diverting in his latter days. But everybody loved him, and the remembrance of his pretty little tricks; and the raging old Dean of Saint Patrick's, chafing in his banishment, was afraid to open the letter which Pope wrote him announcing the sad news of the death of Gay.t

this the demand Homer had upon me, to write fifty verses a day, besides learned notes, all which are at a conclusion for this year. Rejoice with me, O my friend! that my labour is over; come and make merry with me in much feasting. We will feed among the lilies (by the lilies I mean the ladies). Are not the Rosalindas of Britain as charming as the Blousalindas of the Hague? or have the two great Pastoral poets of our nation renounced love at the same time? for Philips, immortal Philips, hath deserted, yea, and in a rustic manner kicked his Rosalind. Dr. Parnell and I have been inseparable ever since you went. We are now at the Bath, where (if you are not, as I heartily hope, better engaged) your coming would be the greatest pleasure to us in the world. Talk not of expenses: Homer shall support his children. I beg a line from you, directed to the Post-house in Bath. Poor Parnell is in an ill state of health.

"Pardon me if I add a word of advice in the poetical way. Write something on the King, or Prince, or Princess. On whatsoever foot you may be with the Court, this can do no harm. I shall never know where to end, and am confounded in the many things I have to say to you, though they all amount but to this, that I am, entirely, as ever,

"Your," &c.

Gay took the advice "in the poetical way," and published “An Epistle to a Lady, occasioned by the arrival of Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales." But though this brought him access to Court, and the attendance of the Prince and Princess at his farce of the What d'ye call it?" it did not bring him a place. On the accession of George II., he was offered the situation of Gentleman Usher to the Princess Louisa (Her Highness being then two years old); but "by this offer," says Johnson, "he thought himself insulted."

* " Gay was a great eater.-As the French philosopher used to prove his existence by Cogito, ergo sum, the greatest proof of Gay's existence is, Edit, ergo est."-CONGREVE, in a letter to Pope. Spence's Anecdotes.

Swift's letters to him are beautiful; and having no purpose but kindness in writing to him, no party aim to advocate, or slight or anger to wreak, every word the Dean says to his favourite is natural, trustworthy, and kindly. His admiration for Gay's parts and honesty, and his laughter at his weaknesses, were alike just and genuine. He paints his character in wonderful pleasant traits of jocular satire. "I writ lately to Mr. Pope," Swift says, writing to Gay: "I wish you had a little villakin in his neighbourhood; but you are yet too volatile, and any lady with a coach and six horses would carry you to Japan." "If your ramble," says Swift, in another letter, "was on horseback, I am glad of it, on account of your health; but I know your arts of patching up a journey between stagecoaches and friends' coaches-for you are as arrant a cockney as any hosier in Cheapside. I have often had it in my head to put it into yours, that you ought to have some great work in scheme, which may take up seven years to finish, besides two or three under- ones that may add another thousand pounds to your stock. And then I shall be in less pain about you. I know you can find dinners, but you love twelvepenny coaches too well, without considering that the interest of a whole thousand pounds brings you but half-a-crown a day.” And then Swift goes off from Gay to pay some grand compliments to her Grace the Duchess of Queensberry, in whose sunshine Mr. Gay was basking, and in whose radiance the Dean would have liked to warm himself too.

But we have Gay here before us, in these letters-lazy,

received Dec. 15, but not read till the 20th, by an impulse foreboding some misfortune."

"It was by Swift's interest that Gay was made known to Lord Bolingbroke, and obtained his patronage."-SCOTT's Swift, vol. i. p. 156.

Pope wrote on the occasion of Gay's death, to Swift, thus:

"[Dec. 5, 1732.] "... One of the nearest and longest ties I have ever had is broken all on a sudden by the unexpected death of poor Mr. Gay. An inflammatory fever hurried him out of this life in three days. . . . He asked of you a few hours before when in acute torment by the inflammation in his bowels and breast.... His sisters, we suppose, will be his heirs, who are two widows. . . . Good God! how often are we to die before we go quite off this stage? In every friend we lose a part of ourselves, and the best part. God keep those we have left! few are worth praying for, and one's self the least of all."