Since all my schemes were baulked, my last resort, Still every one I met in this agreed From the first George these godlike kings descend, A line which only with the world shall end. The next a generous Prince renowned in arms, And blessed, long blessed in Carolina's arms, etc., etc. There does not seem to be much poetical tact in this; the Court may well have thought that the ridicule neutralised the flattery. At any rate the panegyric bore no fruit in the shape of preferment to the author, who was, nevertheless, well looked after by his patrons. In 1715 the Earl of Burlington supported him in his house, and paid the expenses of a holiday visit which he made to Devonshire. On this occasion Gay wrote, for the amusement of the Earl, his rhymed letter recording his adventures during A Journey to Exeter. Pulteney also took him as his companion to the Continent in 1717, and Lord Harcourt in 1718 invited him to Cockthorpe, whence he went on to Stanton Harcourt, another house of Lord Harcourt's, where Pope was finishing his translation of the Iliad. Parnell made him a present of £16:2:6, the sum paid him in 1717 for his Life of Zoilus. Besides the help which Gay thus received from his numerous friends, he also made money by the publication of plays and poems. Of the former the most successful was The What D'ye Call It? (produced on the 15th of February 1715), which contained the charming ballad: "'Twas when the Seas were Roaring." In 1717 was acted Three Hours after Marriage, an indecent and vulgar libel on Dr. Woodward, the eminent geologist. It was the joint work of Pope, Gay, and Arbuthnot, and though it failed on the stage, the sale of the play, among the maids of honour and numerous other aristocratic friends of the authors, was doubtless considerable. Trivia, or The Art of Walking the Streets of London, published in January 1716, proved very popular with the same class, who were largely represented on the list of subscribers for Gay's collected poems, published in two large quarto volumes in 1720, the names being for the most part the same as those appearing in Mr. Pope's Welcome from Greece, a humorous imitation of Ariosto, written also in that year to celebrate the completion of the translation of the Iliad. By the sale of these poems Gay made over £1000, which he invested entirely in South Sea stock. Secretary Craggs had a little while before made him a present of some of the same stock, and if he had been prudent enough to sell at the proper moment, he might have realised from his investments £20,000. With his usual want of foresight he let the opportunity slip, and lost everything that he had earned. As before, he was saved by his friends from anything like distressful consequences. He was always a welcome companion to the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry. Lord and Lady Burlington gave him the freedom of their house. In 1722 he was appointed Lottery Commissioner, with a salary of £150, by Walpole, who allowed him to keep it till 1731, in spite of the attacks made on himself in The Beggars' Opera and Polly. All this was not enough for Gay, who thought, through his life, that it was the duty of other people to make his fortune. "They wonder at each other for not providing for me," he writes to Swift, "and I wonder at them all." In 1722 a fairly successful play, The Captives, increased his resources, and in 1725 he was made tutor to the Duke of Cumberland, for whom he wrote, and to whom he dedicated, his Fables, published in 1727. Queen Caroline had announced on her accession, in allusion to one of Gay's fables, that "she would take up the hare," and considered that she had fulfilled her promise in having him appointed gentleman-usher to the Princess Louisa, a child of two years old. The post was doubtless meant to be regarded as a sinecure, but Gay chose to consider the offer as an insult, and, believing that the disappointment of his expectations was due to Walpole, joined zealously in the opposition to the Minister, which was being conducted by Bolingbroke and Pulteney, abetted by Pope and Swift. The poetical product of this opposition, as far as Gay was concerned, was The Beggars' Opera, acted for the first time at the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre on the 29th of January 1728, a play of which I shall have more to say in a later chapter; and this was followed by Polly, the acting of which was prohibited by the Lord Chamberlain in December of the same year. The suppression of the play on the stage proved a gold-mine to the poet. The whole of the aristocratic opposition hastened to subscribe for and buy his book when printed, and Arbuthnot describes in vivid language the effects of his popularity : The inoffensive John Gay is now become one of the obstructions to the peace of Europe, the terror of the ministers, the chief author of The Craftsman, and all the seditious pamphlets which have been published against the Government. He has got several turned out of their places; the greatest ornament of the Court banished from it for his sake; another great lady in danger of being chassée likewise; about seven or eight duchesses pushing forward like the ancient circumcelliones in the church, 1 Gay to Swift: Letter of December 22, 1722. who shall suffer martyrdom on his account first. He is the darling of the city. If he should travel about the country he would have hecatombs of roasted oxen sacrificed to him since he became so conspicuous. I hope he will get a good deal of money by printing his play; but I really believe he would get more by showing his person; and I can assure you this is the very identical John Gay whom you formerly knew and lodged with in Whitehall two years ago.1 1 "The greatest ornament of the Court" banished for Gay's sake was the Duchess of Queensberry, who had made herself outrageously conspicuous by the zeal with which she solicited subscriptions for Polly at St. James's itself. These amounted to about £1200, so that, with what he received from the publishers, Gay must have made almost £3000 by the suppression of his play. He continued to live at Amesbury in Wiltshire, under the protection of the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry, till his death on the 4th of December 1732. On the 23rd of that month he was buried in Westminster Abbey. The temperament and qualities of Gay, so characteristically displayed in his history, are not less vividly reflected in his verse. Beyond all his contemporaries, with the exception of Pope, he was by nature a poet, in the sense that he had an intuitive perception of the way in which whatever subject he selected ought to be treated in metre. He was without invention in the highest meaning of the word; as Johnson well puts it, "he had not in any great degree the mens divinior, the dignity of genius." As he was content to depend for his livelihood on the help of others, so in poetry he rarely formed designs of his own. His first poem, Wine, was inspired by the reading of John Philips' Cider; Rural Sports would not have been written if it had not been preceded by Windsor Forest; Pope set in motion the idea of The Shepherd's Week; Swift gave the hints required for Trivia and The Beggars' Opera. And yet all these works bear on them the unmistakable stamp of Gay's genius. He had a 1 Arbuthnot to Swift, Letter of March 19, 1729; Aitken's Life and Works of Arbuthnot, p. 125. unique gift for divining the drift of the public taste, and for casting his thought into the form best suited to the requirements of those whom he desired to please. The happiness of his inspiration is well illustrated by his treatment of the Pastoral, a species of poetry which we have had frequent occasion to notice since the time of Spenser, and in which Breton, Barnfield, and Milton had all caught something of the spirit of Theocritus. With the Restoration the taste of the Court was coloured with the more artificial manner of Virgil, and with the pseudopastoralism of D'Urfé and Mlle. de Scudéry, as well as with the China-shepherdess affectations encouraged by the criticism of Fontenelle. But the love of reality, as well as of the country, was too strong in Englishmen to be eradicated by any fashion, and, as The Spectator shows, the national humour soon detected the absurdity of mere mythological formalism. The genius of Gay was well qualified to embody the mixed feeling struggling for expression in aristocratic society. He had a genuine, if sentimental, affection for rural things, well becoming a Devonian and the fellow-countryman of Browne of Tavistock. But he was also a born parodist; so that when Pope suggested to him the ridicule of Ambrose Philips' Eclogues, he perceived at once the humorous effects that might be produced by blending the classical forms of Theocritus and Virgil with English manners and folk-lore. There is a charming ease and grace in the adaptation of the Pharmaceutria of Theocritus and Virgil to the superstitious spells of the Devonian Hobnelia :--- Two hazel-nuts I threw into the flame, And to each nut I gave a sweetheart's name. For 'twas thy nut that did so brightly glow. With my sharp heel I three times mark the ground, As peascods once I plucked, I chanced to see One that was closely filled with three times three, |