heart. A combination of chagrin and gluttony was too much for his constitution, and the news presently came to Pope's ears that his little friend was lying desperately ill in lodgings at Hampstead. The poet, whom a fellow-feeling rendered wondrous kind in a case of illness, wrote to assure Gay that if he himself were not in daily apprehension of losing his mother, he would take rooms at Hampstead, and share in the work of nursing.

"If I am so unfortunate as to lose my poor mother," he continues, "and yet have the good fortune to have my prayers heard for you, I hope we may live most of our remaining days together. If, as I believe, the air of a better clime, as the southern part of France, may be thought useful for your recovery, thither I would go with you infallibly; and it is very probable we might get the dean with us, who is in that abandoned state already in which I shall shortly be, as to other cares and duties.

treatment." When the Vice-Chamberlain went with the message, the duchess returned the following answer :

"The duchess of Queensberry is surprised and well-pleased that the king has given her so agreeable a command as to stay from Court, where she never came for diversion, but to bestow a civility upon the king and queen; she hopes by so unprecedented an order as this that the king will see so few as he wishes at his Court, particularly such as dare to think or speak the truth. I dare not do otherwise, and would not have imagined that it would not have been the very highest compliment I could possibly pay the king to endeavour to support mirth and innocence in his house, particularly when the king and queen both told me they had not read Mr. Gay's play. I have certainly done right, then, to stand by my own words rather than his Grace of Grafton's [Lord Chamberlain], who had neither made use of truth, judgment, nor honour, through this whole affair, either for himself or his friends.

"C. QUEENSBERRY."

Dear Gay, be as cheerful as your sufferings will permit; God is a better friend than a Court; even any honest man is a better."

Thanks to the devoted attention of Arbuthnot, Gay pulled through, and Mrs. Pope still lingered on, though for some time her death was daily expected. Congreve, a friend of long standing, was taken ill about this time, and died on January 19, 1729. It was a depressing period for our poet, who wrote to Gay later in the same month that he had spent five weeks without going from home, and without any company, except on four or five days. "Friends rarely stretch their kindness so far as ten miles. My Lord Bolingbroke and Mr. Bethel have not forgotten to visit me; the rest, except Mrs. Blount once, were contented to send messages. I never passed so melancholy a time, and now Mr. Congreve's death touches me nearly."

Though Gay recovered his health, it was some time before he recovered his spirits. His melancholy, he declares, daily increases, "and not the divine looks, the kind favours and expressions of the divine duchess, who hereafter shall be in place of a queen to me-nay, she shall be my queen-nor the inexpressible goodness of the duke, can in the least cheer me. The drawing-room no more receives light from those two stars. . . . Oh, that I had never known what a Court was! Dear Pope,

what a barren soil (to me so) I have been striving to produce something out of! Why did I not take your advice before writing my 'Fables' for the duke, not to write them? Or, rather, to write them for some young nobleman? nobleman? It is It is very hard fate that I

must get nothing, write for or against them." Gay concludes by begging Pope to see that the now famous epitaph was put over his tomb :

Life is a jest, and all things show it,

I thought so once, but now I know it.

But it was not long before the little man plucked up his spirit. Indeed, he could hardly fail to be gratified at the fact that, since his disgrace with the Court and Ministry he had become the darling of one section of society. "For writing in the cause of virtue and against the fashionable vices," he tells Swift (on March 19), "I am looked upon at present as the most obnoxious person almost in England. Mr. Pulteney tells me I have got the start of him. Mr. Pope tells me that I am dead, and that this obnoxiousness is the reward for my inoffensiveness in my former life. The Duchess of Queensberry is allowed to have shown more spirit, more honour, more goodness than was thought possible in our times; I should have added, too, more understanding and good sense. You see my fortune (as I hope my virtue will) increases by oppression. I go to no Courts; I drink no wine; and am calumniated even by Ministers of State; and yet am in good spirits."

1 Arbuthnot, writing to Swift on March 19, says that "The inoffensive John Gay is now become one of the obstructions to the peace of Europe, the terror of 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 is in danger of being chassée likewise; about seven or eight duchesses pushing like the ancient circumcelliones in the church, who shall suffer martyrdom upon his account first. He is the darling of the city."

VOL. II

2

Extraordinary as had been the success of the first incomplete version of "The Dunciad," Pope dared not issue the enlarged edition with personal notes without taking elaborate precautions to secure himself against actions for libel. In November he assigned to "three lords of his acquaintance"— Burlington, Oxford, and Bathurst-the temporary ownership of the poem, while they, in their turn, assigned the right of printing the same to Pope's chosen publisher, Lawton Gilliver. Although the book was registered at Stationers' Hall in November 1728, it was not published until April 1729. On March 13 Pope had written to Lord Oxford: "You are now at full liberty to publish all my faults and enormities. The king and queen had the book yesterday by the hands of Sir R. W[alpole], so that your lordships may now let me fly."1

For a time the fiction was carefully kept up that only the three peers had the right to distribute the books. On April 8 Pope wrote to inform Caryll that the new edition was written, all but the poem, by two or three of his friends, who had the art to make trifles agreeable. "It would have been a sort of curiosity had it reached your hands a week ago, for the publishers had not then permitted any to be sold, but only dispersed by some lords of their and my acquaintance, of whom I procured yours. But I understand that now the booksellers have got them by the consent of Lord Bathurst."

1 The king is reported to have said, after reading "The Dunciad," or having it read to him, that "Mr. Pope was a very honest man."

The new and enlarged edition opened with a letter to the publisher, signed by William Cleland,1 but undoubtedly dictated by Pope. Cleland begins by expressing his pleasure that the publisher has been able to secure a correct version of "The Dunciad," and states that he has forwarded some notes, which he hopes will be inserted. He explains that it was upon reading some of the abusive papers published concerning his friend, the author, that he engaged in inquiries of which these notes were the result. In the first place, he perceived that these abusive writers had been the first aggressors. They had striven to prove Mr. Pope a dunce, and, failing in this, had descended to personal abuse of himself and his friends. "Now what had Mr. Pope done before to incense them? He had published those works which are in the hands of everybody, in which not the least mention is made of any of them. And what has he done since? He has laughed, and written The Dunciad.'' In that work he had told a serious truth, which the public had said before, namely, that they were dull.

The writer proceeds that he should have been silent if these men had not attacked his friend's moral character, and that anonymously. This was a matter of both public and private concern. He was one of that number who had long loved and esteemed Mr. Pope, not so much for his capacity and writings

1Cleland was a Scotsman, who had served with the army in Spain. In 1723 he was appointed a commissioner of the landtax and house duties. Pope made use of him as he did of Savage. Cleland earned the nickname of Mr. Pope's "Man William."

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