“Well, I shall think of that no more, If you'll be sure to come at four."

The Doctor now obeys the summons,
Likes both his company and commons;
Displays his talent, sits till ten :
Next day invited comes again;
Soon grows domestic, seldom fails
Either at morning or at meals;
Came early, and departed late ;
In short, the gudgeon took the bait.
My lord would carry on the jest,
And down to Windsor takes his guest.
Swift much admires the place and air,
And longs to be a canon there ;
In summer round the park to ride;
In winter never to reside.

“A canon! that's a place too mean
No, Doctor, you shall be a dean ;
Two dozen canons round your stall,
And you the tyrant of them all :
You need but cross the Irish seas,
To live in plenty, power, and ease.”
Poor Swift departs; and what is worse
With borrowed money in his purse;
Travels at least an hundred leagues,
And suffers numberless fatigues.

Suppose him now a dean complete,
Demurely lolling in his seat;

The silver verge, with decent pride,

Stuck underneath his cushion-side:

Suppose him gone through all vexations,

Patents, instalments, abjurations,

First-fruits, and tenths, and chapter-treats :

Dues, payments, fees, demands, and cheats— (The wicked laity's contriving

To hinder clergymen from thriving).

Now all the Doctor's money's spent ;
His tenants wrong him in his rent;
The farmers, spitefully combined,
Force him to take his tithes in kind.

And Parvisol discounts arrears

By bills for taxes and repairs.

Poor Swift, with all his losses vext,
Not knowing where to turn him next,
Above a thousand pounds in debt,
Takes horse and, in a mighty fret,
Rides day and night at such a rate,
He soon arrives at Harley's gate;
But was so dirty, pale, and thin,
Old Read would hardly let him in.
Said Harley, "Welcome, reverend Dean;
What makes your worship look so lean?

Why sure you won't appear in town

In that old wig and rusty gown?

I doubt your heart is set on pelf

So much, that you neglect yourself.
What! I suppose, now stocks are high,
You've some good purchase in your eye?
Or is your money out at use?"

"Truce, good my lord, I beg a truce,"
(The Doctor in a passion cried).
"Your raillery is misapplied;
Experience I have dearly bought;
You know I am not worth a groat;
But you resolved to have your jest,
And 'twas a folly to contest.

Then, since you now have done your worst,

Pray leave me where you found me first." }

In

No two men could be more unlike each other in respect of character, genius, and fortune than were Swift and Gay. The latter was as obsequious, accommodating, and amiable, as the former was cynical, haughty, and independent. Swift was sparing and spartan in his habits; Gay was greedy, indolent, and ostentatious. point of literary style everything that Swift wrote bore the stamp of originality, and, as Johnson says, even of singularity. Gay never initiated any characteristic line of thought from the first his works owed their existence to other men's suggestions. Yet Gay met with none of the impediments that barred the ambition of Swift. Fortune, on the contrary, was always providing him with opportunities, which he generally wasted through careless1 Imitation of Horace, Book i. Epistle 7.

:

ness and want of foresight; and, in spite of these faults, some friendly hand was ever ready to help him out of the difficulty of the moment. Nearly everything that he wrote attained a certain amount of popularity, and even fame, some of which has been lasting; and this he owed to the almost servile facility with which he adapted himself to the tastes and perceptions of the society about him, exactly inverting the misanthropic contempt for the whole human race displayed by his friend, the Dean of St. Patrick's. To his chameleon-like power of reflecting the average thought and manners of his time must be ascribed the undoubtedly characteristic place that he occupies in the History of English Poetry.

John Gay was baptized at Barnstaple Old Church on the 16th of September 1685. He was the youngest son of William Gay of Barnstaple-a member of an old but decayed Devonshire family-who died when the future poet was about ten years old. John was educated at the Grammar School of his native town, under the mastership first of one Rayner, and then of Robert Luck, a man not unknown in his day as a writer of Latin and English verse. Among his schoolfellows were Pope's friend, William Fortescue, and Aaron Hill. After leaving school he was apprenticed, by an uncle who took charge of him, to a silkmercer in London. It is said that he soon obtained a discharge from a business that was irksome to him, and returned for a time to Barnstaple; but there are no records of the manner in which he contrived to support himself before the year 1708, when his first poem, called Wine, was published by William Keble. This was written in imitation of Philips' Cider: whether, however, it obtained anything like the same amount of popularity there is nothing to show.

But Gay took instinctively the surest road to secure the support that his limited genius required. In 1711 we find him issuing a pamphlet entitled The Present State of Wit, in which he gives an account of the origin and character of the leading newspapers of recent date, including The Tatler, The Spectator, and The Examiner,

with complimentary references to the leading writers in them. He thus found an easy entrance to the good graces of Steele and Swift; and in the same year it appears, by a letter from Cromwell to Pope, that Gay had addressed a letter to Lintot on the publication of his Miscellany, in which he speaks as follows of the author of The Rape of the Lock and the Essay on Criticism :—

When Pope's harmonious muse with pleasure roves
Amidst the plains, the murmuring streams and groves,
Attentive Echo, pleased to hear his songs,

Through the glad shade each warbling note prolongs ;
His varied numbers charm our ravished ears,
His steady judgment far out-shoots his years,
And early in the youth a god appears.

This happy flattery, the beginning of an enduring friendship, was emphasised in 1713 by the dedication of Rural Sports to Pope with the humble acknowledgment of discipleship :

My muse shall rove through flowery meads and plains,
And deck with Rural Sports her native strains,
And the same road ambitiously pursue

Frequented by the Mantuan swain and you.

Pope, who was then meditating his campaign against Ambrose Philips, with a rapid perception of the peculiar gifts of his admirer, suggested to him the idea of ridiculing Philips' Pastorals by a representation of country manners as they really were. Gay, working upon the hint in his own style, produced in 1714 The Shepherd's Week. The Prologue, in which this poem with flattering compliments was dedicated to Bolingbroke, shows that the author had contrived to insinuate himself into the good graces of the arbitra elegantiarum, whom he thus celebrates :

There saw I ladies all a-row

Before their Queen in seemly show.
No more I'll sing Buxonia brown,
Like goldfinch in her Sunday gown ;
Nor Clumsilis, nor Marian bright,
Nor damsel that Hobnelia hight.

But Lansdown fresh as flower of May,

And Berkeley lady blithe and gay,

And Anglesey whose speech exceeds
The voice of pipe or oaten reeds;

And blooming Hyde, with eyes so rare,
And Montague beyond compare.

Such ladies fair would I depaint

In roundelay or sonnet quaint.

It was not so much by his lyric style, however, as by his mock-heroic portraiture of artificial manners, that Gay at first secured popularity among female readers. In the previous year he had published The Fan, of which Pope, repaying the flattery of his imitator, writes to him on the 17th of August 1713: "I am very much recreated and refreshed with the news of the advancement of The Fan, which I doubt not will delight the eye and sense of the fair, as long as that agreeable machine shall play in the hands of posterity." Whatever the opinion of this poor poem may be, among that part of posterity which uses the fan, it appears to have given much pleasure to the ladies of the day, who probably exerted all their influence to obtain for their favourite poet the post of Secretary to Lord Clarendon's Embassy, sent in June 1714 to the Court of Hanover to condole with the Elector on the loss of his mother, the Electress Sophia. On the 1st of August in the same year, Queen Anne having died, the Embassy came to a natural end, and with it all Gay's hopes of political preferment. Whenever fortune failed him, he seems to have been himself entirely helpless, yet never to have been without help. So it was now. Pope, who was busy at Binfield with his translation of Homer, offered to provide for him there, and meantime suggested to him the expediency of flattering some member of the Royal Family. Upon this hint, Gay published on 20th November 1714 his Letter to a Lady: Occasioned by the Arrival of Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales; a composition which he seems to have modelled on the half-panegyrical, half-humorous style of Montague's Epistle to Dorset, on the Battle of the Boyne. The following extract shows the effect of the mixed manner :

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