Page:Devonshire Characters and Strange Events.djvu/505

Rh of the celebrated song ’How happy could I be with either' is full of humour, and his change of manner from ' tol-de-rol ' in a tender tone, when addressed to the gentle, confiding Polly, to the ' tol-de-rol ' with a true Cockney chick-a-leary twang when addressed to the vulgar Lucy Lockit, is a clever idea, most artistically carried out; and then his dance up the stage while singing, giving his last note good and true to the end in spite of his unaccustomed exertion, as with a jump he seats himself in a natural devil-may-care style upon the table, was followed by an encore so momentous that even he, the anti-encorist was fain to comply with the enthusiastic demand; so he repeated the two verses, the dance, and the jump with as much freshness and vigour as though he had not already sung six songs—snatches, more or less, it is true—and had got ten more to follow."

As a man, Gay was amiable and winning in manner. He had a foible—indolence. Nevertheless he had saved several thousand pounds at the time of his death, which occurred in the house of the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry, in Burlington Gardens, in December, 1732, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

And now, having done with the man, we come to his chair.

Rather over eighty years after the death of Gay some unpublished poems of his were found in an old arm-chair which had belonged to the poet, and after his death had been retained, with other relics, by the surviving members of his family. The history was fully narrated immediately after the discovery in a little book, called Gay's Chair, along with the life of the poet and a selection of the poems discovered; some were too broad in humour for publication.