Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 21.djvu/93

 her protection. ‘Any lady with a coach and six horses’—as Swift complained later, with a half-sorry recollection of his friend's ‘rooted laziness’ and ‘utter impatience of fatigue’—‘would carry him to Japan,’ and he was certainly not the man to resent her grace's imperious patronage. ‘He [Gay] is always with the Duchess of Queensberry,’ writes Mrs. Bradshaw to Mrs. Howard from Bath in 1721; and five years later the poet himself tells Swift that he has been with his great friends at Oxford and Petersham ‘and wheresoever they would carry me.’ In the intervals he is with Lord Burlington at Chiswick or Piccadilly or Tunbridge Wells. Or he is helping Congreve to nurse his gout at ‘the Bath,’ or acting as Pope's secretary at Twickenham (‘which you know is no idle charge’), or borrowing sheets from Jervas to put up Swift at the lodgings in Whitehall which were granted him by the Earl of Lincoln. But though his life sounds pleasant in the summary, it must often have involved many of the humiliations of dependency. According to Arbuthnot (, Corr. ii. 32 n.), it would seem that the Burlingtons sometimes neglected the creature comforts of their protégé, and they and his other great friends either could not or would not procure his advancement. ‘They wonder,’ says Gay piteously to Swift in 1722, ‘at each other for not providing for me, and I wonder at them all.’ Still, from a reference in another letter to Pope (ib. ii. 426 and n.), it appears that he drew a salary of 150l. per annum as a lottery commissioner, a post which he held from 1722 to 1731; and, except that he lived in the Saturnian age of letters for those who had friends in power, there was no pressing reason why he should be singled out for special honours.

It is evident, too, that his circumstances—as far as they can be ascertained from chance references—were not improved by his own dilatory and temporising habits, nor was he of a fibre to endure the shocks of fortune. When his unsubstantial South Sea riches had vanished, he sank into a state of despondency which, ‘being attended with the cholic,’ says the ‘Biographia Britannica,’ ‘brought his life in danger.’ This illness, from a letter written to Swift in December 1722, must have preceded his appointment as a lottery commissioner. But he still continued to look discontentedly for further advancement, which was not forthcoming. ‘I hear nothing of our friend Gay,’ says Swift three years later, ‘but I find the court keeps him at hard meat’ (ib. ii. 55), and from other indications it would seem that Gay trusted much to the advocacy of Mrs. Howard (afterwards Countess of Suffolk), who probably had the will but not the power to help him.

After the ‘Poems’ of 1720 his next production was the tragedy of ‘The Captives,’ which was acted at Drury Lane in January 1724 with considerable success for seven nights, the third, or author's night, being by the express command of the Prince and Princess of Wales, to whom he had read his play in manuscript at Leicester House. Towards the close of the following year we get a hint of the work upon which his reputation as a writer mainly rests. ‘Gay,’ Pope tells Swift in December, ‘is writing Tales for Prince William’ (afterwards the Duke of Cumberland). The tales in question were the well-known ‘Fables.’ After considerable delay, caused to some extent by the slow progress of the plates, which were designed by Wootton, the animal painter, and Kent, the first series was published by Tonson & Watts in 1727, with an introductory fable to his highness. The work was well received; but, from a remark by Swift in No. 3 of ‘The Intelligencer,’ it must be inferred that some of the writer's sarcasms against courtiers were thought to be over bold. At all events, when the reward he had been led to anticipate came at last with the accession of George II, it was confined to a nomination as gentleman-usher to the little Princess Louisa. ‘The queen's family,’ he tells Swift in October 1727, ‘is at last settled, and in the list I was appointed gentleman-usher to the Princess Louisa … which, upon account I am so far advanced in life, I have declined accepting, and have endeavoured, in the best manner I could, to make my excuses by a letter to her majesty. So now all my expectations are vanished; and I have no prospect, but in depending wholly upon myself, and my own conduct. As I am used to disappointments, I can bear them; but as I can have no more hopes, I can no more be disappointed, so that I am in a blessed condition’ (ib. ii. 103).

In the same letter he refers to his next effort, the famous ‘Beggar's Opera,’ which he declares to be ‘already finished.’ The first idea was Swift's, and connects itself with the old warfare against Ambrose Philips. ‘I believe,’ says Swift in a letter to Pope of 30 Aug. 1716, ‘that the pastoral ridicule is not exhausted, and that a porter, footman, or chairman's pastoral might do well. Or what think you of a Newgate pastoral?’ Gay had essayed, upon another hint in this letter, a quaker eclogue, which is to be found in vol. ii. of the ‘Poems’ of 1720; but for the Newgate pastoral he had substituted a lyrical drama, which was now completed. Spence (Anecdotes, ed. Singer, p. 120) says that