and caper without offending the most thin-skinned of poets and men; and when he was jilted in that little court affair of which we have spoken, his warm-hearted patrons the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry,[1] (the
- ↑ "I can give you no account of Gay," says Pope, curiously, "since he was raffled for, and won back by his Duchess."—Works, Roscoe's Ed., vol. ix, p. 392.
Here is the letter Pope wrote to him when the death of Queen Anne brought back Lord Clarendon from Hanover, and lost him the Secretaryship of that nobleman, of which he had had but a short tenure.
Gay's court prospects were never happy from this time.—His dedication of the "Shepherd's Week," to Bolingbroke, Swift used to call the "original sin," which had hurt him with the house of Hanover."Sept. 23, 1714."Dear Mr. Gay,—
"Welcome to your native soil! welcome to your friends! thrice welcome to me! whether returned in glory, blest with court interest, the love and familiarity of the great, and filled with agreeable hopes; or melancholy with dejection, contemplative of the changes of fortune, and doubtful for the future; whether returned a triumphant Whig or a depending Tory, equally all hail! equally beloved and welcome to me! If happy, I am to partake of your elevation; if unhappy you have still a warm corner in my heart, and a retreat at Benfield in the worst of times at your service. If you are a Tory, or thought so by any man, I know it can proceed from nothing but your gratitude to a few people who endeavoured to serve you, and whose politics were never your concern. If you are a Whig, as I rather hope, and as I think your principles and mine (as brother poets) had ever a bias to the side of liberty, I know you will be an honest man and an inoffensive one. Upon the whole, I know you are incapable of being so much of either party as to be good for nothing. Therefore, once more, whatever you are or in whatever state you are, all hail!
"One or two of your own friends complained they bad nothing from you since the Queen's death; I told them no man living loved Mr. Gay better than I, yet I had not once written to him in all his voyage, This I thought a convincing proof, but truly one may be a friend to another without telling him so every month. But they had reasons, too, them-
