carrying off with them into their retirement their kind, gentle, protégé. With these kind, lordly folks, a real Duke and Duchess, as delightful as those who harboured Don Quixote, and loved that dear old Sancho, Gay lived, and was lapped in cotton, and had his plate of chicken, and his saucer of cream, and frisked, and barked, and wheezed, and grew fat, and so ended.[1] He became very melancholy, and lazy, sadly plethoric, and only occasionally diverting in his latter days. But everybody loved him, and the remembrance of his pretty little tricks; and the raging old Dean of St. Patrick's, chafing in his banishment, was afraid to open the letter which Pope wrote him, announcing the sad news of the death of Gay.[2]
- ↑ "Gay was a great eater.—'As the French philosopher used to prove his existence by cogito, ergo sum, the greatest proof of Gay's existence is, edit, ergo est."
Congreve, in a Letter to Pope (Spence's Anecdotes).
- ↑ Swift indorsed the letter—"On my dear friend Mr. Gay's death; received Dec. 15, but not read till the 20th, by an impulse foreboding some misfortune."
"It was by Swift's interest that Gay was made known to Lord Bolingbroke, and obtained his patronage."—Scott's Swift, vol. i. p. 156.
Pope wrote on the occasion of Gay's death, to Swift, thus:—"[Dec, 5, 1732.]. . . "One of the nearest and longest ties I have ever had is broken all on a sudden by the unfortunate death of poor Mr. Gay. An inflammatory fever carried him out of this life in three days. . . . He asked of you a few hours before when in acute torment by the inflammation in his bowels and breast. . . . His sisters, we suppose, will be his heirs, who are two widows. . . . Good God! how often are we to die before we go quite off this stage? In every fiend we lose a part of ourselves, and the best part. God keep those we have left! Few are worth praying for, and one's self the least of all."
