joy and surprise, I received a letter from Carlingford in Ireland, which informed us, that, after many perils, you were safely landed there. Had the oysters been good, it would have been a comfortable refreshment after your fatigue. We compassionated you in your travels through that country of desolation and poverty in your way to Dublin; for it is a most dreadful circumstance, to have lazy dull horses on a road where there are very bad or no inns. When you carry a sample of English apples next to Ireland, I beg you would get them either from Goodrich or Devonshire. Pray who was the clergyman that met you at some distance from Dublin? because we could not learn his name. These are all the hints we could get of your long and dangerous journey, every step of which we shared your anxieties and all that we have now left to comfort us, is to hear that you are in good health. * But why should we tell you what you know already? The queen's family is at last settled, and in the list I was appointed gentleman usher to the princess Louisa, the youngest princess; which, upon account that I am so far advanced in life, I have declined accepting; and I 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 dis Queen Caroline, consort of king George II. + This appointment was treated by all the friends of Gay, as a great indignity; and he is said to have felt the disappointment very severely and was too much dejected on the occasion. appointed, so that I am in a blessed condition. You remember you were advising me to go into Newgate to finish my scenes the more correctly. I now think I shall, for I have no attendance to hinder me; but my opera✶ is already finished. I leave the rest of this paper to Mr. Pope. Gay is a free man, and I wrote him a long congratulatory letter upon it. Do you the same: it will mend him, and make him a better man than a court could do. Horace might keep his coach in Augustus's time, if he pleased; but I will not in the time of our Augustus. My poem (which it grieves me that I dare not send you a copy of, for fear of the Curlls and Dennises of Ireland, and still more for fear of the worst of traitors, our friends and admirers) my poem, I say, will show you what a distinguished age we lived in? Your name is in it, with some others, under a mark of such ignominy as you will not much grieve to wear in that company. Adieu, and God bless you, and give you health and spirits. Whether thou choose Cervantes' serious air These two verses are over and above what I have poem. Adieu. said of you in the The Beggar's Opera. + The Dunciad. We see by this, with what judgment Pope corrected and erased. ΤΟ TO MR. GAY. DUBLIN, NOV. 23, 1727. I ENTIRELY approve your refusal of that em ployment, and your writing to the queen. I am perfectly confident you have a keen enemy in the ministry. God forgive him, but not till he puts himself in a state to be forgiven. Upon reasoning with myself, I should hope they are gone too far to discard you quite, and that they will give you something; which, although much less than they ought, will be (as far as it is worth) better circumstantiated: and since you already just live, a middling help will make you just tolerable. Your lateness in life (as you so soon call it) might be improper to begin the world with, but almost the eldest men may hope to see changes in a court. A minister is always seventy you are thirty years younger; and consider, Cromwell himself did not begin to appear till he was older than you. I beg you will be thrifty, and learn to value a shilling, which Dr. Birch said was a serious thing. Get a stronger fence about your 1000l. and throw the inner fence into the heap, and be advised by your Twickenham landlord and me about an annuity. You are the most refractory, honest, good natured man I ever have known; I could argue out this paper-I am very glad your opera is finished, and hope your friends will join the readier to make it succeed, because you are ill used by others, I have known courts these thirty-six years, and know they differ; but in some things they are extremely constant: First, in the trite old maxim of a minister's never forgiving those he hath injured: Secondly, in the insincerity of those who would be thought the best friends: Thirdly, in the love of fawning, cringing, and talebearing; Fourthly, in sacrificing those whom we really wish well, to a point of interest, or intrigue: Fifthly, in keeping every thing worth taking, for those who can do service or disservice*. Now why does not Pope publish his dulness? the rogues he marks will die of themselves in peace, and so will his friends, and so there will be neither punishment nor reward. Pray inquire how my lord St. John does; there is no man's health in England I am more concerned about than his. I wonder whether you begin to taste the pleasure of independency? or whether you do not sometimes leer upon the court, oculo retcrto? Will you not think of an annuity, when you are two years older, and have doubled your purchase money? Have you dedicated your opera, and got the usual dedication fee of twenty guineas? How is the doctor? does he not chide that you never called upon him for hints? Is my lord Bolingbroke, at the moment I am writing, a planter, a philosopher, or a writer? Is Mr. Pulteney in expectation of a son, or my lord Oxford of a new old manuscript ! I bought your opera to day for sixpence, a cursed print. I find there is neither dedication nor preface, both which wants I approve; it is in the grand goût. We are as full of it, pro modulo nostro, as London Let every expectant of preferment in church and state carefully attend to, and remember the five reflections of a man well versed in courts. can be; continually acting, and houses crammed, and the lord lieutenant several times there laughing his heart out. I did not understand that the scene of Locket and Peachum's quarrel was an imitation of one between Brutus and Cassius, till I was told it. I wish Macheath, when he was going to be hanged, had imitated Alexander the Great when he was dying: I would have had his fellow-rogues desire his commands about a successor, and he to answer, Let it be the most worthy, &c. We hear a million of stories about the opera, of the applause at the song, That was levelled at me," when two great ministers were in a box together, and all the world staring at them*. I am heartily glad your opera hath mended your purse, though perhaps it may spoil your court. 66 Will you desire my lord Bolingbroke, Mr, Pulteney, and Mr. Pope, to command you to buy an annuity with two thousand pounds? that you may laugh at courts, and bid ministers Ever preserve some spice of the alderman, and prepare against age and dulness, and sickness, and coldness or death of friends. A whore has a resource left, that she can turn bawd; but an old decayed poet is a creature abandoned, and at mercy, when he can find none. Get me likewise Polly's mezzotinto. Lord, how the schoolboys at West minister, * Some of these songs that contained the severest satire against the court were written by Pope; particularly, and also, "Thro' all the Employments of Life," "Since Laws were made," &c. + This was miss Lavinia Fenton. She afterward became duchess of Bolton. She was very accomplished; was a most agreeable companion $ 4 |