more good-humored vein than was his wont, has summed up for us.

It was in 1688, the year of the Revolution, that he was born at Barnstaple, where he received his education. In London, he soon quitted the mercer's shop, and became the secretary of the Duchess of Monmouth, in which capacity he found leisure enough to write and publish his Rurai Sports, which he inscribed to Pope, and thus won his friendship. So much pleased was Pope with his manners and conversation, that he soon became his fast and intimate friend, and introduced him to Swift. The three, as we have seen, formed a bond of attachment and of familiar intercourse, that Gay's death only put an end to. Of Gay's various publications it is not necessary here to speak. They are chiefly his Rural Sports, already mentioned; The Shepherd's Week; The Wife of Bath, a Play; What D'ye Call it, a Mock Tragedy; Three Hours after Marriage, a Comedy; The Captives; The Beggar's Opera; Polly; The Distressed Wife; his Fables; Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets; The Fan; Tales; Epistles; Gondibert, a Poem; and various small compositions.

His plays were seldom successful, with the exception of The Beggar's Opera, which was extremely so, and still continues so with certain classes. The origin of this singular production Pope has thus detailed:

"Dr. Swift had been observing once to Mr. Gay what an odd, pretty sort of a thing a Newgate Pastoral might make. Gay was inclined to try at such a thing for some time, but afterward thought it would be better to write a comedy on the same plan. This was what gave rise to the Beg gar's Opera. He began on it; and when first he mentioned it to Swift, the doctor did not much like the project. As he carried it on, he showed what he wrote to both of us, and we now and then gave a correction, or a word or two of advice; but it was wholly of his own writing. When it was done, neither of us thought it would succeed

He showed it to Congreve, who, after reading it over, said, 'It would either take greatly, or be damned confoundedly.' We were all at the first night of it, in great uncertainty of the event; till we were very much encouraged by overhearing the Duke of Argyle, who sat in the next box to us, say, 'It will do-it must do! I see it in the eyes of them!' This was a good while before the first act was over, and so gave us ease soon; for that duke, besides his own good taste, has a particular knack, as any one now living, in discovering the taste of the public. He was quite right in that, as usual: the good-nature of the audience appeared stronger and stronger every act, and ended in a clamor of applause."

Pope has also recorded the following particulars of its popularity. "This piece was received with greater applause than was ever known. Besides being acted in London sixty-three days without interruption, and received the next season with equal applause, it spread into all the great towns of England; was played in many places to the thirtieth and fortieth time; at Bath and Bristol, fifty, &c. It made its progress into Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, where it was performed twenty-four days successively. The ladies carried about with them the favorite songs of it in fans, and houses were furnished with it in screens. The fame of it was not confined to the author only. The person who acted Polly, till then obscure, became all at once the favorite of the town; her pictures were engraved, and sold in great numbers; her life written; books of letters and verses to her published, and pamphlets made even of her sayings and jests. Furthermore, it drove out of England, for that season, the Italian opera, which had carried all before it for ten years."

From that time to the present, the effect has been, to a certain degree, the same, in a certain class; the songs of The Beggar's Opera have begun again to be sung, and a manifest tendency has been produced to exalt into this ad

miration of the multitude, highwaymen and women of the town. Neither can it be denied that it has given birth anew, in the shape of novels, to Newgate literature. The oddity of it was, that in opposition to the storm of reprehension which followed it from the press, Swift defended it for the excellence of its morality, and because "it placed all kinds of vice in the strongest and most odious light." This was sufficiently contradicted by the public admiration of its heroes, heroines, its songs, and its very slang. Yet we find Gay representing himself, in a letter to Swift, as a martyr to morality. "For writing in the cause of virtue, and against the fashionable vices, I am looked upon at present as the most obnoxious person almost in England." If Gay's self-love could so far blind and persuade him, there can be no reader of his collected poems at the present day who can agree with him. There is a far too considerable quantity of his writings which are utterly vile and filthy, and fit only to be bound up with Rochester, or, rather, not to be bound up at all; and it may be questioned whether the prudent lessons of his fables, and the better sentiments scattered through his other poetry, could by any means even neutralize the effect of his pages of defilement, were not the better more commonly read, and the worse left to oblivion by the purer spirit of the age.

The origin of his Shepherd's Week, which, though coarse, has much nature in it, is also curious. Steele, in some papers in the Guardian, had praised Ambrose Philips as the Pastoral writer who was second only to Theocritus, Virgil, and Spenser. Pope, who had also published pastorals, not pleased to be overlooked, drew up a comparison of his own compositions with those of Philips's, in which he civilly gave himself the preference, while he seemed to disown it. So enraged was Philips, that he brought a sturdy cudgel to Button's coffee-house, and put it over the mantel-piece, saying, "That was for Pope when he could catch him there." Pope, on his part again, is supposed to

have incited Gay to write the Shepherd's Week, to show that, if it be necessary to copy nature with minuteness, rural life must be exhibited such as grossness and ignorance have made it. But intended only to burlesque Philips, these pastorals became popular, and were eagerly read for their truth to country life by those who took no interest in the literary squabble.

If we add to the places already mentioned the house of Dr. Arbuthnot, at Hampstead, where Gay used occasionally to domicile himself, we have a sufficient index to his homes and haunts.

POPE, who was born in London, spent nearly the whole of his life between Binfield, in Windsor Forest, and Twickenham. They were his only two constant residences; the time which he passed in London, he passed but as a visitor, or lodger. Town poet, or poet of society, as he seems, he was inseparably attached to the country, though it was the country of an easily accessible vicinity to town, and itself pretty thickly inhabited by people of rank and intelligence. From the time that his father purchased the property at Binfield, with the exception of a short time at school at Twyford, near Winchester, and at another school in Mary-le-bone, which was removed while he was there to near Hyde Park Corner, Pope never quitted Binfield as a residence till he bought Twickenham. He went soon after his twelfth year from school, and he continued to reside at Binfield till 1716, when he was twenty-eight years of age; and singularly enough, he lived at Twickenham