is the composition of another doctor of divinity—Dr. Abel Evans—and was probably prompted by envy.
Amongst other things, Vanbrugh was a Herald, and in that capacity visited Hanover in 1706, and helped to invest the Electoral Prince, afterwards George II., with the Order of the Garter. Vanbrugh’s personality is not clearly revealed to us anywhere, but he appears to have been a pleasant companion and witty talker. He married late in life, and of three children only one survived, to be killed at Fontenoy. He himself died in 1726, in his sixty-third year, of a quinsy. His widow survived him half a century, thus affording another proof, if proof be needed, that no man is indispensable.
JOHN GAY.
The first half of the eighteenth century was in England the poet’s playground. These rhyming gentry had then a status, a claim upon private munificence and the public purse which has long since been hopelessly barred. A measure of wit, a tincture of taste, and a perseverance in demand would in those days secure for the puling Muse slices of solid pudding whilst in the flesh, and (frequently) sepulture in the Abbey when all was over.
What silk-mercer’s apprentice in these hard times, finding a place behind Messrs. Marshall and Snelgrove’s counter not jumping with his genius, dare hope by the easy expedient of publishing a pamphlet on ‘The Present State of Wit’ to become domestic steward to a semi-royal Duchess, and the friend of Mr. Lewis Morris and Mr. Lecky, who are, I suppose, our nineteenth-century equivalents for Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift? Yet such was the happy fate of Gay, who, after an idle life of undeserved good-fortune and much unmanly repining, died of an inflammation, in spite of the skilled care of Arbuthnot and the unwearying solicitude of the Duchess of Queensberry, and was interred like a peer of the realm in Westminster Abbey, having for his pall-bearers the Earl of Chesterfield, Viscount Cornbury, the Hon. Mr. Berkeley, General Dormer, Mr. Gore, and Mr. Pope. Such a recognition of the author of ‘Fables’ and ‘The Beggars’ Opera’ must make Mr. Besant’s mouth water. Nor did Gay, despite heavy losses in the South Sea Company, die a pauper; he left £6,000 behind him, which, as he was wise enough to die intestate, was divided equally between his two surviving sisters.
Gay’s good luck has never forsaken him. He enjoys, if, indeed, the word be not the hollowest of mockeries, an eternity of fame. It is true he is not read much, but he is always read a little. He has been dead more than a century and a half, so it seems likely that a hundred and fifty years hence he will be read as much as he is now, and, like a cork, will be observed bobbing on the surface of men’s memories. Better men and better poets than he have been, and will be, entirely submerged; but he was happy in his hour, happy even in his name (which lent itself to rhyme), happy in his nature; and so (such at least is our prognostication) new editions of Gay’s slender remains will at long intervals continue to appear and to attract a moment’s attention, even as Mr. Underhill’s admirable edition of the poems has lately done; new anthologies will contain his name, the biographical dictionaries will never quite forget him, his tomb in the Abbey will be stared at by impressionable youngsters, Pope’s striking epitaph will invite the fault-finding of the critical, and his own jesting couplet incur the censure of the moralist, until the day dawns when men cease to forget themselves in trifles. As soon as they do this, Gay will be forgotten once and for ever.
Gay’s one real achievement was ‘The Beggars’ Opera,’ which sprang from a sprout of Swift’s great brain. A ‘Newgate pastoral might make an odd, pretty sort of thing,’ so the Dean once remarked to Gay; and as Mr. Underhill, in his admirable Life of our poet, reminds us, Swift repeated the suggestion in a letter to Pope: ‘What think you of a Newgate pastoral among the whores and thieves there?’ But Swift’s ‘Beggars’ Opera’ would not have hit the public taste between wind and water as did Gay’s. It would have been much too tremendous a thing—its sincerity would have damned it past redemption. Even in Gay’s light hands the thing was risky—a speculation in the public fancy which could not but be dangerous. Gay knew this well enough, hence his quotation from Martial (afterwards adopted by the Tennysons as the motto for ‘Poems by Two Brothers’), Nos hæc novimus esse nihil. Congreve, resting on his laurels, declared it would either take greatly, or be damned confoundedly. It took, and, indeed, we cannot wonder. There was a foretaste of Gilbert about it quite enough to make its fortune in any century. Furthermore, it drove out of England, so writes an early editor, ‘for that season, the Italian opera, which had carried all before it for several years.’ It was a triumph for the home-bred article, and therefore dear to the souls of all true patriots.
The piece, though as wholly without sincerity as a pastoral by Ambrose Philips, a thing merely of the footlights, entirely shorn of a single one of the rays which glorify lawlessness in Burns’s ‘Jolly Beggars,’ yet manages through the medium of the songs to convey a pleasing though absurd sentimentality; and there is, perhaps, noticeable throughout a slight—a very slight—flavour of what is cantingly but conveniently called ‘the Revolution,’ which imparts a slender interest.