JOHN GAY TO DEAN SWIFT.
"I find myself dispirited for want of having some pursuit. Indolence and idleness are the most tiresome things in the world. I begin to find a dislike to society. I think I ought to try to break myself of it, but I cannot resolve to set about it. I have left off almost all my great acquaintance, which saves me something in chair hire, though in that article the town is still very expensive. Those who were your old acquaintance are almost the only people I visit; and, indeed, upon trying all, I like them best....
"If you would advise the Duchess to confine me four hours a-day to my own room, while I am in the country, I will write; for I cannot confine myself as I ought."[[1]]
DEAN SWIFT TO JOHN GAY.
"It is your pride or laziness, more than chair-hire, that makes the town expensive. No honour is lost by [pg 134]walking in the dark; and in the day, you may beckon a blackguard boy under a gate [to clean your shoes] near your visiting place (experto crede), save eleven pence, and get half a crown's-worth of health ...
"I find by the whole cast of your letter, that you are as giddy and volatile as ever: just the reverse of Mr. Pope, who has always loved a domestic life from his youth. I was going to wish you had some little place that you could call your own, but, I profess I do not know you well enough to contrive any one system of life that would please you. You pretend to preach up riding and walking to the Duchess, yet from my knowledge of you after twenty years, you always joined a violent desire of perpetually shifting places and company, with a rooted laziness, and an utter impatience of fatigue. A coach and six horses is the utmost exercise you can bear; and this only when you can fill it with such company as is best suited to your taste, and how glad would you be if it could waft you in the air to avoid jolting; while I, who am so much later in life, can, or at least could, ride five hundred miles on a trotting horse. You mortally hate writing, only because it is the thing you chiefly ought to do, as well to keep up the vogue you have in the world, as to make you easy in your fortune: you are merciful to everything but money your best friend, whom you treat with inhumanity."[[2]]
In May was first performed at the Haymarket Theatre "Acis and Galatea," of which he wrote the "book" and Handel the music; but this was not work upon which he had been lately engaged—in fact, both words and music had been ready for ten years. Gay, however, did occasionally put in some time on literary work, and at his death left the "book" of an opera "Achilles," which was produced on February 10th, 1733, at the scene of his triumph with "The Beggar's Opera," the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields; "The Distrest Wife" and a farce, "[pg 135]The Rehearsal at Goatham," which last were printed, respectively, in 1743 and 1754. He was at this time composing very leisurely a second series of "Fables," which were ready for the press at the time of his death, but did not appear until 1738.
JOHN GAY TO DEAN SWIFT.
"You seemed not to approve of my writing more Fables. Those I am now writing have a prefatory discourse before each of them, by way of epistle, and the morals of them mostly are of the political kind; which makes them run into a greater length than those I have already published. I have already finished about fifteen or sixteen; four or five more would make a volume of the same size as the first. Though this is a kind of writing that appears very easy, I find it the most difficult of any I ever undertook. After I have invented one fable, and finished it, I despair of finding out another; but I have a moral or two more, which I wish to write upon.