Whose company drives sorrow from the heart
As all disease his medicines dissipate.
knew him well and loved him deeply. "We have all had another loss of our worthy and dear friend, Mr. Gay," he wrote to Swift on January 13th, 1733. "It was some alleviation of my grief to see him so universally lamented by almost everybody, even by those who knew him only by reputation. He was interred at Westminster Abbey, as if he had been a peer of the realm; and the good Duke of Queensberry, who lamented him as a brother, will set up a handsome monument upon him. These are little affronts put upon vice and injustice, and is all that remains in our power. I believe 'The Beggar's Opera,' and what he had to come upon the stage, will make the sum of the diversions of the town for some time to come."[[22]]
By virtue of their fame, towering high above the rest of the select band of Gay's dearest friends, were Pope and Swift:—
Blest be the great! for those they take away,
And those they left me; for they left me Gay,
Pope had written in the "Epistle to Arbuthnot"; and Gay, as has been said, had more than once entered the lists and broken a lance on his brother poet's behalf, as when he parodied Ambrose Philips in "The Shepherd's Week." His "Mr. Pope's Welcome from Greece," written when Pope had finished his translation of the "Iliad," was a fine panegyric, in which he had a sly dig at the rival editor:—
Tickell, whose skiff (in partnership they say)
Set forth for Greece, but founder'd on the way.
[pg 146]and in his "Epistle to the Right Honourable Paul Methuen, Esq.," he pilloried one of his friend's most violent critics:—