B.M., Add MSS., 22626, f. 22.
CHAPTER VI
1720 "Poems on Several Occasions"—Gay Invests His Earnings in the South
Sea Company—The South Sea "Bubble" Breaks, and Gay Loses all His
Money—Appointed a Commissioner of the State Lottery—Lord Lincoln
Gives Him an Apartment in Whitehall—At Tunbridge Wells—Correspondence
with Mrs. Howard.
Gay in 1720 was in his thirty-fifth year, and he had commenced author some twelve years before this date. During this period his output had been very small, and his success not conspicuous. As a dramatist he had been a complete failure—his first play, "The Wife of Bath," was still-born, and the others, "The What D'ye Call It" and "Three Hours After Marriage," had practically been hooted off the stage, and had brought him in their train a considerable degree of unpopularity. Of his poems, the only ones of any marked merit were "The Shepherd's Week," and "Trivia," and even these were unambitious, though not without merit. Gay now bethought him of collecting his poems, published and unpublished, and they were issued in two quarto volumes early in 1720, with the joint imprint of Jacob Tonson and his old publisher, Bernard Lintott, and with a frontispiece by William Kent.
The "Poems on Several Occasions," as the collection was styled, were issued by subscription. His friends supported him admirably. Lord Burlington and Lord Chandos each put down his name for fifty copies, Lord Bathurst for ten copies; in all Gay made more than [pg 51]£1,000 by the publication. To this success he alluded in his "Epistle to the Right Honourable Paul Methuen, Esq."[[1]]
Yet there are ways for authors to be great;