“Welcome to your native soil! welcome to your friends! thrice welcome to me! whether returned in glory, blest with Court interest, the love and familiarity of the great, and filled with agreeable hopes; or melancholy with dejection, contemplative of the changes of fortune, and doubtful for the future; whether returned a triumphant Whig or a depending Tory, equally all hail! equally beloved and welcome to me! If happy, I am to partake of your elevation; if unhappy, you have still a warm corner in my heart, and a retreat at Benfield in the worst of times at your service. If you are a Tory, or thought so by any man, I know it can proceed from nothing but your gratitude to a few people who endeavoured to serve you, and whose politics were never your concern. If you are a Whig, as I rather hope, and as I think your principles and mine (as brother poets) had ever a bias to the side of liberty, I know you will be an honest man and an inoffensive one. Upon the whole, I know you are incapable of being so much of either party as to be good for nothing. Therefore, once more, whatever you are or in whatever state you are, all hail!
“One or two of your own friends complained they had nothing from you since the Queen's death; I told them no man living loved Mr. Gay better than I, yet I had not once written to him in all his voyage. This I thought a convincing proof, but truly one may be a friend to another without telling him so every month. But they had reasons, too, themselves to allege in your excuse, as men who really value one another will never want such as make their friends and themselves easy. The late universal concern in public affairs threw us all into a hurry of spirits: even I, who am more a philosopher than to expect anything from any reign, was borne away with the current, and full of the expectation of the successor. During your journeys, I knew not whither to aim a letter after you; that was a sort of shooting flying: add to this the demand Homer had upon me, to write fifty verses a day, besides learned notes, all of which are at a conclusion for this year. Rejoice with me, O my friend! that my labour is over; come and make merry with me in much feasting. We will feed among the lilies (by the lilies I mean the ladies). Are not the Rosalindas of Britain as charming as the Blousalindas of the Hague? or have the two great Pastoral poets of our own nation renounced love at the same time? for Philips, unnatural Philips, hath deserted it, yea, and in a rustic manner kicked his Rosalind. Dr. Parnell and I have been inseparable ever since you went. We are now at the Bath, where (if you are not, as I heartily hope, better engaged) your company would be the greatest pleasure to us in the world. Talk not of expenses: Homer shall support his children. I beg a line from you, directed to the Post-house in Bath. Poor Parnell is in an ill state of health.
“Pardon me if I add a word of advice in the poetical way. Write something on the King, or Prince, or Princess. On whatsoever foot you may be with the court, this can do no harm. I shall never know where to end, and am confounded in the many things I have to say to you, though they all amount but to this, that I am, entirely, as ever,
“Your,” &c.
Gay took the advice “in the poetical way”, and published An Epistle to a Lady, occasioned by the arrival of her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales. But, though this brought him access to Court, and the attendance of the Prince and Princess at his farce of the What d'ye, call it? it did not bring him a place. On the accession of George II, he was offered the situation of Gentleman Usher to the Princess Louisa (her Highness being then two years old); but “by this offer”, says Johnson, “he thought himself insulted.”
Swift indorsed the letter—“On my dear friend Mr. Gay's death; received Dec. 15, but not read till the 20th, by an impulse foreboding some misfortune.”
“It was by Swift's interest that Gay was made known to Lord Bolingbroke, and obtained his patronage.”—Scott's Swift, vol. i, p. 156.
Pope wrote on the occasion of Gay's death, to Swift, thus:—
“[Dec. 5, 1732.]
“One of the dearest and longest ties I have ever had is broken all on a sudden by the unfortunate death of poor Mr. Gay. An inflammatory fever carried him out of this life in three days.... He asked of you a few hours before when in acute torment by the inflammation in his bowels and breast.... His sisters, we suppose, will be his heirs, who are two widows.... Good God! how often are we to die before we go quite off this stage? In every friend we lose a part of ourselves, and the best part. God keep those we have left! few are worth praying for, and one's self the least of all.”