escaped the
popular notice, which has fastened on the numerous stinging
utterantes wrung from certain bitter passages of his experience.
Scores of critics have dwelt on the terrible traits he has given to
Delilah in "Samson Agonistes," where one has called attention to the
breathing emotion, the celestial coloring, the ineffable sweetness
and grandeur he has lavished on the Lady in "Comus." For imperishable
monuments of his friendships with the selectest women of that age,
behold his Italian lines to Leonora Baroni, his sonnets "To a
Virtuous Young Lady," "To the Lady Margaret Ley," "To the Memory of
Mrs. Catharine Thomson," and the record of his long and unbroken
intimacy with the admirable and all-accomplished Countess Ranclagh,
of whom he said, "She was to me in the place of every want."

The Duchess of Queensbury was the unfailing friend and encourager of
Gay. When Gay died, she eloquently rebuked the vitriolic Swift, for
expressing the heartless sentiment, that a lost friend might be
replaced as well as spent money. Madame Rambouillet was the friend of
Voiture; Madame Sabliere of La Fontaine. Hundreds of similar examples
might easily be gathered. Few of the French literary men of the
seventeenth or the eighteenth century led those disorderly and
disreputable lives which were the calamity and the disgrace of most
of the professed writers of England at that time. Madame Mole justly
observes, "They owed their exemption from these miseries chiefly to
the women, who, from the earliest days of French literature, gave
them all the succor they could; bringing them into contact with the
rich and the great, showing them off with every kind of ingenuity and
tact, so as to make them understood and valued. If we examine the
private history of all their celebrated men, we find scarcely one to
whom some lady was not a ministering spirit. They helped them with
their wit, their influence, and their money. They did far more. They
helped them with their hearts, listened to their sorrows, admired
their genius before the world had become aware of it, advised them,
entered patiently into all their feelings, soothed their wounded
vanities and irritable fancies. What balm has been found in the
listening look, for the warm and vexed spirit how has it risen again
after repeated disappointment, comforted by encouragements gently
administered! If the Otways and the Chattertons had possessed one
such friend, their country might not have been