lowing dedication:--

TO HER ROYAL HIGHNESS THE PRINCESS OF WALES.

"Madam,

"The honour I received from your Royal Highness in being permitted to
read this play to you before it was acted, made me more happy than any
other success that could have happened to me. If it had the good fortune
to gain your Royal Highness's approbation, I have often been reflecting
to what to impute it, and I think it must have been the catastrophe of
the fall, the rewarding virtue and the relieving the distressed. For
that could not fail to give some pleasure in fiction, which, it is
plain, gives you the greatest in reality, or else your Royal Highness
would not (as you always have done) make it your daily practice.

"I am, Madam,
"Your Royal Highness's most dutiful
and most humbly devoted servant,
"JOHN GAY."

Of what Gay did, or where he went during 1724, next to nothing is known.
Presumably he spent most of his time in his apartment at Whitehall,
eating much and drinking more than was good for him, and, to judge by
results, writing nothing. The only trace of him during 1724 is in the
following letter:--

JOHN GAY TO THE HON. MRS. HOWARD.

[Bath, 1724.]

"Since I came to the Bath I have written three letters; the first to
you, the second to Mr. Pope, and the third to Mr. Fortescue. Every post
gives me fresh mortification, for I am forgot by everybody. Dr.
Arbuthnot and his brother went away this morning, and intend to see
Oxford on their way to London. The talk of the Bath is the marriage of
Lord Somerville and Mrs. Rolt. She left the Bath yesterday. He continues
here but is to go away to-day or to-morrow; but as opinions differ I
cannot decide whether they are married or no. Lord Essex gives a private
ball in Hamson's great room to Mrs. Pelham this evening, so that in all
probabilities some odd bodies being left out, we shall soon have the
pleasure of being divided into fractions. I shall return to London with
Lord Scarborough, who hath not as yet fixed his time of leaving the
Bath. Lord Fitzwilliam this morning had an account that a ticket of his
was come up L500. Lady Fitzwilliam wonders she has not heard from you,
and has so little resolution that she cannot resist buttered rolls at
breakfast, though she knows they prejudice her health.

"If you will write to me you will make me cheerful and happy, without
which I am told the waters will have no good effect. Pray have some
regard to my health, for my life is in your