ie lightly on him! _Deus sit
propitius huic potatori_, as Walter de Mapes sang.(112) Perhaps Samuel
Johnson, who spoke slightingly of Prior's verses, enjoyed them more than
he was willing to own. The old moralist had studied them as well as Mr.
Thomas Moore, and defended them, and showed that he remembered them very
well too on an occasion when their morality was called in question by that
noted puritan, James Boswell, Esq., of Auchinleck.(113)

In the great society of the wits, John Gay deserved to be a favourite, and
to have a good place.(114) In his set all were fond of him. His success
offended nobody. He missed a fortune once or twice. He was talked of for
Court favour, and hoped to win it; but the Court favour jilted him. Craggs
gave him some South-Sea Stock; and at one time Gay had very nearly made
his fortune. But Fortune shook her swift wings and jilted him too: and so
his friends, instead of being angry with him, and jealous of him, were
kind and fond of honest Gay. In the portraits of the literary worthies of
the early part of the last century, Gay's face is the pleasantest perhaps
of all. It appears adorned with neither periwig nor nightcap (the full
dress and _negligee_ of learning, without which the painters of those days
scarcely ever portrayed wits), and he laughs at you over his shoulder with
an honest boyish glee--an artless sweet humour. He was so kind, so gentle,
so jocular, so delightfully brisk at times, so dismally woebegone at
others, such a natural good creature that the Giants loved him. The great
Swift was gentle and sportive with him,(115) as the enormous Brobdingnag
maids of honour were with little Gulliver. He could frisk and fondle round
Pope,(116) and sport, and bark, and caper without offending the most
thin-skinned of poets and men; and when he was jilted in that little Court
affair of which we have spoken, his warm-hearted patrons the Duke and
Duchess of Queensberry(117) (the "Kitty, beautiful and young", of Prior)
pleaded his cause with indignation, and quitted the Court in a huff,
carrying off with them into their retirement their kind gentle protege.
With these kind lordly folks, a real Duke and Duchess, as delightful as
those who harboured Don Quixote, and loved that dear old Sancho, Gay
lived, and was lapped in cotton, and had his plate of chicken, and his
saucer of cream, and frisked, and barked, and wheezed, and grew fat, and
so ended.(118) He became very melancholy and lazy, sadl