Homer himself is recorded to have ejaculated his aspiration to be
the favourite of the Greek girls and boys. A poet seer loves no brother
near his throne, and is but too apt to complain of non-appreciation of
his muse on the part of the world. The fault rather is in their own too
sensitive souls; and it is a fact that there is scarcely a name in the
roll of poets, whose fame is not harmed by divulging his exotic life.
The rural labourer's fate--

"Where to be born and die,
Of rich and poor, make all the history"--

is far better than to be paraded from the disobedience of youth, the
rebellion of manhood, and the disappointment of age, divulged in the
storied lives of the few hundred names admitted to be British poets; and
the reading of whose works is, as a rule, a task of weariness. The
career of Gay is a very fair one as an average of the poetic. He mainly
avoided the enumerated ills--enumerated by Dr. Johnson--

"Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail."

The poetic element in Britain was very strong in the days of Gay. Pope,
Swift, Prior, Addison were the petted servants of the Ministers. They
were all far more successful in their careers than was Gay, who from his
boyhood refused to labour for his bread. Very early he found a patroness
in the Duchess of Monmouth, who had

"Wept over Monmouth's bloody tomb,"

with whom he enjoyed a sort of honorary post--secretary to the shadow
of a princess; next he became a real secretary to the Earl of Clarendon,
Ambassador at Hanover, as Prior had been to the Ambassador at Paris. We
easily trace in Gay's career the unsatisfied overweening poetic soul,
like a Charybdis, insatiable of adulation. In 1716, the Earl of
Burlington cheered him at his seat in Devon; in 1717, he accompanied Mr.
Pulteney to Aix; in 1718, Lord Harcourt soothed his spirits. Then he
made money, which burnt holes in his pockets. He called his friends
together, to ask how he should invest. His poetic friends Pope and Swift
advised him to sink it in an annuity. But fate or fortune cast him in
with Secretary Craggs and the South Sea scheme, and, from the possessor
of 20,000_l._, his capital collapsed to _nil_. In vain he had been
bidden to sell and to realize. He had visions of wealth, and held on to
be accidentally an honester man than if he had enriched himself by that
delusive scheme; but he nearly sunk beneath his disappointment, and his
health was endangered. Hope and t