John Gay

“ I have seen and known many fall untimely to ministerial labours and responsibility. Walking through the streets and squares we may behold the noble brows of Pitt, Canning, Lord George Bentinck, Sir Robert Peel, Lord Palmerston—men "on whose brows shame is ashamed to sit"—and, we might add, another Canning, a Follett, Sir George Lewis, and a hecatomb of Colonial rulers, who have died, overtasked by toil and responsibility; but in all that time we have never heard a minister accused of corruption, or building palaces, or making a fortune from public treasure. ”

“ GAY'S FABLES. INTRODUCTION.
Remote from cities dwelt a swain,
Unvexed by petty cares of gain;
His head was silvered, and by age
He had contented grown and sage;
In summer's heat and winter's cold
He fed his flock and penned his fold,
Devoid of envy or ambition,
So had he won a proud position.
A deep philosopher, whose rules
Of moral life were drawn from schools,
With wonder sought this shepherd's nest,
And his perplexity expressed:
"Whence is thy wisdom? ”

“ And so corruption seized the swarm,
Who plundered underneath his arm.
Thus he harangued: "Whilst vulgar souls
Waste life in low mechanic holes,
Let us scorn drudgery: the drone
And wasp, whose elegance we own,
Like gentlemen sport in the rays
Of sunbeams on all summer days;
It were not fitting they should moil,—
They live upon their neighbour's toil."
A bee, with indignation warm,
Stepped forth from the applauding swarm:
"The laws our native hives protect,
And for the laws bees hold respect.
I do not mind your frown; I cry—
Bees live by honest industry. ”

“ Britain, of trade the chosen mart,
The seat of industry and art,—
May never luxury or minister
Cast over thee a mantle sinister!
Still let thy fleet and cannon's roar
Affright thy foes and guard thy shore.
When Continental States contend,
Be thou to them a common friend.
Imperial rule may sway their land;
Here Commerce only takes her stand,
Diffusing good o'er all the world.
The flag of Commerce, where unfurled,
Stands with fair plenty in her train,
And wealth, to bless her bright domain.
For where the merchant sails to trade
Fair is the face of Nature made. ”

“ My father and I with a dark lantern, it being now light, into the garden with my wife, and there went about our great work to dig up my gold. But, Lord, what a tosse I was for some time in, that they could not justly tell where it was: but by-and-bye, poking with a spit, we found it, and then began with a spudd. But, good God! to see how sillily they did it, not half a foot under ground, and in the sight of the world from a hundred places, and within sight of a neighbour's window. ”

“ My muse shall moralise of beauty.
Amidst the galaxy of fair,
Who do not moralise, the ear
Might be offended to be told
That beauty ever can grow old.
Though you by age must lose much more
Than ever beauty lost before,
You will regard it, when 'tis flown,
As if it ne'er had been your own. ”

“ If they must soothe a patron's ear,
Not I—I was not born to bear;
All base conditions I refuse,
Nor will I so debase the muse.
Though I ne'er flatter nor defame,
Yet would I fain bring guilt to shame;
And I corruption would expose,
Though all corrupted were my foes.
I no man's property invade,—
Corruption 's an unlawful trade;
So bribery also. Politicians
Should be tied down to such conditions ”

“ But herein, as in aught else, it is the mind, and not the outward circumstances, which makes the happiness suited to its strength and position; for it must be confessed it is from the weak in bodily frame, the lame, and the blind, that we draw our poets: and when we find a rare bodily exception to the rule, we find too often a mind insatiate of applause, and pining for more appreciation of their productions. The votaries of the muse cannot be set down as so happy and contented as many a ploughman, nor does the smoothness of the lines gratify the eye more than the smoothness of the furrow. ”

“ Debarred the healthier paths of life, man rushes for employment to the refuging muse; and rightly so, for he finds an employment ornamental and useful still. But solitude does not nurture the virtues of the soul more than physical defect does that of the body, and the withdrawal of the curtain divulges a very sad sight of discontent and envy. 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. ”

“ 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 the Muse restored him to more life and to more disappointment. He then wrote 'The Captive,' obtained an appointment to read it to the Princess of Wales, stumbled, like Cæsar, over a stool; the princess screamed, the omen was a true one—'The Captive' pined and died. ”

“ Every language has its nursery rhymes, which are a sort of Delphian lot, sung in enigma from 'King Pittacus of Mytilene' and 'Le bon Roi Dagobert,' to the lullaby of 'Four-and-twenty Blackbirds.' There is as much sarcasm in nursery rhymes as there is of pride and boast in the songs of bards at the feast of heroes, and as there is of humble confession in the funeral psalm. Song tends alike to evaporate exuberant spirits, and to soothe the soul in an affliction—as Desdemona informs us so sweetly in her misery ”

“ We fast, dear sir, and wish in vain."
"Gluttons! restrain such wish," replied
The dying fox; "be such defied;
Inordinate desires deplore;
The more you win, you grieve the more.
Do not the dogs betray our pace,
And gins and guns destroy our race?
Old age—which few of us attain—
Now puts a period to my pain. ”

“ A courtier is a dedication;
But I dare not to dedicate
My verse e'en unto royal state.
My muse is sacred, and must teach
Truths which they slur in courtly speech.
But I need not to hide the praise,
Or veil the thoughts, a nation pays ”

“ Corruption, if so it may still be termed, has taken another phase; it has bowed its head and courted democracy, like to the Roman king, Ancus Martius, "nimium gaudens popularibus auris"—cringing to popular suffrage—to ride into place and power, by granting measures momentarily floating uppermost, and suffering the tail to guide the head, as did the snake in Æsop's fable. ”

“ But of every species of poetry none are so rife with life and beauty as the song. It conjoins music with words, and brevity with sweetness. There is no position in which man does not sing,—in joy to express it, and in woe to relieve it: in company in chorus, and alone for companionship. ”

“ To which end we must try to identify the reign of King George I. and the manners of that era with these fables; for manners change with every age, and every age has its transitions of political and social manners:
"Manners with fortunes, humours turn with climes,
Tenets with books, and principles with times."
It was in the era of the two first Georges that Gay wrote and applied these fables, filled with diatribes against ministers, courtiers, and misers, and inveighing against court corruption and bribery. ”

“ The charm of Homer is that it is not only a poem, but it instructs us in the history—all that we know of it—of those prehistoric days. It is full of ballads, which are the ground-work by which we trace the manners and the tenets of the pagan tribes. The truth involved in 'Homer' is the charm of his epic poem, while the falsehood involved in the 'Henriade' of Voltaire is amply sufficient to condemn it utterly. For a specimen let us take Pope's 'Homer,' where Hector answers Andromache's appeal to stay and guard the walls of Troy ”

“ Display your treasures on the road?
Would you abet their raid of stealth
By the display of hoarded wealth?
And are you yet with blacklegs fain
With loaded dice to throw a main?
It is not charity—for shame!
The rascals look on you as game. ”

“ To save my father's honours and my own:
Yet come it will, the day decreed by Fates—
How my heart trembles whilst my tongue relates—
That day when thou, imperial Troy, must bend,
Must see thy warriors fall, thy glories end. ”

“ That ministers, high as yon steeple,
Have trodden low law, king, and people,
When virtue from preferment barred
Gets nothing save its own regard.
Courtiers—a set of knaves—attend them,
And arrogance well recommends them;
Who flatter them defame their foes
To lull the ministerial woes:
And if projectors fire a brain,
South Sea or silver mines in Spain,
The broker's ready in a trice
To satisfy e'en avarice.
A courtier's conscience must be pliant ”

“ So William Hewer and I out again about midnight, and there by candle-light did make shift to gather forty pieces more; and so to bed, and there lay in some disquiet until daylight. 11th.—And then William Hewer and I, with pails and a sieve, did lock ourselves into the garden, and did gather the earth and then sift those pails in one of the summer-houses (just as they do for diamonds in other parts) , and there, to our great content did, by nine o'clock, make the last night's forty-five up to seventy-nine; so that we are come to some twenty or thirty of what I think the true number should be. ”

“ It was a period of transition, such as had before occurred, from feudal to monarchial, and now from monarchial to ministerial rule. We had entered into another phase—one of civil and religious liberty; but, at the same time, the royal court was a scene devoid of any graces: the kings could not speak our language, and their feminine favourites were the reverse of fair or virtuous; whilst domestic hate ruled in the palace. ”

“ Our courtier scarce could touch a bit,
But showed his breeding and his wit,
And did his best to seem to eat—
And said: "I vow you're mighty neat;
But, my dear friend, this savage scene!—
I pray you come and live with men.
Consider mice, like men, must die ”

“ Not the native forest tree of Pitt, Huskisson, and Canning, but the hot-bed plant of the advocates of a predominant trade. No British statesman ever dreamt of restricting commerce,—which ever was the bond of unity of nations; but we have sunk every interest at home to swell the exports and imports, to make Britain what Egypt was in the days of the patriarch—the storehouse of the world. Egypt and England both put their agriculturists to pain, and the rural population to serfdom ”

“ Power then ran into a new groove of corruption and bribery; and the scene, vile in itself, was made viler by exaggeration and the retaliations of one political party on the other, whilst either side was equally lauded by its own party. Therefore we may reasonably conclude that matters were not so bad as they were painted, and moreover that it was but a change and transition of evils, to play a part and disappear. The advent of the third George to the throne, and the rigid integrity of the first and second Pitt, reversed the story as read in these fables ”

“ From the regions of ministers and misers we may descend to the equally disputed realms of the muses. Horace terms it "the peevish and inhuman muse," which those who drink of Aganippe's fountain woo; whilst others are apt to equal their Castalian spring and Parnassus with the height of the empyreal, regarding with pity the toilers on the land and deep. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Age overtook her, undecided,
And Cupid left her much derided.
The father raised his voice above,
Complaining of the gifts to Jove;
But Jove replied that weal and woe
Depended not on outward show—
That ignorant of good or ill,
Men still beset the heavenly will:
The blest were those of virtuous mind,
Who were to Providence resigned.
FABLE XL.
The Two Monkeys.
The scholar, of his learning vain,
Beholds the fop with deep disdain:
The fop, with spirit as discerning,
Looks down upon the man of learning. ”

“ 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." ”

“ We may grant, then, that Gay had reason on his side when he inveighed so bitterly against courts and kings; and, granting that, we may recognise the amelioration of the court of the present day, wholly free from corruption and presenting a school to be followed rather than contemned. ”

“ The age in which Gay wrote was eminently what we now designate as conservative. Excise was hateful then; as customs are denounced now, so home taxation was denounced then. So wonderfully do systems change, that in the monthly table of the revenue of this period (December, 1870) , the customs do not raise one-third of the revenue, of which the other two-thirds are raised by home taxation.
From ministers proceed we to the misers. I doubt whether any domestic changes have wrought so great an amelioration in our well-being as banks and banking. It has saved us from burglars ”

“ Doctor Johnson did an unkind deed when he wrote the 'Lives of the Poets;' for which he was fully repaid when Boswell flayed him bare as ever Apollo flayed Marsyas, and exposed all the quivering nerves to the light of day. Of all classes of men, the class of poets most need the concealing veil: the greatest have been blind ”

“ Villains would compass it by guilt.
No: crescit amor nummi—misers
Are not so heartwhole as are sizars.
Think, O John Gay!—and that's myself—
Should Fortune make you her own elf,
Would that augment your happiness? ”