Walter Gay

“ GAY, WALTER (1856–⁠) , American artist, was born at Hingham, Massachusetts, on the 22nd of January 1856. In 1876 he became a pupil of Léon Bonnat in Paris. He received an honourable mention in the Salon of 1885 ”

“ 'Wal'r, my boy,' replied the Captain, 'in the Proverbs of Solomon you will find the following words, "May we never want a friend in need, nor a bottle to give him!" When found, make a note of.'
Here the Captain stretched out his hand to Walter, with an air of downright good faith that spoke volumes; ”

“ 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. ”

“ Gay, who had been making some little sketches herself on a large bare block with a very sharp pencil, laughed at his tone. Outside a January rain was sleeting roughly against the windows, the casements rattled. A small oil stove was burning in the cool gray daylight of the room, the air was faintly scented with the odour of kerosene and hot metal.
“Why, what would you do if you had more money?” Gay asked.
“Oh, Lord——!” David began. “Well, I’d take a [119] studio near Rucker’s,” he began. “At least, I might. And probably about once in every three years I’d go across and study in Europe. ”

“ He looked up from his book, stared at the wall of his little room, felt he had no reason to hate his father and felt slightly ashamed. Gaylord was just lucky to have a rich dad. And even with the new car Gaylord didn't seem too happy. He was almost sad at times.
I wonder if Gay likes me, he thought. I wonder if he does. I hope he does ... I hope we become good friends. He sure is pretty, I've never seen a boy so pretty ... he looks just like a girl. ”

“ John Gay, was first produced at the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, in 1728, and was so successful that it made “Gay rich and Rich (the lessee) gay.” This encouraged Gay to write a sequel to it, entitled “Polly,” which was produced in 1729, but met with far less approbation. ”

“ He was a child when his father went to Halifax, and he remained in Boston with his mother during the war. He graduated at Harvard College in 1789, practiced law, and was a member of the State Senate, and resided at Hingham. Mr. Wickworth Allen Gay, the [325] artist, is his son. Martin Gay the younger, was fifteen years of age when he accompanied his father to Halifax. Three years later he was accidentally shot by a friend while hunting near Windsor, Nova Scotia.
LIST OF CONFISCATED ESTATES BELONGING TO MARTIN GAY IN SUFFOLK COUNTY AND TO WHOM SOLD.
To John Davis. ”

“ Gay walked up to bald-headed "Dave," the patron, who in his shirt-sleeves was superintending the confusion, keeping an eye ready for rising disorder. After a quick colloquy, he beckoned to Fancy, who followed him down between the gay groups to a table in a corner. It was just being deserted by a short young hoodlum, with a pink and green striped sweater, accompanied by a girl several inches too tall for him, dressed in a soiled buff raglan and a triumphal hat.
"Here we are," said Gay; "we're in luck to get a table at all, to-night. But I gave Dave a four-bit piece and that fixed it." ”

“ Gay proceeded, and, a very unusual circumstance in a green-room, the company more than once applauded, delighted at some rich and witty turn that caught their fancy. Walker—the destined Macheath, fairly roared outright at more than one speech to his credit, and at the first pause clapt his hands till the palms rang again. A lusty handsome man somewhat coarsely built, but a good leg and a swagger, and a roving eye to top it all.
“Why, I swear, Mr. Gay, that there’s not its like in the universe. Damme if there is! ’Tis so astonishing new—so surprising fresh! ”

“ A private correspondent has very kindly furnished me with a few particulars relative to Nicholas Gay, the second mentioned in your correspondent's list, and father of the fourth, which Nicholas was vicar of Newton St. Cyres, near Exeter, and died, æt. seventy-five, in 1775; and to another, Richard Gay, rector of St. Leonard, near Exeter, who died in 1755. Of this Richard Gay, on a stone in the church of Frithelstock, near Torrington, it is said that—
"To great learning, he added a most exemplary life in constant faithful endeavours to support religion, to glorify God, and to do good to man. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In Arbuthnot's letter above quoted he writes that Gay owes his life under God ‘to the unwearied endeavours and care of your humble servant; for a physician who had not been passionately his friend could not have saved him.’ Gay himself, writing to Swift on the previous day, had told the same tale. With the Queensberrys he seems to have continued for the rest of his life either in their town house or in their country seat of Amesbury in Wiltshire. They assumed, indeed, formal charge of him, the duke taking care of his money and the duchess watching over the poet himself. ”

“ I hope he will get a good deal of money by printing his play ['Polly'] ; but I really believe he would get more money by showing his person; and I can assure you, this is the very identical John Gay whom you formerly knew, and lodged in Whitehall, two years ago." [3]
Gay was now the avowed protégé of the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry, so he spent the greater part of his closing years either at their country seat, Middleton Stoney, Amesbury, in Wiltshire, or at their London house in Burlington Gardens. ”

“ John Gay had his faults as a man and as a poet, and it were easy finding fault with him in both capacities. But
"Poor were the triumph o'er the timid hare;"
and he was, by his own shewing, as well as Queen Caroline's, "the Hare with many friends." Let us, instead, drop a "tear over his fate," and pay a tribute, short, but sincere, to his true, though limited genius. ”

“ 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." ”

“ She turned away, glanced back an instant later to make sure that they had entered the house, and then gathering up her Sunday skirt of blue Henrietta cloth, started in a rapid run back along the path to the willows. When she reached a sheltered nook, formed by a lattice of boughs, she found Gay walking impatiently back and forth, with his hands in his pockets and the anxious frown still on his forehead. ”

“ Madame Gay found in Gérard's _salon_ all the people she had best known in her youth, and she was delighted to have her early years recalled to her. Mme. Ancelot, who, like many of her country women, felt a marked antipathy for Madame Gay, has given a very true portrait of both mother and daughter.
"Many years after," she writes, "when these ladies were (through M. de Girardin) at the head of one of the chief organs of the Paris press, they were much flattered and courted; at the period I speak of" (about 1817-1825) "their position was far from brilliant, and Mme. Gay was far from popular. ”

“ William Gay's brothers were John and Richard, who resided at Frittelstock; James, Rector of Meeth; and Thomas, who lived at Barnstaple. Mrs. Gay's only brother was John Hanmer, who succeeded to his father's pastoral office among the Congregational or Independent Dissenters at Barnstaple. Jonathan, the elder son of William Gay, who inherited the family property, was intended for the Church, but "severe studies not well suiting his natural genius, he betook himself to military pursuits," [4] and, probably about the time of his father's death, entered the army. ”

“ DUCHESS OF QUEENSBERRY AND JOHN GAY TO THE HON. MRS. HOWARD.
December 17th [1730] .
"You cannot imagine in what due time your letter came; for I had given you up, and with great pains had very near brought our friend Mr. Gay to own that nobody cared for us, and a few more thoughts which shall now be nameless. I am sincerely sorry that you have been ill, and very very glad that you are better and think of life; for I know none whom one could more wish to have life than yourself. ”

“ Yet we find Gay representing himself, in a letter to Swift, as a martyr to morality. "For writing in the cause of virtue, and against the fashionable vices, I am looked upon at present as the most obnoxious person almost in England." If Gay's self-love could so far blind and persuade him, there can be no reader of his collected poems at the present day who can agree with him. There is a far too considerable quantity of his writings which are utterly vile and filthy, and fit only to be bound up with Rochester, or, rather, not to be bound up at all ”

“ May and I are one, and sometimes she's the one and sometimes I'm the one, but between us we've learned mother's lesson of life."
"You see Miss Maud and Uncle George under the trees in the garden, don't you?" Gay broke out abruptly, a moment later. "They've been there since we came. They don't know that they are dusty and need dusting just as much as any of us, because they are lovers and don't know things like other people!" ”

“ The inoffensive John Gay is now become one of the obstructions to the peace of Europe, the terror of Ministers, the chief author of the Craftsmen, and all the seditious pamphlets which have been published against the Government. He has got several turned out of their places; the greatest ornament of the Court [the Duchess of Queensberry] banished from it for his sake; another great lady [Mrs. Howard] in danger of being chasée likewise ”

“ Such a recognition of the author of ‘Fables’ and ‘The Beggars’ Opera’ must make Mr. [Pg 111] Besant’s mouth water. Nor did Gay, despite heavy losses in the South Sea Company, die a pauper; he left £6,000 behind him, which, as he was wise enough to die intestate, was divided equally between his two surviving sisters.
Gay’s good luck has never forsaken him. He enjoys, if, indeed, the word be not the hollowest of mockeries, an eternity of fame. It is true he is not read much, but he is always read a little. ”

“ In short, John, you may be a snail or a silk-worm, but by my consent you shall never be a hare again.
"We go to town next week. Try your interest and bring the duchess up by the birthday. I did not think to have named her any more in this letter. I find I am a little foolish about her; don't you be a great deal so, for if she will not come, do you come without her."
Gay was not the man to keep his feelings of disappointment to himself, and his feelings were so widely known that at the time the following copy of verses was handed about in manuscript [22] :—
A mother who vast pleasure finds ”

“ Probably it was because he wore a moustache, while Rob and Malcolm and Alex and Ranald were all smooth-shaven. Maybe it was that same black moustache, with the gleam of white teeth and the flashing glance of his black eyes that gave him that dashing cavalier sort of look. How wonderfully his dark face lighted up when he smiled, and how distinctly one recalled it when he had passed on. And yet it wasn't a handsome face. She wondered wherein lay its charm.
Gay's words recurred to her: "So fiery and impetuous he would ride rough-shod over anything that stood in his way to get what he wants." ”

“ Arbuthnot wrote a History of John Bull, which was designed to render the war then carried on by Marlborough unpopular, and certainly conduced to that end.
John Gay, 1688-1732: he was of humble origin, but rose by his talents, and figured at court. He wrote several dramas in a mock-tragic vein. ”

“ John Gay was the son of William Gay, fourth son of John Gay of Frithelstock. William had married the daughter of a Dissenting preacher named Hanmer, in Barnstaple, and there John was born on 30 June, 1685. William Gay died when John was but ten years old, [Pg 415] and he was brought up by his mother in Ivy Street, Barnstaple, and sent to school to Robert Luck, a would-be poet, who wrote Latin and English verses, in one of which, “The Female Phæton,” he depicted the career and lapse of a fast young lady of fashionable life. ”

“ With all his unworldliness Gay always had an eager, if not very keen, eye on the main chance, and finding himself surrounded by men of influence, he not unnaturally, in a day when men of letters often found their reward in Government places or in sinecures, looked to his acquaintances to further his interests. ”

“ As for myself, whether I am at home or abroad, gratitude will always put me in mind of the man to whom I owe so many benefits." [7]
These tidings were confirmed to Swift by Arbuthnot, who wrote from St. James's on June 12th: "You know that Gay goes to Hanover, and my Lord Treasurer has promised to equip him. Monday is the day of departure, and he is now dancing attendance for money to buy him shoes, stockings, and linen. The Duchess [of Monmouth] has turned him off, which I am afraid will make the poor man's condition worse instead of better." ”