by his thoughtlessness and gullibility. He has
as little foresight of age, sickness, poverty, or loss of admirers as
a girl of fifteen." And his dear Mrs. Howard, afterwards Lady Suffolk,
took him affectionately to task:--"Your head is your best friend: it
would clothe, lodge, and feed you; but you neglect it, and follow that
false friend your heart, which is such a foolish, tender thing that it
makes others despise your head, that have not half so good a one on
their own shoulders. In short, John, you may be a snail, or a
silkworm; but by my consent you shall never be a hare again."

He lived under other great roofs, if not contentedly, at least
gracefully and agreeably. If his dependent state irked him, his hosts
did not perceive it. To Swift he wrote, indeed, "They wonder at each
other for not providing for me, and _I_ wonder at them all." Yet, for
the nine years from 1722 to 1731 he had a small official salary, on
which a thriftier or more industrious mortal would have managed to
live respectably even in that expensive age; and for at least a part
of the time he had official lodgings at Whitehall.

In 1725 was published the first edition of his famous 'Fables,' which
had been written for the moral behoof of Prince William, afterward
Duke of Cumberland, of unblessed memory. The book did not make his
fortune with the court, as he had hoped, and in 1728 he produced his
best known work, 'The Beggar's Opera.' Nobody had much faith in this
"Newgate Pastoral," least of all Swift, who had first suggested it.
But it took the town by storm, running for sixty-three consecutive
nights. As the heroine, Polly Peachum, the lovely Lavinia Fenton
captured a duchess's coronet. The songs were heard alike in West End
drawing-rooms and East End slums. Swift praised it for its morality,
and the Archbishop of Canterbury scored it for its condonation of
vice. The breath of praise and blame filled equally its prosperous
sails, blew it all over the kingdom wherever a theatre could be found,
and finally wafted it to Minorca. So well did the opera pay him that
Gay wrote a sequel called 'Polly,' which, being prohibited through
some notion of Walpole's, sold enormously by subscription and earned
Gay L1,200.

After this the hospitable Queensberrys seem to have adopted him. He
produced a musical drama, 'Acis and Galatea,' written long before and
set to Handel's music; a few more 'Fables'; a thin opera called
'Achilles'; and then his work was do