me there by chance.
Nor knows with whom, nor why she comes along.

Gay was now on intimate terms with Lord Harcourt, whom he presently
introduced into "Mr. Pope's Welcome from Greece":--

Harcourt I see, for eloquence renown'd,
The mouth of justice, oracle of law!
Another Simon is beside him found,
Another Simon like as straw to straw;

and early in 1718 he visited him, first at Cockthorpe and then at
Stanton Harcourt, at which latter seat Pope was staying, working on the
fifth volume of the "Iliad." In the following year Gay again crossed the
Channel, possibly for the second time with the Pulteneys, but the only
record of this trip is to be found in the following letter:--

JOHN GAY TO THE HON. MRS. HOWARD.

Dijon, September 8th, 1719.

"If it be absolutely necessary that I make an apology for my not
writing, I must give you an account of very bad physicians, and a fever
which I had at Spa, that confined me for a month; but I do not see that
I need make the least excuse, or that I can find any reason for writing
to you at all; for can you believe that I would wish to converse with
you if it were not for the pleasure to hear you talk again? Then why
should I write to you when there is no possibility of receiving an
answer? I have been looking everywhere since I came into France to find
out some object that might take you from my thoughts, that my journey
might seem less tedious; but since nothing could ever do it in England I
can much less expect it in France.

"I am rambling from place to place. In about a month I hope to be at
Paris, and in the next month to be in England, and the next minute to
see you. I am now at Dijon in Burgundy, where last night, at an
ordinary, I was surprised by a question from an English gentleman whom I
had never seen before; hearing my name, he asked me if I had any
relation or acquaintance with _myself_, and when I told him I knew no
such person, he assured me that he was an intimate acquaintance of Mr.
Gay's of London. There was a Scotch gentleman, who all supper time was
teaching some French gentlemen the force and propriety of the English
language; and, what is seen very commonly, a young English gentleman
with a Jacobite governor. A French marquis drove an Abbe from the table
by railing against the vast riches of the Church, and another marquis,
who squinted, endeavoured to explain transubstantiation: 'That a thing
might not be what it really appeared to be