GAY’S best work as an essayist was done in the Guardian, when he was under thirty years of age. From Devonshire, where he was born in 1685, he went up to London as a boy,—no doubt with the ulterior intention of becoming great in literature, as he soon gave up for that purpose the trade of silk-mercer to which he had been apprenticed on his first arrival in the city. His first poem, “Wine,” was published in 1710, and he never afterwards became much more serious either in purposes or methods than he showed himself in this. Pope loved and helped him, and, after experiencing the worst hardships of Grub Street, he died one of the most prosperous of poets, leaving his heirs an estate of £6,000, earned by his pen. “The Beggar’s Opera,” the most celebrated of his dramatic productions, netted him little in cash, but helped to make him famous, so that though he sold the copyright of his first “Fables” and of “The Beggar’s Opera” together for only ninety guineas, his poems, which he published himself by subscription, brought him a profit of £1,000; and this was handsomely increased by returns from his later “Fables” and plays. Of his poems “Black-Eyed Susan” and the “Fables” alone would have immortalized him. If he has done nothing else so popular as these, he has done nothing badly, for among the minor poets of England few have equaled him in skill. If he was not serious enough to become great among the artists of his own generation, he was good-natured enough to become a boon companion to uncounted friends in all the generations after him.