[Footnote 11:  Probably a copy of a letter from Mrs. Howard to Lord Peterborough].

CHAPTER VII

1724-1727

     “THE CAPTIVES”—­THE FIRST SERIES OF “FABLES”—­GAY AND THE
     COURT—­POPE, SWIFT AND MRS. HOWARD.

During 1723 Gay wrote a tragedy, “The Captives,” which at the end of the year he read to the royal circle at Leicester House.  “When the hour came,” Johnson has recorded, “he saw the Princess [of Wales] and her ladies all in expectation, and, advancing with reverence, too great for any other attention, stumbled at a stool, and, falling forward, threw down a weighty Japanese screen.  The Princess started, the ladies screamed, and poor Gay, after all the disturbance, was still to read his play."[1] “The Captives” was produced at Drury Lane Theatre in January, 1724, and according to the Biographica Dramatica was “acted nine nights with great applause,” the third, or author’s night, being by the command of the Prince and Princess of Wales.  According, however, to Fenton, “Gay’s play had no success.  I am told he gave thirty guineas to have it acted on the fifth night."[2] When it was published, Gay prefaced it with the following dedication:—­

TO HER ROYAL HIGHNESS THE PRINCESS OF WALES.

“Madam,

“The honour I received from your Royal Highness in being permitted to read this play to you before it was acted, made me more happy than any other success that could have happened to me.  If it had the good fortune to gain your Royal Highness’s approbation, I have often been reflecting to what to impute it, and I think it must have been the catastrophe of the fall, the rewarding virtue and the relieving the distressed.  For that could not fail to give some pleasure in fiction, which, it is plain, gives you the greatest in reality, or else your Royal Highness would not (as you always have done) make it your daily practice.

“I am, Madam,
“Your Royal Highness’s most dutiful
and most humbly devoted servant,
“JOHN GAY.”

Of what Gay did, or where he went during 1724, next to nothing is known.  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.  The talk of the Bath is the marriage of Lord Somerville and Mrs. Rolt.  She left the Bath yesterday.