be if it could waft you in the air to avoid jolting; while I, who am so much later in life, can, or at least could, ride five hundred miles on a trotting horse.  You mortally hate writing, only because it is the thing you chiefly ought to do, as well to keep up the vogue you have in the world, as to make you easy in your fortune:  you are merciful to everything but money your best friend, whom you treat with inhumanity."[2]

* * * * *

In May was first performed at the Haymarket Theatre “Acis and Galatea,” of which he wrote the “book” and Handel the music; but this was not work upon which he had been lately engaged—­in fact, both words and music had been ready for ten years.  Gay, however, did occasionally put in some time on literary work, and at his death left the “book” of an opera “Achilles,” which was produced on February 10th, 1733, at the scene of his triumph with “The Beggar’s Opera,” the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields; “The Distrest Wife” and a farce, “The Rehearsal at Goatham,” which last were printed, respectively, in 1743 and 1754.  He was at this time composing very leisurely a second series of “Fables,” which were ready for the press at the time of his death, but did not appear until 1738.

JOHN GAY TO DEAN SWIFT.

  London, May 19th, 1732.

“You seemed not to approve of my writing more Fables.  Those I am now writing have a prefatory discourse before each of them, by way of epistle, and the morals of them mostly are of the political kind; which makes them run into a greater length than those I have already published.  I have already finished about fifteen or sixteen; four or five more would make a volume of the same size as the first.  Though this is a kind of writing that appears very easy, I find it the most difficult of any I ever undertook.  After I have invented one fable, and finished it, I despair of finding out another; but I have a moral or two more, which I wish to write upon.

“I have also a sort of a scheme to raise my finances by doing something for the stage:  with this, and some reading, and a great deal of exercise, I propose to pass my summer.

“As for myself, I am often troubled with the colic.  I have as much inattention, and have, I think, lower spirits than usual, which I impute to my having no one pursuit in life."[3]

JOHN GAY TO DEAN SWIFT.

  Amesbury, July 24th, 1732.

“I shall finish the work I intended, this summer,[4] but I look upon the success in every respect to be precarious.  You judge very right of my present situation, that I cannot propose to succeed by favour:  but I do not think, if I could flatter myself that I had any degree of merit, much could be expected from that unfashionable pretension.

“I have almost done everything I proposed in the way of Fables; but have not set the last hand to them.  Though they will not amount to half the number, I believe they will make much such another volume as the last.  I find it the most difficult task I ever undertook; but have determined to go through with it; and, after this, I believe I shall never have courage enough to think any more in this way."[5]