The Poetical Works of John Gay. Edited, with Notes and
a Life, by John Underhill. 2 vole, (Lawrence and Bullen.)—These volumes, part of the "Muses' Library," a series which we do not remember to have seen, are a good piece of work, both from the technical and the literary point of view, as good, we might say, as Gay's merits deserve, but that it is now the fashion to revive versifiers of much inferior skill. Mr. Underhill has taken pains to collect all that can be found out about the poet, and has suc- ceeded in adding some new facts, and he estimates with fairness the character of the man and the value of his literary work. Gay was a man who deserved the affection which he received from his friends ; but nothing could well be more unfounded than the belief—cherished, it would seem, by himself, and accepted by some who ought to have known better—that he was a great man, ill-treated by an unappreciative world. On the whole, he seems to have got quite as much as he deserved. He lived in sufficient comfort, though he was not by any means a hard worker ; and he left 46,000 behind him,—a very respectable sum for a third-rate poet. As to the poems collected in these two volumes, one can only say that considerably more than half might perish without a shadow of loss to the world. It is the fashion, however, now to collect all the rubbish that the ingenuity and industry of the collector can find ; and it is useless to complain. We may remind Mr. Underhill, who seems to have done his work with great care, that Mrs. Howard, the favourite of George II., did not become Duchess of Suffolk in 1731. Her husband succeeded in that year to the Earldom of Suffolk, a peerage created in 1603.
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