GAY.

THIS cotemporary with Pope, Swift, and other celebrated geniusses, was the descendant of an ancient family that had long been in possession of the manor of Goldworthy, in Devonshire, and was born in 1688, at or near Barnstaple. Being sent to the school of that town, a little before he retired from it he published a volume of Latin and English Poems; but, having no hereditary riches, he was sent to London, and apprenticed to a silk mercer. Here, it seems, he soon became weary of the restraint, or what he might deem the servility, of his situation; however, his master was easily persuaded to release him from any obligation, and in 1712 he got into the service of the duchess of Monmouth as her secretary. The year following he published his Rural Sports, and inscribed it to Mr. Pope, then rising fast into reputation. Pope, when he became acquainted with Gay, found such attractions in his manners and conversation, that a friendship was formed between them, which lasted till their separation by death. In the following year he published The Shepherds' Week, six English pastorals, in which the images are drawn from real life, as it appears in remote parts of England; and these pastorals were read as just representations of rural manners and occupations. In 1713 he brought out his comedy of the Wife of Bath; but as this received no applause, he printed it; and seventeen years after, having, as he supposed, adapted it more to the public taste, he again offered it for the stage; but had the mortification of seeing it rejected, even while he was flushed with the success of his Beggars' Opera. In the last year of Queen Anne, Gay was appointed secretary to the earl of Clarendon, ambassador to the court of Hanover. In 1717, he brought out Three Weeks after Marriage, a comedy written to ridicule Dr. Woodward, the Fossilist, a man not really or justly contemptible : and the performers were driven off the stage. Gay, after this, falling into dejection, the earl of Burlington sent him into Devonshire, and the year after 1717 Mr. Pulteney took him to Aix: in the following year lord Harcourt invited him to his seat, where, during his visit, two rural lovers were killed with lightning; the particulars of which are related in Pope's Letters. In 1720, he published his poems by subscription with such success, that he raised a thousand pounds; but afterwards engaging in a dangerous speculation in the South Sea scheme, he was again reduced so low, that his life was in danger. Being again restored to health, his awkwardness and simplicity exposed him to the laugh of the town, on account of his falling down and overturning a screen, when sent for to read the play of the Captives before the princess of Wales and her attendants. In 1726, he wrote Fables for the young duke of Cumberland. In 1727, having refused the offer of being made gentleman usher to the princess Louisa, all the interest of his friends to move the court in his favour after this proved unavailing.-All the pain, however, which he suffered from the neglect of the court is supposed to have been driven away by the unexampled success of the Beggars' Opera. Besides being acted in London sixty-three days without interruption, and renewed the next season with equal applause, it spread into all the great towns of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Ladies' fans, and the screens in the houses, bore the favorite songs of this opera, and even the person who performed Polly was raised from obscurity. Gay, too much elated by this success, produced a second part, under the title of Polly; but this the lord Chamberlain very properly refused to licence: but for this hardship he found a recompense in the affectionate attention of the duke and duchess of Queensberry, into whose house he was taken. He died of a violent fit of the cholic, in December 1732, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, where his generons patrons erected a monument to his memory.

GIBBON.

THIS eminent English historian was born at Putney, in 1737. His father, Edward Gibbon, Esq. was a gentleman of family and fortune, and sat in two parliaments. Edward, his only child, was in his ninth year sent to Dr. Woodeson's school, at Kingstonupon-Thames. Having acquired the rudiments of Latin, he returned to his friends, and as in his twelfth year he read a variety of English books of poetry, romance, history, and travels, he mentioned this " as the most propitious to the growth of his intellectual stature." He was then entered at Westminster School, but repeated attacks of ill health prevented him from making a regular progress in the classical studies here. His constitution at length acquiring firmness, his father placed him as a gentleman commoner in Magdalen College, Oxford; yet the short time he spent here, not exceeding fourteen months, he has stigmatised as "the most idle and unprofitable of his life."

In 1753, thinking he was able to enter the lists of controversy with a catholic priest, he found himself completely vanquished in argument, and solemnly abjured the errors of heresy. His father, offended at his conduct on this occasion, sent him to Lausanne, in Switzerland, to be under the care of M. Pavilliard, a calvinist minister; here his faith in the Romish articles gradually gave way, and on Christmas-day, 1754, he received the sacrament in the protestant church. At Lausanne, he made himself master of the French and Latin languages, and of the art of logic, and read with great attention many excellent authors: belles-lettres, and the history of man and the human mind, were his favourite objects of study; mathematics he only touched upon, and left. What he called his banishment at Lausanne terminating in 1758, he was received by his father with favour and affection, and almost immediately undertook the arduous task of writing a work in a foreign language, which required polish and even elegance of style; this was his "Essai sur l'Etude de la Litterature," which was printed in 1761. At this time he was not twenty-two years of age: the topics most enlarged upon are taste, criticism, and philosophy; on which subjects there are many old observations well repeated; many ingenious conjectures advanced, and much reading displayed. It was preceded by an eulogium by Dr. Maty, and a dedication so strikingly manly and affectionate to the author's father, that, if a reconciliation had not previously taken place, little doubt could have remained of its being effected by such a production. As his father had a command in the militia of Hampshire, where his estates lay, he was soon after joined by his son, who took a captain's commission, which he held about two years and a half.

After the peace of 1763, he visited Paris, and, when he had spent some months with the gay and learned there, he visited Lausanne, preparatory to his journey into Italy. At Rome," among the bare-footed friars who were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter," he conceived the first idea of writing the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In 1770, Mr. Gibbon's father died, and in 1774 he obtained a seat in the House of Com mons, for the borough of Liskeard, through the favour of his kinsman, Lord Elliot; but during eight years never had the courage to open his mouth, though he always voted with the minister against the American revolution. In the beginning of 1776, the first volume, in quarto, of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire appeared; all the attacks against which he parried with the utmost ingenuity. The progress of a disease which had existed above thirty years terminated in a mortification, and carried him off, on the 16th of January 1794, in his sixty-seventh year. His approaching end, though unsuspected, did not in the least disturb his tranquility.