But the habit of ascribing his work to others goes back to Gay's own time and is especially hard to combat because some of his works were, in fact, collaborative. Hearing Pope read part of a transcription of one of Gay's plays, according to Joseph Spence, Colley Gibber, "upon seeing a knife with the name of J. Gay upon it, ... said: 'What, does Mr. Pope make knives too"'" It is worth demonstrating that Gay could use his own verbal knife effectively. But if Gay is interesting and amusing on his own, he is all the more so for readers who know the work of some of his friends and contemporaries and who are alert to intertextual relationships as well as to personal ones.
Gay had a gift for friendship. In "A Farewell to London" (1715) Pope describes him as "lov[ing] all Mankind, but flatter[ing] none." Gay was fat: Spence quotes a letter in which William Congreve remarks to Pope, "As the French philosopher used to prove his existence by cogito ergo sum, the greatest proof of Gay's existence is edi ergo est" (the gist of this imprecise Latin being "he eats, therefore he is").
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