Lord Bathurst, too, deplored the loss of Gay; he of whom the poet had written in “Mr. Pope’s Welcome from Greece":—­

  Bathurst impetuous, hastens to the coast. 
  Whom you and I strive who shall love the most.

“Poor John Gay!” he wrote to Swift on March 29th, 1733.  “We shall see him no more; but he will always be remembered by those who knew him, with a tender concern.”  Arbuthnot, who also had had tribute paid him in “Mr. Pope’s Welcome from Greece":—­

  Arbuthnot there I see, in physic’s art,
    As Galen learned or famed Hippocrate;
  Whose company drives sorrow from the heart
    As all disease his medicines dissipate.

knew him well and loved him deeply.  “We have all had another loss of our worthy and dear friend, Mr. Gay,” he wrote to Swift on January 13th, 1733.  “It was some alleviation of my grief to see him so universally lamented by almost everybody, even by those who knew him only by reputation.  He was interred at Westminster Abbey, as if he had been a peer of the realm; and the good Duke of Queensberry, who lamented him as a brother, will set up a handsome monument upon him.  These are little affronts put upon vice and injustice, and is all that remains in our power.  I believe ‘The Beggar’s Opera,’ and what he had to come upon the stage, will make the sum of the diversions of the town for some time to come."[22]

By virtue of their fame, towering high above the rest of the select band of Gay’s dearest friends, were Pope and Swift:—­

  Blest be the great! for those they take away,
  And those they left me; for they left me Gay,

Pope had written in the “Epistle to Arbuthnot”; and Gay, as has been said, had more than once entered the lists and broken a lance on his brother poet’s behalf, as when he parodied Ambrose Philips in “The Shepherd’s Week.”  His “Mr. Pope’s Welcome from Greece,” written when Pope had finished his translation of the “Iliad,” was a fine panegyric, in which he had a sly dig at the rival editor:—­

  Tickell, whose skiff (in partnership they say)
  Set forth for Greece, but founder’d on the way.

and in his “Epistle to the Right Honourable Paul Methuen, Esq.,” he pilloried one of his friend’s most violent critics:—­

    Had Pope with grovelling numbers fill’d his page,
  Dennis had never kindled into rage. 
  ’Tis the sublime that hurt the critic’s ease;
  Write nonsense, and he reads and sleeps in peace.

“You say truly,” Pope wrote to Swift, on April 2nd, 1733, “that death is only terrible to us as it separates us from those we love; but I really think those have the worst of it who are left by us, if we are true friends.  I have felt more (I fancy) in the loss of Mr. Gay, than I shall suffer in the thought of going away myself into a state that none of us can feel this sort of losses.  I wished vehemently to have seen him in a condition of living independent, and to have lived in perfect indolence the rest of our days together, the two most idle, most innocent, undesigning poets of our age."[23]