. Devonshire characters and strange events. fill out twopoints, the story of The Beggars Opera, and that ofthe discovery of MSS. in Gays chair. The Gays of Goldsworthy were an ancient Devon-shire family, tracing back in direct descent from a JohnGay, already seated in his warm nest at Goldsworthy, inParkham, near Bideford, a parish that nursed as wellthe Giffards of Halsbury and the Risdons of if Parkham nursed these families, it did not keepthem; Giffards, Risdons, Gays are all gone, and theGays had sold Goldsworthy before Risdon wrote hisSurvey between 1605 and 1630. But the Gays
. Devonshire characters and strange events. fill out twopoints, the story of The Beggars Opera, and that ofthe discovery of MSS. in Gays chair. The Gays of Goldsworthy were an ancient Devon-shire family, tracing back in direct descent from a JohnGay, already seated in his warm nest at Goldsworthy, inParkham, near Bideford, a parish that nursed as wellthe Giffards of Halsbury and the Risdons of if Parkham nursed these families, it did not keepthem; Giffards, Risdons, Gays are all gone, and theGays had sold Goldsworthy before Risdon wrote hisSurvey between 1605 and 1630. But the Gays still re-tained the old priory of Frithelstock which they held ona long lease from 1602, and where lived the widow of aGay in 1822, when Lysons published his Devonshirein Magna Britannia. John Gay was the son of William Gay, fourth son ofJohn Gay of Frithelstock. William had married thedaughter of a Dissenting preacher named Hanmer, inBarnstaple, and there John was born on 30 June, Gay died when John was but ten years old, 414. THE BEGGARS OPERA 415 and he was brought up by his mother in Ivy Street,Barnstaple, and sent to school to Robert Luck, awould-be poet, who wrote Latin and English verses,in one of which, The Female Phaston, he depictedthe career and lapse of a fast young lady of fashionablelife. Gay was bound apprentice to a London mercer,but, his health failing, he returned to Barnstaple,where he dwelt with his uncle, the Dissenting minister,John Hanmer. The association must have been mostunsuitable to both. John toujours gai, with a poetsfancy, a buoyant heart, what more incongruous than tobe lodged under the roof and nourished at the table ofa sour and moody Puritan ! How and when he broke away from this depressingand distressing environment we do not know. All thatis known of this early period is to be found in a littlework called Gays Chair, written by his nephew,Joseph Ballard. At the age of twenty-one he wrotehis first piece, Rural Sports, which he de
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