Tory," but the warm praise which he extends to Steele and Addison makes
his pamphlet sound like the criticism of one very close to the Whigs.
Though Gay is ordinarily associated with the Tory circle of Swift and
Pope, he was in 1711 still in the somewhat uncertain position of a
youngster willing to be courted by either group. His earliest
sympathies were if anything on the side of the Whigs, in spite of the
turn of events in the autumn of 1710. Gay's interests in these early
years are nowhere so well analyzed as in the early pages of W.H.
Irving's _John Gay: Favorite of the Wits_ (Durham, N.C., 1940): cf. the
title of the second chapter: "Direction Found--the Year 1713." Even as
late as 1715 Swift apparently thought of him as a Whig (Swift's
_Letters_, ed. Ball, II, 286, cited by Irving, p. 91).

One need not be surprised, then, to find Gay eulogizing Captain Steele
as "the greatest scholar and best casuist of any man in England," an
essayist whose writings "have set all our wits and men of letters on a
new way of thinking." Swift's reaction is well known. "Dr. Freind was
with me," he writes to Stella on May 14th, "and pulled out a two-penny
pamphlet just published, called, _The State of Wit_, giving a character
of all the papers that have come out of late. The author seems to be a
Whig, yet he speaks very highly of a paper called the _Examiner_, and
says the supposed author of it is Dr. Swift. But above all things he
praises the _Tatlers_ and _Spectators_; and I believe Steele and Addison
were privy to the printing of it. Thus is one treated by these impudent
dogs" (_Journal to Stella_, ed. J.K. Moorhead, Everyman's Library, p.
168).

In addition to the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_ Gay discusses a dozen other
periodical publications which are of some interest to-day. Dr. King's
"monthly _Philosophical Transactions_," mentioned in the third