Though they had long been in correspondence, Swift and Gay had not yet met. Swift, of course, had often in his mind a visit to London--he admitted the temptation, but resisted it. "I was three years reconciling myself to the scene, and the business to which fortune had condemned me, and stupidity was what I had recourse to,"[7] he had written to Gay from Dublin, January 8th, 1723. "Besides, what a figure should I make in London, while my friends are in poverty, exile, distress, or imprisonment, and my enemies with rods of iron?" At last, however, in March, 1726, he did come to London, and he was the guest of Gay, whom he subsequently referred to as "my landlord at Whitehall." He saw much of Gay. "I have lived these two months past for the most part in the country, either at Twickenham with Mr. Pope, or rambling with him and Mr. Gay for a fortnight together. Yesterday Lord Bolingbroke and Mr. Congreve made up five at dinner at Twickenham,"[8] Swift wrote to Tickell from London on July 7th. Like the rest, Swift came to love Gay dearly, and Gay was no whit less attracted to the great man, who promised on his next visit to stay again in Whitehall. "My landlord," he wrote in a letter addressed jointly to Pope and Gay, October 15th, 1726, "who treats me with kindness and domesticity, and says that he is laying in a double stock of wine."[9] Swift had been introduced to Mrs. Howard--it may be by Gay--and she too wished to entertain him. "I hope you will get your house and wine ready, to which Mr. Gay and I are to have access when you are at Court; for, as to Mr. Pope, he is not worth considering on such occasions,"[10] he wrote to her from Dublin, February 1st, 1727.