Ere this, however, he had been admitted to the intimacy of Pope, and was hired or flattered by him to engage in the famous "Battle of the Wits," springing from the publication of the "Pastorals" of Ambrose Philips. This agreeable but nearly forgotten writer published some pastorals, which Steele, with his usual rashness and fatal favouritism, commended in the "Guardian" as superior to all productions of the class, (including Pope's,) except those of Theocritus, Virgil, and Spenser. Pope retorted in a style of inimitable irony, by a letter to the "Guardian," where he professedly gives the preference to Philips, but damages his claim by producing four specimens of his composition, and contrasting them with the better portions of his own. Not contented with this, he prevailed on Gay to satirise Philips in the "Shepherd's Week"--a poem which forms the _reductio ad absurdum_ of that writer's plan, and exhibits rural life in more than the vulgarity and grossness which the author of the "Pastorals" had ascribed to it. Gay shortly after wrote his "Fan," and his "Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of London"--the former a mythological fiction, in three books, now entirely and deservedly neglected; the second still worthy of perusal on account of its fidelity to truth, in its pictures of the dirty London of 1713--a fidelity reminding you of Crabbe and of Swift; indeed, Gay is said to have been assisted in "Trivia" by the latter, who, we may not uncharitably suppose, supplied the filth of allusion and image which here and there taints the poem. In 1713, our author brought out on the stage a comedy, entitled the "Wife of Bath," which met with no success, and which, when reproduced seventeen years later, after the "Beggars' Opera" had taken the town by storm, fell as flat as before.