Gay is writing, he tells us, without prejudice "either for Whig or 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 paragraph, had begun as a parody of the Royal Society's publications, but they had failed to hold the public interest, in spite of the wit of the author of the _Art of Cookery_: "though that gentleman has a world of wit..., the town soon grew weary of his writings." King's _Useful Transactions in Philosophy_ had in fact run to only three numbers in the early months of 1709. The _Monthly Amusement_ of John Ozell, mentioned in the following paragraph, which Churton Collins erroneously considered to be not a periodical but "simply his frequent appearances as a translator" (p. xxxii)--a statement, repeated by Lewis Melville in his _Life and Letters of John Gay_ (London, 1921, p. 12)--ran for only six numbers, from April to September 1709. Gay's statement that it "is still continued" may refer to the better known _Delights for the Ingenious; or a Monthly Entertainment for the Curious of Both Sexes_ (edited by John Tipper) which was currently appearing in 1711.