[Gay, John.]

folio, 14 pp. and final leaf of errata, first edition, full brown morocco by Zaehnsdorf, preserved in a dark blue full morocco fleece-lined folding case, outer margin of the final errata leaf professionally restored, with a couple of letters in facsimile, but generally a very good copy

Foxon G89; Bond, English Burlesque Poetry, 1700-1750, 23; Horn, Marlborough: A Survey, 238; Hayward 141; CBEL II, 497.

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Gay's first publication, and one of the great rarities of 18th-century poetry.  Iolo Williams, in his preface to a facsimile edition published in 1926, said that "the original edition is unlikely to fall to the prowess of even the keenest hunter after rare books."  Aside from this copy, the last to come on the market was acquired for Yale in 1955 by Prof. C. B. Tinker, then Keeper of Rare Books, who is recorded as saying at the time that he had searched in vain for a copy for over forty years. The present copy surfaced in 1972, and no other has surfaced since. The ESTC now lists seven copies in all (British Library, Bodleian, Worcester College, Yale, Huntington, Texas, Harvard), with Foxon adding another copy at Texas and a copy at Williams.

Wine is a parody of a parody.  The opening lines -- "Of happiness terrestrial, and the course / Whence human pleasures flow, sing heavenly Muse" -- are an obvious imitation of Paradise Lost.  Gay's immediate source of inspiration, however, was The Splendid Shilling (1701), a burlesque of Milton's style by John Philips; there are echoes as well of such derivative poems as Elijah Fenton's Cerealia (1706), and Philips' own Cyder (1708).  Gay's authorship of this poem is attested to by a letter from his schoolmate and mentor Aaron Hill, written to Richard Savage in 1736.  Foxon mentions that some doubt has been cast upon this ascription, but in fact it has been fully accepted by all recent scholars and critics.  For a full discussion, see David Nokes, John Gay: A Profession of Friendship (1995), pp. 50-55: "Wine is a highly characteristic piece; a brief but nevertheless ambitious jeu d'esprit, deliberately ephemeral, yet still revelling in multi-layered literary allusiveness. . . . Wine is a highly self-conscious poem, with more than a hint of adolescent bravado in the way it perverts Miltonic sentiments into bacchanalian pranks.  There is a conscious dare-devil air in the way the antics of Gay's tavern-companions parody the ambitions of Satan's fallen angels."  The poem was immediately pirated by Henry Hills, who printed three editions of it in 1708-9; the first time it was assigned to Gay was in Bell's British Poets, in 1773, citing the letter from Aaron Hill.