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.
Gay had become more and more on good terms with the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry, especially with the Duchess, who treated him as a sort of pet lap-dog.

"Since I wrote last," Gay told Swift in a letter dated September 16th, 1726, "I have been always upon the ramble.

I have been in Oxfordshire with the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry, and at Petersham, and wheresoever they would carry me; but as they will go to Wiltshire[11] without me on Tuesday next, for two or three months, I believe I shall then have finished my travels for this year, and shall not go further from London than now and then to Twickenham."[12] It was as well that Gay remained in London, else probably his "Fables" would never have appeared.