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 PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 As a biographical study, this little volume differs in one 
 important respect from its predecessors in this series. Ex- 
 pansion, instead of compression, has had to be my method 
 in treating the existing lives of Gray. Of these none have 
 hitherto been published except in connexion with some 
 part of his works, and none has attempted to go at all 
 into detail. Mitford's, which is the fullest, would occupy, 
 in its purely biographical section, not more than thirty of 
 these pages. 
 
 The materials I have used are chiefly taken- from the 
 following sources : 
 
 I. The Life and Letters of Gray, edited by Mason in 
 1774. This work consists of a very meagre thread of 
 biography connecting a collection of letters, which would 
 be more valuable, if Mason had not tampered with them, 
 altering, omitting, and re-dating at his own free will. 
 
 II. Mitford's Life of Thomas Gray, prefixed to the 
 1814 edition of the Poems. This is very valuable so far 
 as it goes. The Rev. John Mitford was a young clergy- 
 man, who was born ten years after the death of Gray, and 
 who made it the business of his life to collect from such 
 survivors as remembered Gray all the documents and an- 
 ecdotes that he could secure. This is the life which was 
 altered and enlarged, to be prefixed to the Eton Gray, in 
 1845. 
 
vi PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 III. Mitford's edition of the Works of Gray, published 
 in 4 vols., in 1836. This contained the genuine text of 
 most of the letters printed by Mason, and a large number 
 which now saw the light for the first time, addressed to 
 Wharton, Chute, Nichols, and others. 
 
 IV. Correspondence and Reminiscences of the Rev. Nor- 
 ton Nichols, edited by Mitford, in 1843. 
 
 V. The Correspondence of Gray and Mason, to which 
 are added other letters, not before printed, an exceedingly 
 valuable collection, not widely enough known, which was 
 published by Mitford in 1853. 
 
 VI. The Works of Gray, as edited in 2 vols, by Mathias, 
 in 1814; this is the only publication in which the Pem- 
 broke MSS. have hitherto been made use of. 
 
 VII. Souvenirs de C. V. de Bonstetten, 1832. 
 
 VIII. The Correspondence of Horace Walpole. 
 
 IX. Gray's and Stonehewer's MSS., as preserved in 
 Pembroke College, Cambridge. 
 
 X. MS. Notes and Letters by Gray, Cole, and others, in 
 the British Museum. 
 
 By far the best account of Gray, not written by a per- 
 sonal friend, is the brief summary of his character and 
 genius contributed by Mr. Matthew Arnold to " The Eng- 
 lish Poets." 
 
 No really good or tolerably full edition of Gray's Works 
 is in existence. Neither his English nor his Latin Poems 
 have been edited in any collection which is even approxi- 
 mately complete ; and his Letters, although they are bet- 
 ter given by Mitford than by Mason, are very far from 
 being in a satisfactory condition. In many of them the 
 date is wrongly printed ; and some, which bear no date, 
 are found, by internal evidence, to be incorrectly attributed 
 by Mitford. No attempt has ever been made to collect 
 
PREFATORY NOTE. vii 
 
 Gray's writings into one single publication. I am sorry 
 to say that all my efforts to obtain a sight of Gray's 
 unpublished letters and facetious poems, many of which 
 were sold at Sotheby & Wilkinson's on the 4th of August, 
 1854, have failed. On the other hand, the examination 
 of the Pembroke MSS. has supplied me with a consider- 
 able amount of very exact and important biographical in- 
 formation which has never seen the light until now. 
 
 I have to express my warmest thanks to the Master 
 and Fellows of Pembroke College, Cambridge, who per- 
 mitted me to examine these invaluable MSS. ; to Mr. R. 
 A. Neil, of Pembroke, and Mr. J. W. Clark, of Trinity, 
 whose kindness in examining archives, and copying docu- 
 ments for me, has been great ; to Mr. R. T. Turner, who 
 has placed his Gray MSS. at my disposal ; to Professor 
 Sidney Colvin and Mr. Basil Champneys, who have given 
 me the benefit of their advice on those points of art and 
 architecture which are essential to a study of Gray; and 
 to Mr. Edward Scott and Mr. Richard Garnett, for valu- 
 able assistance in the Library of the British Museum. For 
 much help*in forming an idea of the world in which Gray 
 moved, I am indebted to Mr. Christopher Wordsworth's 
 books on Cambridge in the eighteenth century. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Page 
 
 Childhood and Early College Life ...... 1 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 The Grand Tour 23 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 Stoke-Pogis. — Death of West. — First English Poem& 46 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 Life at Cambridge 68 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 The "Elegy." — Six Poems. — Death of Gray's Aunt 
 and Mother 93 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 The Pindaric Odes 117 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 British Museum. — Norton Nichols 140 
 
 1* 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 Page 
 
 Life at Cambridge.— English Travels ..... 164 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 BONSTETTEN. — DEATH. . „ 191 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 Posthumous . . 210 
 
GEAT. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 CHILDHOOD AND EARLY COLLEGE LIFE. 
 
 Thomas Gray was born at his father's house in Cornhill, 
 on the 26th of December, 1716. Of his ancestry nothing- 
 is known. Late in life, when he was a famous poet, Baron 
 Gray of Gray in Forfarshire claimed him as a relation, but 
 with characteristic serenity he put the suggestion from 
 him. "I know no pretence," he said to Beattie, "that I 
 have to the honour Lord Gray is pleased to do me; but 
 if his lordship chooses to own me, it certainly is not my 
 business to deny it." The only proof of his connexion 
 with this ancient family is that he possessed a bloodstone 
 seal, which had belonged to his father, engraved with Lord 
 Gray's arms, gules a lion rampant, within a bordure en- 
 grailed argent. These have been accepted at Pembroke 
 College as the poet's arms, but as a matter of fact we may 
 say that he sprang on both sides from the lower-middle 
 classes. His paternal grandfather had been a successful 
 merchant, and died leaving Philip, apparently his only 
 son, a fortune of 10,000/. Through various vicissitudes 
 this money passed, at length almost reaching the poet's 
 
2 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 hands in no very much diminished quantity, for Philip 
 Gray seems to have been as clever in business as he was 
 extravagant. He was born in 1676. Towards his thir- 
 tieth year he married Miss Dorothy Antrobus, a Bucking- 
 hamshire lady, about twenty years of age, who, with her 
 sister Mary, a young woman three years her senior, kept 
 a milliner's shop in the City. They belonged, however, to 
 a genteel family, for the remaining sister, Anna, was the 
 wife of a prosperous country lawyer, Mr. Jonathan Rogers, 
 and the two brothers, Robert and John Antrobus, were 
 fellows of Cambridge colleges, and afterwards tutors at 
 Eton. These five persons take a prominent place in the 
 subsequent life of the poet, whereas he never mentions 
 any of the Grays. His father had certainly one sister, 
 Mrs. Oliffe, a woman of violent temper, who married a 
 gentleman of Norfolk, and was well out of the way till 
 after the death of Gray's mother, when she began to 
 haunt him, and only died two or three months before he 
 did. She seems to have resembled Philip Gray in char- 
 acter, for the poet, always singularly respectful and loyal 
 to his other elderly relations, calls her " the spawn of 
 Cerberus upon the Dragon of Wantley." 
 
 Dorothy Gray was unfortunate in her married life; her 
 husband was violent, jealous, and probably mad. Of her 
 twelve children, Thomas was the only one whom she 
 reared, but Mason is doubtless wrong in saying that the 
 eleven who died were all suffocated by infantile convul- 
 sions. Mrs. Gray speaks in her "case" of the expense 
 of providing "all manner of apparel for her children." 
 Thomas, however, certainly would have died as an infant, 
 but that his mother, finding him in a fit, opened a vein 
 with her scissors, by that means relieving the determina- 
 tion of blood to the brain. His father neglected him, and 
 
I.] CHILDHOOD AND EARLY COLLEGE LIFE. 3 
 
 he was brought up by his mother and his aunt Mary. He 
 also mentions with touching affection, in speaking of the 
 death of a Mrs. Bonfoy in 1763, that "she taught me to 
 pray." Home life at Cornhill was rendered miserable by 
 the cruelties of the father, and it seems that the boy's 
 uncle, Robert Antrobus, took him away to his own house 
 at Burnham, in Bucks. This gentleman was a fellow of 
 Peterhouse, as his younger brother Thomas was of King's 
 College, Cambridge. "With Robert the boy studied botany, 
 and became learned, according to Horace Walpole, in the 
 virtues of herbs and simples. Unfortunately, this uncle 
 died on January 23, 1729, at the age of fifty ; there still 
 exists a copy of Waller's Poems in which Gray has writ- 
 ten his own name, with this date ; perhaps it was an heir- 
 loom of his uncle. 
 
 In one of 'Philip Gray's fits of extravagance he seems to 
 have had a full-length of his son painted, about this time, 
 by the fashionable portrait-painter of the day, Jonathan 
 Richardson the elder. This picture is now in the Fitz- 
 william Museum, at Cambridge. The head is good in 
 colour and modelling; a broad, pale brow, sharp nose and 
 chin, large eyes, and a pert expression give a lively idea 
 of the precocious and not very healthy young gentleman 
 of thirteen. He is dressed in a blue satin coat, lined with 
 pale shot silk, and crosses his stockinged legs so as to dis- 
 play dapper slippers of russet leather. His father, how- 
 ever, absolutely refused to educate him, and he was sent 
 to Eton, about 1727, under the auspices of his uncles, 
 and at the expense of his mother. On the 26th of April 
 of the same year, a smart child of ten, with the airs of a 
 little dancing-master, a child who was son of a prime-min- 
 isfer, and had kissed the King's hand, entered the same 
 school; and some intellectual impulse brought them to? 
 
4 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 gether directly in a friendship that was to last, with a 
 short interval, until the death of one of them more than 
 forty years afterwards. 
 
 It is not certain that Horace Walpole at once adopted 
 that attitude of frivolous worship which he preserved to- 
 wards Gray in later life. He was a brilliant little social 
 meteor at Eton, and Gray was probably attracted first to 
 him. Yet it was characteristic of the poet throughout 
 life that he had always to be sought, and even at Eton 
 his talents may have attracted Walpole's notice. At all 
 events, they became fast friends, and fostered in one an- 
 other intellectual pretensions of an alarming nature. Both 
 were oppidans and not collegers, and therefore it is diffi- 
 cult to trace them minutely at Eton. But we know that 
 they " never made an expedition against bargemen, or won 
 a match at cricket," for this Walpole confesses; but they 
 wandered through the playing-fields at Eton tending a 
 visionary flock, and "sighing out some pastoral name to 
 the echo of the cascade under the bridge" which spans 
 Chalvey Brook. An avenue of limes amongst the elms 
 is still named the " Poet's "Walk," and is connected by tra- 
 dition with Gray. They were a pair of weakly little boys, 
 and in these days of brisk athletic training would hardly 
 be allowed to exist. Another amiable and gentle boy, still 
 more ailing than themselves, was early drawn to them by 
 sympathy : this was Richard West, a few months younger 
 than Gray and older than Walpole, a son of the Richard 
 West who was made Lord Chancellor of Ireland when he 
 was only thirty-five, and who then immediatel} 7 died ; his 
 mother's father, dead before young Richard's birth, had 
 been the famous Bishop Gilbert Burnet. A fourth friend 
 was Thomas Ashton, who soon slips out of our history, 
 but who survived until 1775. 
 
i.] childhood and early COLLEGE LIFE. 5 
 
 These four boys formed a " quadruple alliance " of the 
 warmest friendship. West seemed the genius amongst 
 them ; he was a nervous and precocious lad, who made 
 verses in his sleep, cultivated not only a public Latin 
 muse, but also a private English one, and dazzled his com- 
 panions by the ease and fluency of his pen. His poetical 
 remains — to which we shall presently return, since they 
 are intimately connected with the development of Gray's 
 genius — are of sufficient merit to permit us to believe that 
 had he lived he might have achieved a reputation amongst 
 the minor poets of his age. Neither Shenstone nor Beat- 
 tie had written anything so considerable when they reach- 
 ed the age at which West died. His character was ex- 
 tremely winning, and in his correspondence with Gray, as 
 far as it has been preserved, we find him at first the more 
 serious and the more affectionate friend. But the symp- 
 toms of his illness, which seem to have closely resembled 
 those of Keats, destroyed the superficial sweetness of his 
 nature, and towards the end we find Gray the more sober 
 and the more manly of the two. 
 
 Besides the inner circle of Walpole, West, and Ashton, 
 there was an outer ring of Eton friends, whose names 
 have been preserved in connexion with Gray's. Amongst 
 these was George Montagu, grandnephew of the great 
 Earl of Halifax ; Stonehewer, a very firm and loyal friend, 
 with whom Gray's intimacy deepened to the end of his 
 life ; Clarke, afterwards a fashionable physician at Epsom ; 
 and Jacob Bryant, the antiquary, whose place in class was 
 next to Gray's through one term. With these he doubt- 
 less shared those delights of swimming, birds'-nesting, 
 hoops, and trap-ball which he has described, in ornate 
 eighteenth-century fashion, in the famous stanza of his 
 Eton Ode : 
 
6 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 " Say, Father Thames, for thou hast seen 
 
 Full many a sprightly race, 
 Disporting on thy margent green, 
 
 The paths of pleasure trace ; 
 Who foremost now delights to cleave, 
 With pliant arm, thy glassy wave ; 
 
 The captive linnet which enthral ? 
 What idle progeny succeed 
 To chase the rolling circle's speed, 
 
 Or urge the flying ball ?" 
 
 But we have every reason to believe that he was much 
 more amply occupied in helping "grateful Science" to 
 adore " her Henry's holy shade." Learning was still pre- 
 ferred to athletics at our public schools, and Gray was 
 naturally drawn by temperament to study. It has always 
 been understood that he versified at Eton, but the earliest 
 lines of his which have hitherto been known are as late as 
 1736, when he had been nearly two years at Cambridge. 
 I have, however, been fortunate enough to find among the 
 MSS. in Pembroke College a " play-exercise at Eton," in 
 the poet's handwriting, which has never been printed, and 
 which is valuable as showing us the early ripeness of his 
 scholarship. It is a theme, in seventy - three hexameter 
 verses, commencing with the line — 
 
 " Pendet Homo incertus gemini ad confinia mundi." 
 
 The normal mood of man is described as one of hesi- 
 tation between the things of Heaven and the things of 
 Earth ; he assumes that all nature is made for his enjoy- 
 ment, but soon experience steps in and proves to him the 
 contrary; he endeavours to fathom the laws of nature, 
 but their scheme evades him, and he learns that his effort 
 is a futile one. The proper study of mankind is man, 
 and yet how narrow a theme ! Man yearns forever after 
 
i.] CHILDHOOD AND EARLY COLLEGE LIFE. 1 
 
 superhuman power and accomplishment, only to discover 
 the narrow scope of his possibilities, and he has at last to 
 curb his ambition, and be contented with what God and 
 nature have ordained. The thoughts are beyond a boy, 
 though borrowed in the main from Horace and Pope; 
 while the verse is still more remarkable, being singularly 
 pure and sonorous, though studded, in boyish fashion, 
 with numerous tags from Virgil. What is really notice- 
 able about this "early effusion is the curious way in which 
 it prefigures its author's maturer moral and elegiac man- 
 ner ; we see the writer's bias and the mode in which he 
 will approach ethical questions, and we detect in this little 
 " play-exercise " a shadow of the stately didactic reverie 
 of the Odes. As this poem has never been described, I 
 may be permitted to quote a few of the verses : 
 
 " Plurimus (hie error, demensque libido lacessit) 
 In superos coelumque ruit, sedesque relinquit, 
 Quas natura dedit proprias, jussitque tueri. 
 Humani sortem generis pars altera luget, 
 Invidet arm en to, et campi sibi vindicat herbani. 
 quis me in pecoris felicia transferet arva, 
 In loca pastorum deserta, atque otia dia ? 
 Cur mihi non Lyncisne oculi, vel odora canum vis 
 Additur, aut gressus cursu glomerare potestas ? 
 Aspice ubi, teneres dum texit aranea casses, 
 Funditur in telam, et late per stamina vivit ! 
 Quid mihi non tactus eadem exquisita facultas 
 Taurorumve tori solidi, pennaeve volucrum." 
 
 In the face of such lines as these, and bearing in mind 
 Walpole's assertion that " Gray never was a boy," we may 
 form a tolerably exact idea of the shy and studious lad, 
 already a scholar and a moralist, moving somewhat grave- 
 ly and precociously through the classes of that venerable 
 B 
 
8 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 college which has since adopted him as her typical child, 
 and which now presents to each emerging pupil a hand- 
 some selection from the works of the Etonian par excel- 
 lence, Thomas Gray. 
 
 In 1734 the quadruple alliance broke up. Gray, and 
 probably Ashton, proceeded to Cambridge, where the for- 
 mer was for a short time a pensioner of Pembroke Hall, 
 but went over, on the 3d of July, as a fellow-commoner, to 
 his uncle Antrobus's college, Peterhouse. 1 Walpole went 
 up to London for the winter, and did not make his ap- 
 pearance at King's College, Cambridge, until March, 1735. 
 West, meanwhile, had been isolated from his friends by 
 being sent to Oxford, where he entered Christ Church 
 much against his will. For a year the young undergrad- 
 uates are absolutely lost to sight. If they wrote to one 
 another, their letters are missing, and the correspondence 
 of Walpole and of Gray with West begins in Novem- 
 ber, 1735. 
 
 But in the early part of that year a very striking inci- 
 dent occurred in the Gray family, an incident that was 
 perfectly unknown until, in 1807, a friend of Haslewood's 
 happened to discover, in a volume of MS. law-cases, a case 
 submitted by Mrs. Dorothy Gray to the eminent civilian, 
 John Audley, in February, 1735. In this extraordinary 
 document the poet's mother states that for nearly thirty 
 years, that is to say, for the whole of her married life, she 
 
 1 The Master of Peterhouse has kindly copied for me, from the 
 register of admissions at that college, this entry, hitherto inedited : 
 "Jul: 3 tio - 1734, Thomas Gray Middlesexiensis in schola publica 
 Etonensi institutus, annosque natus 18 (petente Tutore suo) Clusetur 
 admisus ad Mensam Pensionariorum sub Tutore et Fidejussore M r0 * 
 Birkett, sed ea lege ut brevi se sistat in collegia et examinatoribus 
 se probet." 
 
i.] CHILDHOOD AND EARLY COLLEGE LIFE. 9 
 
 has received no support from her husband, but has de- 
 pended entirely on the receipts of the shop kept by her- 
 self and her sister ; moreover " almost providing every- 
 thing for her son whilst at Eton school, and now he is 
 at Peter-House in Cambridge." 
 
 " Notwithstanding which, almost ever since he (her husband) hath 
 been married, he hath used her in the most inhuman manner, by 
 beating, kicking, punching, and with the most vile and abusive lan- 
 guage, that she hath been in the utmost fear and danger of her life, 
 and hath been obliged this last year to quit her bed, and lie with her 
 sister. This she was resolved, if possible, to bear ; not to leave her 
 shop of trade for the sake of her son, to be able to assist in the main- 
 tenance of him at the University, since his father won't." 
 
 Mrs. Gray goes on to state that her husband has an in- 
 sane jealousy of all the world, and even of her brother, 
 Thomas Antrobus, and that he constantly threatens "to 
 ruin himself to undo her and his only son," having now 
 gone so far as to give Mary Antrobus notice to quit the 
 shop in Cornhill at Midsummer next. If he carries out 
 this threat, Mrs. Gray says that she must go with her 
 sister, to help her "in the said trade, for her own and 
 her son's support." She asks legal counsel which way 
 will be best u for her to conduct herself in this unhappy 
 circumstance." Mr. Audley writes sympathetically from 
 Doctors Commons, but civilly and kindly tells her that 
 she can find no protection in the English law. 
 
 This strange and tantalising document, the genuineness 
 of which has never been disputed, is surrounded by diffi- 
 culties to a biographer. The known wealth and occa- 
 sional extravagances of Philip Gray make it hard to un- 
 derstand why he should be so rapacious of his wife's little 
 earnings, and at the same time so barbarous in his neglect 
 
10 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 of her and of his son. That there is not one word or hint 
 of family troubles in Gray's copious correspondence is 
 what we might expect from so proud and reticent a nat- 
 ure. But the gossipy Walpole must have known all this, 
 and Mason need not have been so excessively discreet, 
 when all concerned had long been dead. Perhaps Mrs. 
 Gray exaggerated a little, and perhaps also the vileness 
 of her husband's behaviour in 1735 made her forget that 
 in earlier years they had lived on gentler terms. At all 
 events, the money-scrivener is shown to have been miserly, 
 violent, and, as I have before conjectured, probably half- 
 insane. The interesting point in the whole story is Mrs. 
 Gray's self-sacrifice for her son, a devotion which he in 
 his turn repaid with passionate attachment, and remem- 
 bered with tender effusion to the day of his' death. He 
 inherited from his mother his power of endurance, his 
 quiet rectitude, his capacity for suffering in silence, and 
 the singular tenacity of his affections. 
 
 Gray, Ashton, and Horace Walpole were at Cambridge 
 together as undergraduates from the spring of 1735 until 
 the winter of 1738. They associated very much with one 
 another, and Walpole shone rather less, it would appear, 
 than at any other part of his life. The following extract 
 of a letter from Walpole to West, dated November 9, 1735, 
 is particularly valuable : 
 
 " Tydeus rose and set at Eton. He is only known here to be a 
 scholar of King's. Orosmades and Almanzor are just the same; 
 that is, I am almost the only person they are acquainted with, 
 and consequently the only person acquainted with their excellences. 
 Plato improves every day ; so does my friendship with him. These 
 three divide my whole time, though I believe you will guess there is 
 no quadruple alliance ; that is a happiness which I only enjoyed when 
 you was at Eton," 
 
i.] CHILDHOOD AND EARLY COLLEGE LIFE. 1} 
 
 The nickname which gives us least difficulty here is 
 that in which we are most interested. Orosmades was 
 West's name for Gray, because he was such a chilly 
 mortal, and worshipped the sun. West himself was known 
 as Favonius. Tydeus is very clearly Walpole himself, 
 and Almanzor is probably Ashton. I would hazard the 
 conjecture that Plato is Henry Coventry, a young man 
 then making some stir in the University with certain 
 semi-religious Dialogues. He was a friend of Ashton's, 
 and produced on Horace Walpole a very startling im- 
 pression, causing in that volatile creature for the first and 
 only time an access of fervent piety, during which Horace 
 actually went to read the Bible to the prisoners in the 
 Castle gaol. Very soon this wore off, and Coventry him- 
 self became a free-thinker, but Ashton remained serious, 
 and taking orders very early, dropped out of the circle of 
 friends. In all this the name of Gray is not mentioned, 
 but one is justified in believing that he did not join the 
 reading-parties at the Castle. 
 
 Early in 1736 the three Cambridge undergraduates ap- 
 peared in print simultaneously and for the first time in a 
 folio collection of Latin Hymeneals on the marriage of 
 Frederic, Prince of Wales. Of these effusions, Gray's 
 copy of hexameters is by far the best, and was so recog- 
 nized from the first. Mason has thought it necessary to 
 make a curious apology for this poem, and says that Gray 
 "ought to have been above prostituting his powers" in 
 " adulatory verses of this kind." But if he had glanced 
 through the lines again, of which he must have been 
 speaking from memory, Mason would have seen that they 
 contain no more fulsome compliments than were abso- 
 lutely needful on the occasion. The young poet is not 
 thinking at all about their royal highnesses, but a great 
 
12 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 deal about his own fine language, and is very innocent 
 of anything like adulation. The verses themselves do 
 not show much progress; there is a fine passage at the 
 end, but it is almost a cento from Ovid. One line, mel- 
 ancholy to relate, does not scan. In every way superior 
 to the Hymeneal is Luna Habitabilis, a poem in nearly 
 one hundred verses, written by desire of the College in 
 1737, and printed in the Musce Etonenses. It is impos- 
 sible to lay any stress on these official productions, mere 
 exercises on a given text. At Pembroke, both in the 
 library of the College, and in the Stonehewer MSS. at 
 the Master's lodge, I have examined a number of similar 
 pieces, in prose and verse, copied in a round, youthful 
 handwriting, and signed "Gray." Among them a copy 
 of elegiacs, on the 5th of November, struck me as particu- 
 larly clever, and it might be w r ell, as the body of Gray's 
 works is so small, and his Latin verse so admirable, to 
 include several of these in a complete edition of his writ- 
 ings. They do not, however, greatly concern us here. 
 
 As early as May, 1736, it is curious to find the dulness 
 of Cambridge already lying with a leaden weight on the 
 nerves and energies of Gray, a youth scarcely in his twen- 
 tieth year. In his letters to West he strikes exactly the 
 same note that he harped upon ten years later to Whar- 
 ton, twenty years later to Mason, thirty years later to 
 Norton Nichols, and in his last months, with more shrill 
 insistence than ever, to Bonstetten. The cloud sank early 
 upon his spirits. He writes to West : " When we meet 
 it will be my greatest of pleasures to know what you do, 
 what you read, and how you spend your time, and to tell 
 you what I do not read, and how I do not, &c, for almost 
 all the employment of my hours may be best explained by 
 negatives ; take my word and experience upon it, doing 
 
i.] CHILDHOOD AND EARLY COLLEGE LIFE. 13 
 
 nothing is a most amusing business ; and yet neither some- 
 thing nor nothing gives me any pleasure. When you have 
 seen one of my days, you have seen a whole year of my 
 life ; they go round and round like the blind horse in the 
 mill, only he has the satisfaction of fancying he makes a 
 progress and gets some ground ; my eyes are open enough 
 to see the same dull prospect, and to know that, having 
 made four-and-twenty steps more, I shall be just where I 
 was." This is the real Gray speaking to us for the first 
 time, and after a few more playful phrases he turns again, 
 and gives us another phase of his character. " You need 
 not doubt, therefore, of having a first row in the front box 
 of my little heart, and I believe you are not in danger of be- 
 ing crowded there ; it is asking you to an old play, indeed, 
 but you will be candid enough to excuse the whole piece 
 for the sake of a few tolerable linesJ' Many clever and 
 delicate boys think it effective to pose as victims to mel- 
 ancholy, and the former of these passages would possess 
 no importance if it were not for its relation to the poet's 
 later expressions. He never henceforward habitually rose 
 above this deadly dulness of the spirits. His melancholy 
 was passive and under control, not acute and rebellious, 
 like that of Cowper, but it was almost more enduring. It 
 is probable that with judicious medical treatment it might 
 have been removed, or so far relieved as to be harmless. 
 But it was not the habit of men in the first half of the 
 eighteenth century to take any rational care of their 
 health. Men who lived in the country, and did not hunt, 
 took no exercise at all.- The constitution of the genera- 
 tion was suffering from the mad frolics of the preceding 
 age, and almost everybody had a touch of gout or scurvy. 
 Nothing was more frequent than for. men, in apparently 
 robust health, to break down suddenly, at all points, in 
 
14 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 early middle life. People were not in the least surprised 
 when men like Garth and Fenton died of mere indolence, 
 because they had become prematurely corpulent and could 
 not be persuaded to get out of bed. Swift, Thomson, 
 and Gray are illustrious examples of the neglect of all 
 hygienic precaution among quiet middle-class people in 
 the early decades of the century. Gray took no exercise 
 whatever ; Cole reports that he said at the end of his life 
 that he had never thrown his leg across the back of a 
 horse, and this was really a very extraordinary confession 
 for a man to make in those days. But we shall have to 
 return to the subject of Gray's melancholy, and we need 
 not dwell upon it here, further than to note that it began 
 at least with his undergraduate days. He was considered 
 effeminate at college, but the only proof of this that is 
 given to us is one with which the most robust modern 
 reader must sympathise, namely, that he drank tea for 
 breakfast, whilst all the rest of the university, except 
 Horace Walpole, drank beer. 
 
 The letter from which we have just quoted goes on to 
 show that the idleness of his life existed only in his im- 
 agination. He was, in fact, at this time wandering at will 
 along the less-trodden paths of Latin literature, and rap- 
 idly laying the foundation of his unequalled acquaintance 
 with the classics. He is now reading Statius, he tells 
 West, and he encloses a translation of about one hundred 
 and ten lines from the sixth book of the Thebaid. This 
 is the first example of his English verse which has been 
 preserved. It is very interesting, as showing already the 
 happy instinct which led Gray to reject the mode of Pope 
 in favour of the more massive and sonorous verse system 
 of Dry den. He treats the heroic couplet with great skill, 
 but in close discipleship of the latter master in his Fables. 
 
i.] CHILDHOOD AND EARLY COLLEGE LITE. 15 
 
 To a trained ear, after much study of minor English verse 
 written between 1720 and 1740, these couplets have al- 
 most an archaic sound, so thoroughly are they out of 
 keeping with the glib, satiric poetry of the period. Pope 
 was a splendid artificer of verse, but there was so much of 
 pure intellect, and of personal temperament, in the con- 
 duct of his art, that he could not pass on his secret to his 
 pupils, and in the hands of his direct imitators the heroic 
 couplet lost every charm but that of mere sparkling prog- 
 ress. The verse of such people as Whitehead had be- 
 come a simple voluntary upon knitting-needles. Gray 
 saw the necessity of bringing back melody and volume to 
 the heroic line, and very soon the practice of the day dis- 
 gusted him, as we shall see, with the couplet altogether. 
 For the present he was learning the principles of his art 
 at the feet of Dryden. West was. delighted with the 
 translation, and compared Gray contending with Statius 
 to Apollo wrestling with Hyacinth. In a less hyperboli- 
 cal spirit, he pointed out, very justly, the excellent render- 
 ing of that peculiarly Statian phrase, Summos auro man- 
 sueverat ungues, by 
 
 " And calm'd the terrors of his claws in gold." 
 
 We find from Walpole that Gray spent his vacations in 
 August, 1736, at his uncle's house at Burnham, in Buck- 
 inghamshire ; and here he was close to the scene of so 
 many of his later experiences, the sylvan parish of Stoke- 
 Pogis. For the present, however, all we hear is that he 
 is too lazy to go over to Eton, which the enthusiastic 
 Walpole and West consider to be perfectly unpardonable. 
 A year later he is again with his uncle at Burnham ; and 
 it is on this occasion that he discovers the since-famous 
 beeches. He is writing to Horace Walpole, and he says : 
 2 
 
16 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 "My uncle is a great hunter in imagination; his dogs take up 
 every chair in the house, so I am forced to stand at the present writ- 
 ing; and though the gout forbids him galloping after them in the 
 field, yet he continues still to regale his ears and nose with their com- 
 fortable noise and stink. He holds me mighty cheap, I perceive, for 
 walking when I should ride, and reading when I should hunt. My 
 comfort amidst all this is, that I have at the distance of half a mile, 
 through a green lane, a forest (the vulgar call it a common), all my 
 own, at least, as good as so, for I spy no human thing in it but my- 
 self. It is a little chaos of mountains and precipices ; mountains, it 
 is true, that do not ascend much above the clouds, nor are the de- 
 clivities quite so amazing as Dover Cliff ; but just such hills as peo- 
 ple who love their necks as well as I do may venture to climb, and 
 crags that give the eye as much pleasure as if they were more dan- 
 gerous. Both vale and hill are covered with most venerable beeches, 
 and other very reverend vegetables, that, like most other ancient peo- 
 ple, are always dreaming out their old stories to the winds. At the 
 foot of one of these squats ME (il penseroso), and there I grow to 
 the trunk for a whole morning. The timorous hare and sportive 
 squirrel gambol around me like Adam in Paradise before he had an 
 Eve; but I think he did not use to read Virgil, as I commonly do." 
 
 This is the first expression, as far as I am aware, of the 
 modern feeling of the picturesque. We shall see that it 
 became more and more a characteristic impulse with 
 Gray as years w T ent by. In this letter, too, we see that ? 
 at the age of twenty-one he had already not a little 
 of that sprightly wit and variety of manner which make 
 him one of the most delightful letter- writers in any litera- I 
 ture. 
 
 At Burnham, in 1737, he made the acquaintance of a 
 very interesting waif of the preceding century. Thomas 
 Southerne, the once famous author of Oroonoko and The 
 Fatal Marriage, the last survivor of the age of Dryden, was 
 visiting a gentleman in the neighbourhood of Burnham, 
 and was so much pleased with young Gray that though he 
 
r.] CHILDHOOD AND EARLY COLLEGE LIFE. 17 
 
 was seventy-seven years of age he often came over to the 
 house of Mr. Antrobus to see him. Still oftener, without 
 doubt, the young poet went to see the veteran, whose suc- 
 cesses on the stage of the Restoration took him back fifty 
 years to a society very different from that in which he now 
 vegetated on the ample fortune which his tragedies still 
 brought him in. Unhappily, his memory was almost en- 
 tirely gone, though he lived nine years more, and died of 
 sheer old age on the borders of ninety ; so that Gray's 
 curiosity about Dryden, and the other poets his friends, 
 was more provoked than gratified. However, Gray found 
 him as agreeable an old man as could be, and liked " to 
 look at him and think of Isabella and Oroonoko," those 
 personages then still being typical of romantic disappoint- 
 ment and picturesque sensibility. About this time, more- 
 over, we may just note in passing, died Matthew Green, 
 whose posthumous poem of The Spleen was to exercise a 
 considerable influence over Gray, and to be one of the 
 few contemporary poems which he was able fervidly to 
 admire. 
 
 Lest, however, the boy should seem too serious and pre- 
 cocious, if we know him only by the scholarly letters to 
 West, let us print here, for the first time, a note to his 
 tutor, the Rev. George Birkett, Fellow of Peterhouse, a 
 note which throws an interesting light on his manners. 
 The postmark of this letter, which has lately been discov- 
 ered at Pembroke College, is October 8, the year, I think, 
 1736: 
 
 " S r «, — As I shall stay only a fortnight longer in town, I'll beg you 
 to give yourself the trouble of writing out my Bills, and sending 'em, 
 that I may put myself out of your Debt, as soon as I come down : 
 if Piazza should come to you, you'll be so good as to satisfie him : 
 I protest, I forget what I owe him, but he is honest enough to tell 
 
18 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 you right. My Father and Mother desire me to send their compli- 
 ments, and I beg you'd believe me 
 
 a S r -, your most obed*' humble Serv 4 - 
 
 " T. Gray." 
 
 The amusing point is that the tutor seems to have flown 
 into a rage at the pert tone of this epistle, and we have the 
 rough draft of two replies on the fly-sheet. The first ad- 
 dresses him as " pretty Mr. Gray," and is a moral box on 
 the ear; but this has been cancelled, as wrath gave way to 
 discretion, and the final answer is very friendly, and states 
 that the writer would do anything " for your father and 
 your uncle, Mr. Antrobus (Thos.)." Signor Piazza was 
 the Italian master to the University, and six months later 
 we find Gray, and apparently Horace Walpole also, learn- 
 ing Italian " like any dragon." The course of study habit- 
 ual at the University was entirely out of sympathy with 
 Gray's instinctive movements after knowledge. He com- 
 plains bitterly of having to endure lectures daily and hour- 
 ly, and of having to waste his time over mathematics, 
 where his teacher was the celebrated Professor Nicholas 
 Saunderson, whose masterly Elements of Algebra, after- 
 wards the text-books of the University, were still known 
 only by oral tradition. For such learning Gray had neither 
 taste nor patience. " It is very possible," he writes to West, 
 " that two and two make four, but I would not give four 
 farthings to demonstrate this ever so clearly ; and if these 
 be the profits of life, give me the amusements of it." His 
 account of the low condition of classic learning at Cam- 
 bridge we must take with a grain of salt. As an under- 
 graduate he would of course see nothing of the great lights 
 of the University, now sinking beneath the horizon ; such 
 a shy lad as he would not be asked to share the conversa- 
 tion of Bentley, or Snape, or the venerable Master of Jesus. 
 
l] childhood and EARLY COLLEGE LIFE. 19 
 
 What does seem clear, from his repeated denunciations of 
 " that pretty collection of desolate animals " called Cam* 
 bridge, is that classical taste was at a very low ebb among 
 the junior fellows and the elder undergraduates. The age 
 of the great Latinists had passed away ; the Greek revival, 
 which Gray did much to start, had not begun, and 1737 
 was certainly a dull year at the University. It seems that 
 there were no Greek text-books for the use of schools until 
 1741, and the method of pronouncing that language was 
 as depraved as possible. A few hackneyed extracts from 
 Homer and Hesiod were all that a youth was required to 
 have read in order to pass his examination. Plato and 
 Aristotle were almost unknown, and Gray himself seems 
 to have been the only person at Cambridge who attempted 
 seriously to write Greek verse. It is not difficult to un- 
 derstand that when, with the third term of bis second year, 
 his small opportunities of classical reading were taken from 
 him, and he saw himself descend into the Cimmerian dark- 
 ness of undiluted mathematics, the heart of the young poet 
 sank within him. In December, 1736, there was an attempt 
 at rebellion ; he declined to take degrees, and announced 
 his intention of quitting college, but as we hear no more 
 of this, and as he stayed two years longer at Cambridge, 
 we may believe that this was overruled. 
 
 Meanwhile the leaden rod seemed to rule the fate of the 
 quadruple alliance. West grew worse and worse, hope- 
 lessly entangled in consumptive symptoms. Walpole lost 
 his mother in August of 1737, and after this was a kind 
 of waif and stray until he finally left England in 1739. 
 Gray, whether in Cambridge or London, reverts more and 
 more constantly to his melancholy. " Low spirits are my 
 true and faithful companions ; they get up with me, go 
 to bed with me, make journeys and returns as I do ; nay, 
 
20 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 and pay visits, and will even affect to be jocose, and force 
 a feeble laugh with me ; but most commonly we sit to- 
 gether, and are the prettiest insipid company in the world. 
 However, when you come," he writes to West, " I believe 
 they must undergo the fate of all humble companions, and 
 be discarded* Would I could turn them to the same use 
 that you have done, and make an Apollo of them. If they 
 could write such verses with me, not hartshorn, nor spirit 
 of amber, nor all that furnishes the closet of the apothe- 
 cary's wisdom, should persuade me to part with them." 
 For West had been writing a touching eulogy ad amicos, 
 in the manner of Tibullus, inspired by real feeling and a 
 sad presentiment of the death that lay five years ahead. 
 In reading these lines of Gray's we hardly know whether 
 most to admire the marvellous lightness and charm of the 
 style, or to be concerned at such confession of want of 
 spirits in a lad of twenty-one. His letters, however, when 
 they could be wrung out of his apathy, were precious to 
 poor West at Oxford : "I find no physic comparable to 
 your letters : prescribe to me, dear Gray, as often and as 
 much as you think proper," and the amiable young ped- 
 ants proceed, as before, to the analysis of Poseidippos, 
 and Lucretius, and such like frivolous reading. One of 
 West's letters contains a piece of highly practical advice : 
 " Indulge, amabo te, plusquam soles, corporis exercita- 
 tionibus," but bodily exercise was just what Gray declined 
 to indulge in to the end of his life. He does not seem 
 to have been even a walker ; in-doors he was a bookworm, 
 and out-of-doors a saunterer and a dreamer ; nor was there 
 ever, it would seem, a "good friend Matthew" to urge the 
 too pensive student out into the light of common life. 
 
 Certain interesting poetical exercises mark the close of 
 Gray's undergraduate career. A Latin ode in Sapphics 
 
I.] CHILDHOOD AND EARLY COLLEGE LIFE. 21 
 
 and a fragment in Alcaics were sent in June, 1738, to 
 West, who had just left Oxford for the Inner Temple. 
 The second of these, which is so brief that it may surely 
 be quoted here — 
 
 " lacrymarum fons, tenero sacros 
 Ducentium ortus ex animo ; quater 
 Felix ! in imo qui scatentem 
 Pectore te, pia Nympha, sensit " — 
 
 has called forth high eulogy from scholars of every suc- 
 ceeding generation. It is in such tiny seed-pearl of song 
 as this that we find the very quintessence of Gray's pecul- 
 iar grace and delicacy. To July, 1737, belongs a version 
 into English heroics of a long passage from Propertius, 
 beginning — 
 
 "Now prostrate, Bacchus, at thy shrine I bend" — 
 
 which I have not met with in print; and another piece 
 from the same poet, beginning " Long as of youth," which 
 occurs in all the editions of Gray, bears on the original 
 MS. at Pembroke the date December, 1738. It may be re- 
 marked that in the printed copies the last two lines — 
 
 " You whose young bosoms feel a nobler flame, 
 Redeem what Crassus lost and vindicate his name " — 
 
 have accidentally dropped out. In September, 1738, Gray 
 left Cambridge, and took up his abode in his father's house 
 for six months, apparently with no definite plans regarding 
 his own future career ; but out of this sleepy condition of 
 mind he was suddenly waked by Horace Walpole's prop- 
 osition that they should start together on the grand tour. 
 The offer was a generous one. Walpole was to pay all 
 Gray's expenses, but Gray was to be absolutely Lndepen- 
 
22 GRAY. [chap. i. 
 
 dent : there was no talk of the poet's accompanying his 
 younger friend in any secondary capacity, and it is only 
 fair to Horace Walpole to state that he seems to have 
 acted in a thoroughly kind and gentlemanly spirit. What 
 was still more remarkable was that, without letting Gray 
 know, he made out his will before starting, and so arranged 
 that, had he died whilst abroad, Gray would have been his 
 sole legatee. The frivolities of Horace Walpole have been 
 dissected with the most cruel frankness ; it is surely only 
 just to point out that in this instance he acted a very 
 gracious and affectionate part. On the 29th of March. 
 1739, the two friends started from Dover. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE GRAND TOUR. 
 
 Gray was only oat of his native country once, but that 
 single visit to the Continent lasted for nearly three years, 
 and produced a very deep impression upon his character. 
 It is difficult to realize what he would have become with- 
 out this stimulus to the animal and external part of his 
 nature. He was in danger of settling down in a species 
 of moral inertia, of becoming dull and torpid, of spoiling 
 a great poet to make a little pedant. The happy frivoli- 
 ties of France and Italy, though they were powerless over 
 the deep springs of his being, stirred the surface of it, 
 and made him bright and human. It is to be noticed 
 that we hear nothing of his "true and faithful companion, 
 melancholy," whilst he is away in the South ; he was cheer- 
 fully occupied, taken out of himself, and serene in the 
 gaiety of others. The two friends enjoyed a very rough 
 passage from Dover to Calais, and on landing Gray antic- 
 ipated Dr. Johnson by being surprised that the inhabitants 
 of the country could speak French so well. He also dis- 
 covered that they were all " Papishes," and briskly adapted 
 himself to the custom of the land by attending high-mass 
 the next day, which happened to be Easter Monday. In 
 the afternoon the companions set out through a snow- 
 storm for Boulogne in a post-chaise, a conveyance — not 
 C 2* 
 
24 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 then imported into England — which filled the young men 
 with hilarious amazement. Walpole, sensibly suggesting 
 that there was no cause for hurry, refused to be driven 
 express to Paris; and so they loitered very agreeably 
 through Picardy, stopping at Montreuil, Abbeville, and 
 Amiens. From the latter city Gray wrote an amusing 
 account of his journey to his mother, containing a lively 
 description of French scenery. "The country we have 
 passed through hitherto has been flat, open, but agreeably 
 diversified with villages, fields well cultivated, and little 
 rivers. On every hillock is a windmill, a crucifix, or a 
 Virgin Mary dressed in flowers and a sarcenet robe ; one 
 sees not many people or carriages on the road. Now and 
 then indeed you meet a strolling friar, a countryman with 
 his great muff, or a woman riding astride on a little ass, 
 with short petticoats, and a great head-dress of blue wool." 
 On the 9th of April, rather late on a Saturday evening, 
 they rolled into Paris, and after a bewildering drive drew 
 up at last at the lodgings which had been prepared for 
 them, probably in or near the British Embassy, and found 
 themselves warmly welcomed by Walpole's cousins, the 
 Con ways, and by Lord Holdernesse. These young men 
 were already in the thick of the gay Parisian tumult, and 
 introduced Walpole and Gray also, as his friend, to the 
 best society. The very day after their arrival they dined 
 at Lord Holdernesse's to meet the Abbe Prevot-d'Exiles, 
 author of that masterpiece of passion, Manon £escaut,&n& 
 now in his forty-second year. It is very much to be de- 
 plored that we do not possess in any form Gray's impres- 
 sions of the illustrious Frenchmen with whom he came 
 into habitual contact during the next two months. He 
 merely mentions the famous comic actress, Mademoiselle 
 Jeanne Quinault " la Cadette," who was even then, though 
 
n.] THE GRAND TOUR. 25 
 
 in the flower of her years, coquettishly threatening to 
 leave the stage, and who did actually retire, amidst the re- 
 grets of a whole city, before Gray came back to England. 
 She reminded the young Englishman of Mrs. Clive, the 
 actress, but he says nothing of those famous Sunday sup- 
 pers at which she presided, and at which all that was witty 
 and brilliant in Paris was rehearsed or invented. These 
 meetings, afterwards developed into the sessions of the 
 Societe du Bout du Banc, were then only in their infancy ; 
 yet there, from his corner unobserved, the little English 
 poet must have keenly noted many celebrities of the hour, 
 whose laurels were destined to wither when his were only 
 beginning to sprout. There would, be found the " most 
 cruel of amateurs," the Comte de^Caylus; Voisenon, still 
 in the flush of his reputation ; Moncrif, the lover of cats, 
 with his strange dog-face ; and there or elsewhere w t o 
 know that Gray met and admired that prince of frivolous 
 ingenuities, the redoubtable Marivaux. But of all this his 
 letters tell us nothing — nothing even of the most curious 
 of his friendships, that with Crebillon fils, who, according 
 to Walpole, was their constant companion during their 
 stay in Paris. 
 
 All the critics of Gray have found it necessary to excuse 
 or explain away that remarkable statement of his, that " as 
 the paradisaical pleasures of the Mahometans consist in 
 playing upon the flute, etc., be mine to read eternal new 
 romances of Marivaux and Crebillon." Mason considered 
 this very whimsical, and later editors have hoped that it 
 meant nothing at all. But Gray was not a man to say 
 what he did not mean, even in jest. Such a reasonable 
 and unprejudiced mind as his may be credited with a 
 meaning, however paradoxical the statement it makes. It 
 is quite certain, from various remarks scattered through his 
 
26 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 correspondence, that the literature of the French Eegency, 
 the boudoir poems and novels of the alcove, gave him more 
 pleasure than any other form of contemporary literature. 
 He uses language, in speaking of Gresset, the author of 
 Vert- Vert, which contrasts curiously with his coldness to- 
 wards Sterne and Collins. But, above all, he delighted in 
 Crebillon. Hardly had he arrived in Paris, than he sent 
 West the Lettres de la Marquise M* * * au Comte de 
 ]% * * *^ which had been published in 1732, but which the 
 success of Tanzai et Neardane had pushed into a new 
 edition. The younger Crebillon at this time was in his 
 thirty-second year, discreet, confident, the friend of every 
 one, the best company in Paris ; half his time spent in 
 wandering over the cheerful city that he loved so much, 
 the other half given to literature in the company of that 
 strange colossus, his father, the tragic poet, the writing- 
 room of this odd couple being shared with a menagerie of 
 cats and dogs and queer feathered folk. Always a ser- 
 viceable creature, and perhaps even already possessed with 
 something of that Anglomania which led him at last into 
 a sort of morganatic marriage with British aristocracy, 
 Crebillon evidently did all he could to make Walpole and 
 Gray happy in Paris; no chaperon could be more fitting 
 than he to a young Englishman desirous of threading the 
 mazes of that rose-colored Parisian Arcadia which had 
 survived the days of the Regency, and had not yet ceased 
 to look on Louis XV. as the Celadon of its pastoral valleys. 
 It was a charming world of fanc}^ and caprice ; a world 
 of milky clouds floating in an infinite azure, and bearing 
 a mundane Venus to her throne on a Frenchified Cithaeron. 
 And what strange figures were bound to the golden car; 
 generals, and abbes, and elderly Academicians, laughing 
 philosophers and weeping tragedians, a motley crew united 
 
il] THE GRAND TOUR. 21 
 
 in the universal culte du Tendre, gliding down a stream of 
 elegance and cheerfulness and tolerance that was by no 
 means wholly ignoble. 
 
 All this, but especially the elegance and the tolerance, 
 made a deep impression upon the spirit of Gray. He 
 came from a Puritan country ; and was himself, like so 
 many of our greatest men, essentially a Puritan at heart; 
 but he was too acute not to observe where English prac- 
 tice was unsatisfactory. Above all, he seems to have de- 
 tected the English deficiency in style and grace ; a defi- 
 ciency then, in 1739, far more marked tfian it had been 
 half a century earlier. He could not but contrast the 
 young English squire, that engaging and florid creature, 
 with the bright, sarcastic, sympathetic companion of his 
 walks in Paris, not without reflecting that the healthier 
 English lad was almost sure to develop into a terrible 
 type of fox-hunting stupidity in middle life. He, for one, 
 then, and to the end of his days, would cast in his lot 
 with what was refined and ingenious, and would temper 
 the robustness of his race with a little Gallic brightness. 
 Moreover, his taste for the novels of Marivaux and Cre- 
 billon, with their ingenious analysis of emotion, their 
 odour of musk and ambergris, their affectation of artless 
 innocence, and their quick parry of wit, was riot without 
 excuse in a man framed as Gray was for the more brill- 
 iant exercises of literature, and forced to feed, in his own 
 country, if he must read romances at all, on the coarse 
 rubbish of Mrs. Behn or Mrs. Manley. Curiously enough, 
 at that very moment Samuel Kichardson was preparing 
 for the press 'that excellent narrative of Pamela which 
 was destined to found a great modern school of fiction in 
 England, a school which was soon to sweep into contempt 
 and oblivion all the " crebillonao;e-amarivaude " which 
 
28 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 Gray delighted in, a contempt so general that one stray 
 reader here or there can scarcely venture to confess that 
 he still finds the Hasard au coin du Feu very pleasant 
 and innocent reading. We shall have to refer once again 
 to this subject, when we reach the humorous poems in 
 which Gray introduced into English literature this rococo 
 manner. 
 
 Gray became quite a little fop in Paris. He complains 
 that the French tailor has covered him with silk and 
 fringe, and has widened his figure with buckram a yard 
 on. either side.. His waistcoat and breeches are so tight 
 that he can scarcely breathe ; he ties a vast solitaire 
 around his neck, wears ruffles at his fingers' ends, and 
 sticks his two arms into a muff. Thus made beautifully 
 genteel, he and Walpole rolled in their coach to the 
 Comedy and the Opera, visited Versailles and the sights 
 of Paris, attended installations and spectacles, and saw the 
 best of all that was to be seen. Gray was absolutely de- 
 lighted with his new existence. " I could entertain myself 
 this month," he w 7 rote to West, " merely with the com- 
 mon streets and the people in them ;" and Walpole, who 
 was good-nature itself during all this early part of the 
 tour, insisted on sending Gray out in his coach to see all 
 the collections of fine art, and other such sights as were 
 not congenial to himself, since Horace Walpole had not 
 yet learned to be a connoisseur. Gray occupied himself 
 no less with music, and his letters to West contain some 
 amusing criticisms of French opera. The performers, he 
 says, " come in and sing sentiment in lamentable strains, 
 neither air nor recitation ; only, to one's great joy, they 
 were every now and then interrupted by a dance, or, to 
 one's great sorrow, by a chorus that borders the stage 
 from one end to the other, and screams, past all power of 
 
il] THE GRAND TOUR. 29 
 
 simile to represent Imagine, I say, all this transact- 
 ed by cracked voices, trilling divisions upon two notes- 
 and-a-half, accompanied by an orchestra of humstrums, 
 and a whole house more attentive than if Farinelli sung, 
 and you will almost have formed a just idea of the thing." 
 And again, later, he writes: " Des miaulemens et des heur- 
 lemens effroyables, meles avec un tintamarre du diable — 
 voila la musique Franchise en abrege." At first the 
 weather was extremely bad, but in May they began to 
 enjoy the genial climate; they took long excursions to 
 Versailles and Chantilly, happy "to walk by moonlight, 
 and hear the ladies and the nightingales sing." 
 
 On the 1st of June, in company with Henry Conway, 
 Walpole and Gray left Paris and settled at Rheims for 
 three exquisite summer months. I fancy that these were 
 amongst the happiest weeks in Gray's life, the most sunny 
 and unconcerned. As the three friends came with par- 
 ticular introductions from Lord Conway, who knew 
 Rheims well, they were welcomed with great cordiality 
 into all the best society of the town. Gray found the 
 provincial assemblies very stately and graceful, but with- 
 out the easy familiarity of Parisian manners. The mode 
 of entertainment was uniform, beginning with cards, in 
 the midst of which every one rose to eat what was called 
 the goutev, a service of fruits, cream, sweetmeats, crawfish, 
 and cheese. People then sat down again to cards, until 
 they had played forty deals, when they broke up into 
 little parties for a promenade. That this formality was 
 sometimes set aside we may gather from a very little 
 vignette that Gray slips into a letter to his mother : . 
 
 " The other evening we happened to be got together in a company 
 of eighteen people, men and women of the best fashion here, at a 
 garden in the town, to walk, when one of the ladies bethought herself 
 
30 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 of asking, 'Why should we not sup here?' Immediately the cloth 
 was laid by the side of a fountain under the trees, and a very elegant 
 supper served up ; after which another said, 4 Come, let us sing,' and 
 directly began herself. From singing we insensibly fell to dancing, 
 and singing in a round ; when somebody mentioned the violins, and 
 immediately a company of them was ordered, minuets were begun in 
 the open air, and then came country dances, which held till four 
 o'clock next morning ; at which hour the gayest lady then proposed 
 that such as were weary should get into their coaches, and the rest 
 of them should dance before them with the music in the van; and in 
 this manner we paraded through all the principal streets of the city, 
 and waked everybody in it. Mr. Walpole had a mind to make a cus- 
 tom of the thing, and would have given a ball in the same manner 
 next week ; but the women did not come into it ; so I believe it will 
 drop, and they will return to their dull cards and usual formalities." 
 
 Walpole intended to spend the winter of 1739 in the 
 South of France, and was therefore not unwilling to loiter 
 by the way. They thought to stay a fortnight at Rheims, 
 but they received a vague intimation that Lord Conway 
 and that prince of idle companions, the ever -sparkling 
 George Selwyn, were coming, and they hung on for three 
 months in expectation of them. At last, on the 7th of 
 September, they left Rheims, and entered Dijon three days 
 later. The capital of Burgundy, with its rich architecture 
 and treasuries of art, made Gray regret the frivolous 
 months they had spent at Rheims, whilst Walpole, who 
 was eager to set off, would only allow him three or four 
 days for exploration. On the 18th of September they 
 were at Lyons, and this town became their head-quarters 
 for the next six weeks. The junction of the rivers has 
 provoked a multitude of conceits, but none perhaps so 
 pretty as this of Gray's: "The Rhone and Saone are two 
 people, who, though of tempers extremely unlike, think fit 
 to join hands here, and make a little party to travel to the 
 
il] THE GRAND TOUR. 31 
 
 Mediterranean in company ; the lady comes gliding along 
 through the fruitful plains of Burgundy, incredibiii lenitate, 
 ita ut oculis in utram partem jluit judicari non possit; the 
 gentleman runs all rough and roaring down from the moun- 
 tains of Switzerland to meet her; and with all her soft 
 airs she likes him never the worse; she goes through the 
 middle of the city in state, and he passes incog, without 
 the walls, but waits for her a little below." 
 
 A fortnight later the friends set out on an excursion 
 across the mountains, that they might accompany Henry 
 Conway, who was now leaving tbem, as far as Geneva. 
 They took the longest road through Savoy, that they 
 might visit the Grande Chartreuse, which impressed Gray 
 very forcibly by the solitary grandeur of its situation. It 
 was, however, not on this occasion, but two years later, 
 that he wrote his famous Alcaic Ode in the album of the 
 monastery. The friends slept as the guests of the fathers, 
 and proceeded next day to Chambery, which greatly dis- 
 appointed them ; and sleeping one night at Aix-les-Bains, 
 which they found deserted, and another at Annecy, they 
 arrived at last at Geneva. They stayed there a week, 
 partly to see Conway settled, and partly because they 
 found it very bright and hospitable, returning at last to 
 Lyons through the spurs of the Jura, and across the plains 
 of La Bresse. They found awaiting them a letter from 
 Sir Robert Walpole, in which he desired his son to go on 
 to Italy, so they gladly resigned their project of spending 
 the winter in France, and pushed on at once to the foot of 
 the Alps; armed against the cold with " muffs, hoods, and 
 masks of beaver, fur boots, and bearskins." On the 6th 
 of November they descended ink) Italy, after a very severe 
 and painful journey of a week's duration, through two 
 days of which they were hardly less frightened than Addi- 
 
32 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 son had been during his Alpine adventures a generation 
 earlier. It was on the sixth day of this journey that the 
 incident occurred which was so graphically described both 
 by Gray and Walpole, and which is often referred to. 
 Walpole had a fat little black spaniel, called Tory, which 
 he was very fond of ; and as this pampered creature was 
 trotting beside the ascending chaise, enjoying his little 
 constitutional, a young wolf sprung out of the covert and 
 snatched the shrieking favourite away from amongst the 
 carriages and servants before any one had the presence of 
 mind to draw a pistol. Walpole screamed and wept, but 
 Tory had disappeared forever. Mason regrets that Gray 
 did not write a mock-heroic poem on this incident, as a 
 companion to the ode on Walpole's cat, and it must be 
 admitted that the theme was an excellent one. 
 
 The name of Addison has just been mentioned, and 
 Walpole's remarks about the horrors of Alpine travelling 
 do indeed savour of the old-fashioned fear of what was 
 sublime in nature. But Gray's sentiments on the occa- 
 sion were very different, and his letter to his mother di- 
 lates on the beauty of the crags and precipices in a way 
 that shows him to have been the first of the romantic 
 lovers of nature, since even Rousseau had then hardly de- 
 veloped his later and more famous attitude, and Vernet 
 had only just begun to contemplate the sea with ecstasy. 
 On the 7th of November, 1739, the travellers had reached 
 Turin, but amongst the clean streets and formal avenues 
 of that prosaic city the thoughts of Gray were still con- 
 tinually in the wonders he had left behind him. In a 
 delightful letter to West, written nine days later, he is 
 still dreaming of the Alps: "I own I have not, as yet, 
 anywhere met with those grand and simple works of art 
 that are to amaze one, and whose sight one is to be the 
 
ii.] THE GRAND TOUR. 33 
 
 better for ; but those of nature have astonished me be- 
 yond expression. In our little journey up to the Grande 
 Chartreuse I do not remember to have gone ten paces 
 without an exclamation that there was no restraining ; 
 not a precipice, not a torrent , not a cliff, but is pregnant 
 with religion and poetry. There, are certain scenes that 
 would awe an atheist into belief, without the help of other 
 argument. One need not have a very fantastic imagina- 
 tion to see spirits there at noon-day. You have Death 
 perpetually before your eyes, only so far removed as to 
 compose the mind without frighting it. I am well per- 
 suaded St. Bruno was a man of no common genius, to 
 choose such a situation for his retirement ; and perhaps 
 I should have been a disciple of his, had I been born in 
 his time." It is hard to cease quoting, all this letter be- 
 ing so new, and beautiful, and suggestive ; but perhaps 
 enough has been given to show in what terms and on 
 what occasion the picturesqueness of Switzerland was first 
 discovered. At the same time the innovator concedes that 
 Mont Cenis does, perhaps, abuse its privilege of being 
 frightful. Amongst the precipices Gray read Livy, Nives 
 ccelo prope immistce, but when the chaise drove down into 
 the sunlit plains of Italy, he laid that severe historian 
 aside, and plunged into the pages of Silius Italicus. 
 
 On the 18th of November they passed on to Genoa, 
 which Gray particularly describes as " a vast semicircular 
 basin, full of fine blue sea, and vessels of all sorts and 
 sizes, some sailing out, some coming in, and others at 
 anchor ; and all round it palaces, and churches peeping 
 over one another's heads, gardens, and marble terraces full 
 of orange and cypress trees, fountains and trellis- works 
 covered with vines, which altogether compose the grandest 
 of theatres." The music in Italv was a feast to him, and 
 
34 GRAY. [chap, 
 
 from this time we may date that careful study of Italiau 
 music which occupied a great part of the ensuing year. 
 Ten days at Genoa left them deeply in love with it, and 
 loth to depart ; but they wished to push on, and crossing 
 the mountains, they found themselves within three days 
 at Piacenza, and so at' Parma; out of which city they 
 were locked on a cold winter's night, and were only able 
 to gain admittance by an ingenious stratagem which 
 amused them very much, h -.1 which they have neglected 
 to record. They greatly enjoyed the Correggios in this 
 place, for Horace Walpole was now learning to be a con- 
 noisseur, and then they proceeded to Bologna, where they 
 spent twelve days in seeing the sights. They found it 
 very irksome to be without introductions, especially after 
 the hospitality which they had enjoyed in France, and as 
 it was winter they could only see, in Gray's words, the 
 skeleton of Italy. He was at least able to observe " very 
 public and scandalous doings between the vine and the 
 elm-trees, and how the olive-trees are shocked thereupon." 
 It is also particularly pleasant to learn that he himself was 
 "grown as fat as a hog;" he was, in fact, perfectly happy 
 and well, perhaps for the only time in his life. 
 
 They crossed the v Apennines on the 15th of the month, 
 and descended through a winding-sheet of mist into the 
 streets of Florence, where Mr. Horace Mann's servant met 
 them at the gates, and conducted them to his house, 
 which, with a certain interval, was to be their home for 
 fifteen months. Horace Mann was a dull letter -writer, 
 but he seems to have been a ver} T engaging and unweary- 
 ing companion. Gray, a man not easily pleased, pro- 
 nounced him " the best and most obliging person in the 
 world." He was then resident, and afterwards envoy ex- 
 traordinary, at the Court of Tuscany, and retains a place 
 
ii.] THE GRAND TOUR. 35 
 
 in history as the correspondent of Horace Walpole through 
 nearly half a century of undivided friendship. Here 
 again the travel-stained youths had the pleasures of society 
 offered to them, and Gray could encase himself again in 
 silk and buckram, and wear ruffles at the tips of his fin- 
 gers. Moreover, his mind, the most actively acquisitive 
 then stirring in Europe, could engage once more in its 
 enchanting exercises, and store up miscellaneous informa- 
 tion with unflagging zeal in a thousand nooks of brain 
 and note-book. Music, painting, and statuary occupied 
 him chiefly, and his unpublished catalogues, not less strik- 
 ingly than his copious printed notes, show the care and 
 assiduity of his research. His Criticisms on Architecture 
 and Painting in Italy is not an amusing treatise, but it 
 is without many of the glaring faults of the aesthetic dis- 
 sertations of the age. The remarks about antique sculpt- 
 ure are often very just and penetrative — as fine sometimes 
 as those exquisite notes by Shelley, which first saw the 
 light in 1 880. Some of his views about modern masters, 
 too, show the native propriety of his taste, and his en- 
 tire indifference to contemporary judgment. For Cara- 
 vaggio, for instance, then at the height of his vogue, he 
 has no patience ; although, in common with all critics of 
 the eighteenth century, and all human beings till about a 
 generation ago, he finds Guido inexpressibly brilliant and 
 harmonious. It is, however, chiefly interesting to us to 
 notice that in these copious notes on painting Gray dis- 
 tinguishes himself from other writers of his time by his 
 simple and purely artistic mode of considering what is 
 presented to him, every other critic, as far as I remember, 
 down to Lessing and Winckelmann, being chiefly occu- 
 pied with rhetorical definitions of the action upon the 
 human mind of art in the abstract. Gray scarcely men- 
 
36 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 tions a single work, however, precedent to the age of 
 Raphael ; and it will not do to insist too strongly upon 
 his independence of the prejudices of his time. 
 
 In music he seems to have been still better occupied. 
 He was astonished, during his stay in Florence, at the 
 beauty and originality of the new school of Italian com- 
 posers, at that time but little known in England. He 
 seems to have been particularly struck with Leonardo da 
 Vinci, who was then just dead, and with Bononcini and 
 the German Hasse, who were still alive. At Naples a few 
 months later he found Leonardo Leo, and was attracted by 
 his genius. But the full ardour of his admiration was re- 
 served for the works of G. B. Pergolesi, whose elevation 
 above the other musicians of his age Gray was the first to 
 observe and assert. Pergolesi, who had died four years 
 before, at the age of twenty-six, was entirely unknown 
 outside Tuscany ; and to the English poet belongs the 
 praise, it is said, of being the first to bring a collection of 
 his pieces to London, and to obtain for this great master a 
 hearing in British concert-rooms. Gray was one of the few 
 poets who have possessed not merely an ear for music, but 
 considerable executive skill. Mason tells us that he enjoyed, 
 probably at this very time, instruction on the harpsichord 
 from the younger Scarlatti, but his main gift was for vocal 
 music. He had a small but very clear and pure voice, and 
 was much admired for his singing in his youth, but during 
 later years was so shy that Walpole "never could but once 
 prevail on him to give a proof of it ; and then it was with 
 so much pain to himself, that it gave Walpole no manner 
 of pleasure." In after-years he had a harpsichord in his 
 rooms at college, and continued to cultivate this sentimen- 
 tal sort of company in his long periods of solitude. Gray 
 formed a valuable collection of MS. music whilst he was in 
 
il] THE GRAND TOUR. 37 
 
 Italy; it consisted of nine large volumes, bound in vellum, 
 and was enriched by a variety of notes in Gray's hand- 
 writing-. 
 
 It was at Florence, on the 12th of March, 1740, that 
 Gray took it into his head to commence a correspondence 
 with his old school-fellow, Dr. Thomas Wharton (" my 
 dear, dear Wharton, which is a ' dear ' more than I give 
 anybody else "), who afterwards became Fellow of Pem- 
 broke Hall, and one of Gray's staunchest and most sym- 
 pathetic friends. To the biographer of the poet, more- 
 over, the name of Wharton must be ever dear, since it was 
 to him that the least reserved and most personal of all 
 Gray's early letters were indited. This Dr. Wharton was 
 a quiet, good man, with no particular genius or taste, but 
 dowered with that delightful tact and sympathetic attrac- 
 tion which are the lode-star of irritable and weary genius. 
 He was by a few months Gray's junior, and survived him 
 three-and-twenty years, indolently intending, it is said, to 
 the last, to collect his memories of his great friend, but dy- 
 ing in his eightieth year so suddenly as to be incapable of 
 any preparation. In this, his first letter to Wharton, Gray 
 mentions the death of Pope Clement XII. , which had oc- 
 curred about a month before, and states his intention to 
 be at Rome in time to see the coronation of his successor, 
 which, however, as it happened, was delayed six months, 
 So little, however, were Walpole and Gray prepared for 
 this, that they set out in the middle of March, 1740, in 
 great fear lest they should be too late, and entered Rome 
 on the 31st of that month. They found the conclave of 
 cardinals sitting and like to sit ; and they prepared them- 
 selves to enjoy Rome in the mean while. The magnificence 
 of the ancient city infinitely surpassed Gray's expectation, 
 but he found modern Rome and its inhabitants very con^ 
 
38 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 temptible and disgusting. There was no society amongst 
 the Roman nobles, who pushed parsimony to an extreme, 
 and showed not the least hospitality. "In short, child" 
 (Walpole says to West, on the 16th of April), " after sun- 
 set one passes one's time here very ill ; and if I did not 
 wish for you in the mornings, it would be no compliment 
 to tell you that I do in the evening." From Tivoli, a 
 month later, Gray writes West a very contemptuous de- 
 scription of the artificial cascades and cliffs of the Duke 
 of Modena's palace-gardens there ; but a few days after- 
 wards, at Alba and Frascati, he was inspired in a gentler 
 mood with the Alcaic Ode to Favonius, beginning " Mater 
 rosarum." Of the same date is a letter laughing at West, 
 who had made some extremely classical allusions in his 
 correspondence, and who is indulged with local colour to 
 his heart's content : 
 
 "I am to-day just returned from Alba, a good deal fatigued, for 
 you know (from Statius) that the Appian is somewhat tiresome. We 
 dined at Pompey's ; he indeed was gone for a few days to his Tus- 
 culan, but, by the care of his villicus, we made an admirable meal. 
 We had the dugs of a pregnant sow, a peacock, a dish of thrushes, 
 a noble scarus just fresh from the Tyrrhene, and some conchylia of 
 the Lake, with garum sauce. For my part, I never ate better at Lu- 
 cullus's table. We drank half a dozen cyathi apiece of ancient Alban 
 to Pholoe's health ; and, after bathing, and playing an hour at ball, 
 we mounted our essedum again, and proceeded up the mount to the 
 temple. The priests there entertained us with an account of a won- 
 derful shower of birds' eggs, that had fallen two days before, which 
 had no sooner touched the ground but they were converted into gud- 
 geons ; as also that the night past a dreadful voice had been heard 
 out of the Adytum, which spoke Greek during a full half-hour, but 
 nobody understood it. But, quitting my Roman ities, to your great 
 joy and mine, let me tell you in plain English that we come from 
 Albano." 
 
ii.] THE GEAND TOUR. 39 
 
 Some entertainments Gray had at Rome. He mentions 
 one ball at which he performed the part of the mouse at 
 the party. The chief virtuoso of the hour, La Diaman- 
 tina, played on the violin, and Giovannino and Pasquelim 
 sang. All the secular grand monde of Eome was there, 
 and there Gray, from the corner where he sat regaling 
 himself with iced fruits, watched the object of his hearty 
 disapproval, the English Pretender, " displaying his rueful 
 length of person." Gray's hatred of the Stuarts was one 
 of his few pronounced political sentiments, and whilst at 
 Rome he could not resist making a contemptuous jest of 
 them in a letter which he believed that James would open. 
 He says, indeed, that all letters sent or received by Eng- 
 lish people in Rome were at that time read by the Pre- 
 tender. In June, as the cardinals could not make up their 
 minds, the young men decided to wait no longer, and pro- 
 ceeded southwards to Terracina, Capua, and Naples. On 
 the 17th of June they visited the remains of Herculaneum, 
 then only just exposed and identified, and before the end 
 of the month they went back to Rome. There, still find- 
 ing that no Pope was elected, and weary of the dreariness 
 and formality of that great city, Walpole determined to 
 return to Florence. They had now been absent from 
 home and habitually thrown upon one another for enter- 
 tainment during nearly fifteen months, and their friend- 
 ship had hitherto shown no abatement. But they had 
 arrived at that point of familiarity when a very little dis- 
 agreement is sufficient to produce a quarrel. No such 
 serious falling-out happened for nearly a year more, but 
 we find Gray, whose note-books were inexhaustible, a lit- 
 tle peevish at being forced to leave the treasures of Rome 
 so soon. However, Florence was very enjoyable. They 
 took up their abode once more in the house of Horace 
 
 r> 3 
 
40 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 Mann, where they looked down into the Arno from their 
 bedroom windows, and could resort at a moment's notice 
 to the marble bridge, to hear music, eat iced fruits, and 
 sup by moonlight. It is a place, Gray says, "excellent 
 to employ #11 one's animal sensations in, but utterly con- 
 trary to one's rational powers. I have struck a medal 
 upon myself ; the device is thus 0, and the motto Nihi- 
 lissimo, which I take in the most concise manner to con- 
 tain a full account of my person, sentiments, occupations, 
 and late glorious successes. We get up at twelve o'clock, 
 breakfast till three, dine till four, sleep till six, drink cool- 
 ing liquors till eight, go to the bridge till ten, sup till two, 
 and so sleep till twelve again." 
 
 In the midst of all this laziness, however, the business 
 of literature recurred to his thoughts. He wrote some 
 short things in Latin, then a fragment of sixty hexameter 
 verses on the Gaurus, and then set about a very ambitious 
 didactic epic, De Principiis Cogitandi. It is a curious 
 commentary on the small bulk of Gray's poetical produc- 
 tions to point out that this Latin poem, only two frag- 
 ments of which were ever written, is considerably the long- 
 est of his writings in verse. As we now possess it, it was 
 chiefly written in Florence during the summer of 1740; 
 some passages were added at Stoke in 1742 ; but by that 
 'time Gray had determined, like other learned Cambridge 
 poets, Spenser and Milton, to bend to the vulgar ear, and 
 leave his Latin behind him. The De Principiis Cogitandi 
 is now entirely neglected, and at no time attracted much 
 curiosity ; yet it is a notable production in its way. It 
 was an attempt to crystallize the philosophy of Locke, for 
 which Gray entertained the customary reverence of his 
 age, in Lucretian hexameters. How the Soul begins to 
 Know ; by what primary Notions Mnemosyne opens her 
 
ii.] THE GRAND TOUR. 41 
 
 succession of thoughts, and her slender chain of ideas ; 
 how Reason contrives to augment her slow empire in the 
 natural breast of man ; and how anger, sorrow, fear, and 
 anxious care are implanted there — of these things he ap- 
 plies himself to sing; and do not thou disdain the singer, 
 thou glory, thou unquestioned second luminary of the 
 English race, thou unnamed spirit of John Locke. With 
 the exception of one episode, in which he compares the 
 human mind in reverie to a Hamadryad who wanders in 
 the woodland, and is startled to find herself mirrored in 
 a pool, the plan of this poem left no scope for fancy or 
 fine imagery ; the theme is treated with a certain rhetori- 
 cal dignity, but the poet has been so much occupied with 
 the matter in hand, that his ideas have suffered some con- 
 gestion. Nevertheless he is himself, and not Virgil or 
 Ovid or Lucretius, and this alone is no small praise for a 
 writer of modern Latin verse. 
 
 If the De Principiis Cogitandi had been published when 
 it was written, it is probable that it would have won some 
 measure of instant celebrity for its author, but the undi- 
 luted conclusions of Locke were no longer interesting in a 
 second-hand form in 1774, when they had already been 
 subjected to the expansions of Hume and the criticisms of 
 Leibnitz. Nor was Gray at all on the wave of philosoph- 
 ical thought"; he seems no less indifferent to Berkeley's 
 Principles of Human Knowledge than he is unaware of 
 Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, which had been 
 printed in 1739, soon after Gray left England. This 
 Latin epic was a distinct false start, but he did not to- 
 tally abandon the hope of completing it until 1746.. 
 
 In August, 1 740, the friends w T ent over to Bologna for 
 a week, and on their return had the mortification to learn 
 that a Pope, Benedict XII., had been elected whilst they 
 
42 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 were within four days' journey of Rome. They began to 
 think of home ; there were talks of taking a felucca over 
 from Leghorn to Marseilles, or of crossing through Ger- 
 many by Venice and the Tyrol. Florence they began to 
 find "one of the dullest cities in Italy," and there is no 
 doubt that they began to be on very strained and uncom- 
 fortable terms with one another. They had the grace, 
 however, absolutely to conceal it from other people, and 
 to the very last each of them wrote to West without the 
 least hint of want of confidence in the other. On the 
 24th of April, 1741, Gray and Walpole set off from Flor- 
 ence, and spent a few days in Bologna to hear La Viscon- 
 tina sing ; from Bologna they proceeded to Reggio, and 
 there occurred the famous quarrel which has perhaps been 
 more often discussed than any other fact in Gray's life. 
 It has been said that he discovered Walpole opening a 
 letter addressed to Gray, or perhaps written by him, to see 
 if anything unpleasant about himself were said in it, and 
 that he broke away from him with scathing anger and 
 scorn, casting Walpole off forever, and at once continuing 
 his journey to Venice alone. But this is really little more 
 than conjecture. Both the friends were very careful to 
 keep their counsel, and within three years the breach was 
 healed. One thing is certain, that Walpole was the of- 
 fender. When Gray was dead and Mason was writing his 
 life, Walpole insisted that this fact should be stated, al- 
 though he very reasonably declined to go into particulars 
 for the public. He wrote a little paragraph for Mason, 
 taking the blame upon himself, but added for the biog- 
 rapher's private information a longer and more intelligible 
 account, saying that " while one is living it is not pleasant 
 to read one's private quarrels discussed in magazines and 
 newspapers,',' but desiring that Mason would preserve this 
 
il] THE GRAND TOUR. . 43 
 
 particular account, that it might be given to posterity. 
 But Walpole lived on until 1797, and by a singular coin- 
 cidence Mason, who was so much younger, only survived 
 him a few days. Accordingly there was a delay m giving 
 this passage to the world ; and though it is known to 
 students of Horace Wal pole's Correspondence, it has never 
 taken the authoritative place it deserves in Gray's life. 
 It is all we possess in the way of direct evidence, and it 
 does great credit no less to Walpole's candour than to 
 his experience of the human heart. He wrote to Mason 
 (March 2,1773): 
 
 " I am conscious that in the beginning of the differences between 
 Gray and me the fault was mine. I was too young, too fond of my 
 own diversions, nay, I do not doubt, too much intoxicated by indul- 
 gence, vanity, and the insolence of my situation as Prime-minister's 
 son, not to have been inattentive and insensible to the feelings of one 
 I thought below me ; of one, I blush to say it, that I knew was obliged 
 to me ; of one whom presumption and folly, perhaps, made me deem 
 not my superior then in parts, though I have since felt my infinite in- 
 feriority to him. I treated him insolently; he loved me, and I did 
 not think he did. I reproached him with the difference between us, 
 when he acted from convictions of knowing he was my superior. I 
 often disregarded his wishes of seeing places, which I would not quit 
 other amusements to visit, though I offered to send him to them with- 
 out me. Forgive me, if I say that his temper was not conciliating; 
 at the same time that I will confess to you that he acted a more 
 friendly part, had I had the sense to take advantage of it — he freely 
 told me of my faults. I declared I did not desire to hear them, nor 
 would correct them. You will not wonder that, with the dignity of 
 his spirit and the obstinate carelessness of mine, the breach must 
 have grown wider till we became incompatible." 
 
 This is the last word on the subject of the quarrel, and af- 
 ter a statement so generous, frank, and lucid it only remains 
 to reudfind the reader that these were lads of iwenty-t'.ree 
 
44 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 and twenty-four respectively, that they had been thrown 
 far too exclusively and too long on one another for enter- 
 tainment, and that probably Walpole is too hard upon him- 
 self in desiring to defend Gray. There is not the slightest 
 trace in his letters or in Gray's of any rudeness on Wal- 
 pole' s part. The main point is that the quarrel was made up 
 in 1744, and that after some coldness on Gray's side they 
 became as intimate as ever for the remainder of their lives. - 
 
 Walpole stayed at Eeggio, and Gray's heart would have 
 stirred with remorse had he known that his old friend was 
 even then sickening for a quinsy, of which he might have 
 died, if the excellent Joseph Spence, Oxford Professor of 
 Poetry, and the friend of Pope, had not happened to be 
 passing through Reggio with Lord Lincoln, and had not 
 given up his whole time to nursing him. Meanwhile the 
 unconscious Gray, sore with pride, passed on to Venice, 
 where he spent two months in the company of a Mr. 
 Whitehead and a Mr. Chute. In July he hired a courier, 
 passed leisurely through the north of Italy, visiting Padua 
 and Verona, reached Turin on the 15th of August, and be- 
 gan to cross the Alps next day. He stayed once more at 
 the Grande Chartreuse, and inscribed in the Album of the 
 Fathers his famous Alcaic Ode, beginning " Oh Tu, severi 
 Religio loci," which is the best known and practically the 
 last of his Latin poems. In this little piece of twenty 
 lines we first recognize that nicety of expression, that deli- 
 cate lapidary style, that touch of subdued romantic senti- 
 ment, which distinguish the English poetry of Gray ; whilst 
 it is perhaps not fantastic to detect in its closing lines the 
 first dawn of those ideas which he afterwards expanded 
 into the Elegy in a Country Church-yard. The original 
 MS. in the album became an object of great interest to 
 visitors to the hospice after Gray's death, and was highly 
 
it] THE GRAND TOUR. 45 
 
 prized by the fathers. It exists, however, no longer; it 
 was destroyed by a rabble from Grenoble during the 
 French Revolution. Gray reached Lyons on the 25th of 
 August, and returned to London on the 1st of September, 
 1741, after an absence from England of exactly two years 
 and five months. Walpole, being cured of his complaint, 
 arrived in England ten days later. To a good-natured let- 
 ter from Henry Conway, suggesting a renewal of intimacy 
 between the friends, Gray returned an answer of the cold- 
 est civility, and Horace Walpole now disappears from our 
 narrative for three years. 
 

 CHAPTER III. 
 
 ST0KE-P0GIS. — DEATH OF WEST. FIRST ENGLISH POEMS. 
 
 On his return from Italy Gray found his father lying very 
 ill, exhausted by successive attacks of gout, and unable to 
 rally from them. Two months later, on the 6th of Novem- 
 ber, 1741, he died in a paroxysm of the disease. His last 
 act had been to squander his fortune, which seems to have 
 remained until that time almost unimpaired, on building a 
 country-house at Wanstead. Not only had he not written 
 to tell his son of this adventure, but he had actually con- 
 trived to conceal it from his wife. Mason is not correct 
 in saying that it became necessary to sell this house im- 
 mediately after Philip Gray's death, or that it fetched 
 2000/. less than it had cost; it remained in the posses- 
 sion of Mrs. Gray. With the ruins of a fortune Mrs. 
 Gray and her sister, Mary Antrobus, seem to have kept 
 house for a year in Cornhill, till, on the death of their 
 brother-in-law, Mr. Jonathan Rogers, on the 21st of Oc- 
 tober, 1742, they joined their widowed sister Anna in her 
 house at Stoke-Pogis, in Buckinghamshire. During these 
 months they wound up their private business in Corn- 
 hill, and disposed of their shop on tolerably advantageous 
 terms; and apparently Gray first imagined that the fam- 
 ily property would be enough to provide amply for him 
 
chap, in.] STOKE-POGIS. 47 
 
 also. Accordingly he began the study of the law, that 
 being the profession for which he had been originally 
 intended. For six months or more he seems to have 
 stayed in London, applying himself rather languidly to 
 common law, and giving his real thoughts and sympa- 
 thies to those who demanded them most, his mother and 
 his unfortunate friend, Richard West. The latter, indeed, 
 he found in a miserable condition. In June, 1740, that 
 young man, having lived at the Temple till he was sick 
 of it, left chambers, finding that neither the prestige of his 
 grandfather nor the reputation of his uncle, Sir Thomas 
 Burnet, advanced him at all in their profession. He was 
 without heart in his work, his talents were not drawn out 
 in the legal direction, and his affectionate and somewhat 
 feminine nature suffered from loneliness and want of con- 
 genial society. He had hoped that Walpole would be 
 able to find him a post in the diplomatic service or in the 
 army ; but this was not possible. Gray strongly disap- 
 proved of the step West took in leaving the Temple, and 
 wrote him from Florence a letter full of kindly and cord- 
 ial good-sense ; but when he arrived in London he found 
 West in a far more broken condition of mind and body 
 than he had anticipated. In extreme agitation West con- 
 fided to his friend a terrible secret which he had discov- 
 ered, and which Gray preserved in silence until the close 
 of his life, when he told it to Norton Nichols. It is a 
 painful story, which need not be repeated here, but which 
 involved the reputation of West's mother with the name 
 of his late father's secretary, a Mr. Williams, whom she 
 finally married when her son was dead. West had not 
 the power to rally from this shock, and the comfort of 
 Gray's society only slightly delayed the end. In March, 
 1742, he was obliged to leave town, and went to stay with 
 3* 
 
48 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 a friend at Popes, Hear Hatfield, Herts, where he lingered 
 three months, and died. 
 
 The winter which Gray and West spent together in 
 London was remarkable in the career of the former as the 
 beginning of his most prolific year of poetical composi- 
 tion — a vocal year to be followed by six of obstinate si- 
 lence. The first original production in English verse was 
 a fragment of the tragedy of Agrippina, of which one 
 complete scene and a few odd lines have been preserved 
 in his works. In this attempt at the drama he was in- 
 spired by Racine, and neither Addison, nor Aaron Hill, 
 nor James Thomson, had contrived to be more cold or 
 academic a playwright. The subject, which had been 
 treated in tragedy more than a century earlier by May, 
 was well adapted for stately stage-effect, and the scheme 
 of Gray's play, so far as we know it, was not without 
 interest. But he was totally unfitted to write for the 
 boards, and even the beauty of versification in Agrippina 
 cannot conceal from us for a moment its ineptitude. All 
 that exists of the play is little else than a soliloquy, in 
 which the Empress defies the rage of Nero, and shows 
 that she possesses 
 
 " A heart that glows with the pure Julian fire," 
 
 by daring her son to the contest : 
 
 "Around thee call 
 The gilded swarm that wantons in the sunshine 
 Of thy full favour ; Seneca be there 
 In gorgeous phrase of laboured eloquence 
 To dress thy plea, and Burrhus strengthen it 
 With his plain soldier's oath and honest seeming. 
 Against thee— liberty and Agrippina ! 
 The world the prize ! and fair befall the victors !" 
 
in.] STOKE-POGI& 4£ 
 
 As a study in blank verse Agrippina shows the result 
 of long apprenticeship to the ancients, and marches with a 
 sharp and dignified step that reminds the reader more of 
 Landor than of any other dramatist. In all other essen- 
 tials, however, the tragedy must be considered, like the 
 didactic epic, a false start ; but Gray was now very soon 
 to learn his real vocation. 
 
 The opening scene of the tragedy was sent down into 
 Hertfordshire to amuse West, who seemed at first to have 
 recovered his spirits, and wko sat " purring by the fireside, 
 in his arm-chair, with no small satisfaction." He was 
 able to busy himself with literature, delighting in the new 
 revision of the Dunciad, and reading Tacitus for the first 
 time. His cool reception of the latter roused Gray to 
 defend his favourite historian with great vigour. " Pray 
 do not imagine," he says, " that Tacitus, of all authors in 
 the world, can be tedious. ... Yet what I admire in him 
 above all is his detestation of tyranny, and the high spirit 
 of liberty that every now and then breaks out, as it were, 
 whether he would or no." Poor West, on the 4th of 
 April, racked by an "importunissima tussis," declines to 
 do battle against Tacitus, but attacks Agrippina with a 
 frankness and a critical sagacity which slew that ill-starred 
 tragedy on the spot. It is evident that Gray had no idea 
 of West's serious condition, for he rallies him on being 
 the first who ever made a muse of a cough, and is confi- 
 dent that " those wicked remains of your illness will soon 
 give way to warm weather and gentle exercise." It is in 
 the same letter that Gray speaks with some coldness of 
 Joseph Andrews, and reverts with the warmth on which 
 we have already commented to the much more congenial 
 romances of Marivaux and Crebillon. We may here con- 
 fess that Gray certainly misses, in common with most 
 
50 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 men of his time, the one great charm of the literary char- 
 acter at its best, namely, enthusiasm for excellence in con- 
 temporaries. It is a sign of a dry age when the principal 
 authors of a country look askance on one another. Some 
 silly critics in our own days have discovered with indig- 
 nant horror the existence of "mutual admiration socie- 
 ties." A little more acquaintance with the history of lit- 
 erature might have shown them how strong the sentiment 
 of comradeship has been in every age of real intellectual 
 vitality. It is much to be deplored that the chilly air 
 of the eighteenth century prevented the " mutual admira- 
 tion " of such men as Gray and Fielding. 
 
 This is perhaps an appropriate point at which to pause 
 and consider the condition of English poetry at the mo- 
 ment at which we have now arrived. When Gray began 
 seriously to write, in 1742, the considerable poets then 
 alive in England might have been counted on the fingers 
 of two hands. Pope and Swift were nearing the close of 
 their careers of glory and suffering, the former still vocal 
 to the last, and now quite unrivalled by any predecessor in 
 personal prestige. As a matter of fact, however, he was 
 not destined to publish anything more of any consequence. 
 Three other names, Goldsmith, Churchill, and Cowper, were 
 those of children not to appear in literature for many years 
 to come. Gray's actual competitors, therefore, were only 
 four in number. Of these the eldest, Young, was just be- 
 ginning to publish, at the age of fifty-eight, the only work 
 by which he is now much remembered, or which can still 
 be read with pleasure. The Night Thoughts was destined 
 to make his the most prominent poetical figure for the 
 next ten years. Thomson, on the other hand, a younger 
 and far more vital spirit, had practically retreated already 
 upon his laurels, and was presently to die, without again 
 
in.] STOKE-POGIS. x 51 
 
 addressing the public, except in the luckless tragedy of 
 Sophonisba, bequeathing, however, to posterity the treasure 
 of his Castle of Indolence. Samuel Johnson had published 
 London, a nine days' wonder, and had subsided into tem- 
 porary oblivion. Collins, just twenty-one years of age, 
 had brought out a pamphlet of Persian Eclogues without 
 attracting the smallest notice from anybody. Amongst 
 the lesser stars Allan Ramsay and Ambrose Philips were 
 retired old men, now a long while silent, who remembered 
 the days of Addison ; Armstrong had flashed into unenvi- 
 able distinction with a poem more clever than decorous; 
 Dyer, one of the lazy men who grow fat too soon, was 
 buried in his own Fleece; Shenstone and Akenside, much 
 younger men, were beginning to be talked about in the 
 circle of their friends, but had as yet done little. The 
 stage, therefore, upon which Gray proceeded very gingerly 
 to step, was not a crowded one, and before he actually 
 ventured to appear in print it was stripped of its most 
 notable adornments. Yet this apparent advantage was in 
 reality a great disadvantage. As Mr. Matthew Arnold ad- 
 mirably says, " born in the same year with Milton, Gray 
 would have been another man ; born in the same year with 
 Burns, he would have been another man." As it was, his 
 genius pined away for want of movement in the atmos- 
 phere ; the wells of poetry were stagnant, and there w r as 
 no angel to strike the waters. 
 
 The amiable dispute as to the merits of Agrippina led 
 the friends on to a wider theme, the peculiar qualities of 
 the style of Shakspeare. How low the standard of crit- 
 icism had fallen in that generation may be estimated when 
 we consider that Theobald, himself the editor and anno- 
 tator of Shakspeare, in palming off his forgery of -The 
 Double Falsehood, which contains such writing as this — 
 
52 GRAY. [chap. J 
 
 "Fond Echo, forego the light strain, 
 And heedf ully hear a lost maid ; 
 Go tell the false ear of the swain 
 
 How deeply his vows have betrayed " — 
 
 as a genuine work by the author of Hamlet, had ventured 
 to appeal to the style as giving the best evidence of the 
 truth of his pretensions. Gray had a more delicate sense 
 of literary flavour than this, and his remarks about the 
 vigour and pictorial richness of Elizabethan drama, since 
 which "our language has greatly degenerated," are highly 
 interesting even to a modern reader. Through April and 
 May he kept up a brisk correspondence, chiefly on books, 
 with West at Popes, and on the 5th of the latter month 
 he received from his friend an Ode to May, beginning — 
 
 " Dear Gray, that always in my heart 
 Possessest still the better part" — 
 
 which is decidedly the most finished of West's produc- 
 tions. Some of the stanzas of this ode possess much 
 suavity and grace : 
 
 "Awake, in all thy glories drest, 
 Recall the zephyrs from the west ; 
 Restore the sun, revive the skies ; 
 At mine and Nature's call arise! 
 Great Nature's self upbraids thy stay, 
 And misses her accustomed May." 
 
 This is almost in the later style of Gray himself, and 
 the poem received from him commendation as being "light 
 and genteel," a phrase that sounds curiously old-fashioned 
 nowadays. Gray meanwhile is busy translating Propertius, 
 and shows no sign of application to legal studies. On the 
 contrary, he has spent the month of April in studying the 
 Peloponnesian War, the greater part of Pliny and Martial, 
 
 
ni.] WEST'S DEATH. 53 
 
 Anacreon, Petrarcb, and Aulus Gellius, a range of reading 
 which must have entirely excluded Coke upon Lyttelton. 
 West's last letter is dated May 11, 1742, and is very cheer- 
 fully written, but closes with words that afterwards took a 
 solemn meaning: "Vale, et vive paulisper cum vivis." On 
 the 27th of the same month Gray wrote a very long letter 
 to West, in which he shows no consciousness whatever of 
 his friend's desperate condition. This epistle contains an 
 interesting reference to his own health : 
 
 " Mine, you are to know, is a white melancholy, or rather leuco- 
 choly, for the most part; which, though it seldom laughs or dances, 
 nor ever amounts to what one calls joy or pleasure, yet is a good, 
 easy sort of a state, and ga ne laisse que de shammer. The only fault 
 is its vapidity, which is apt now and then to give a sort of ennui, 
 which makes one form certain little wishes that signify nothing. But 
 there is another sort, black indeed, which I have now and then felt, 
 that has somewhat in it like Tertullian's rule of faith, Credo quia 
 impossibile est; for it believes, nay, is sure of everything that is un- 
 likely, so it be but frightful ; and on the other hand excludes and 
 shuts its eyes to the most possible hopes, and everything that is 
 pleasurable. From this the Lord deliver us ! for none but He and 
 sunshiny weather can do it." 
 
 Grimly enough, whilst he was thus analyzing his feelings, 
 his friend lay at the point of death. Five days after this 
 letter was written West breathed his last, on the 1st of 
 June, 1742, In the twenty-sixth year of his age, and was 
 buried in the chancel of Hatfield church. 
 
 Probably on the same day that West died Gray went 
 down into Buckinghamshire, to visit his uncle and aunt 
 Rogers at Stoke-Pogis, a village which his name has im- 
 mortalized, and of which it may now be convenient to 
 say a few words. The manor of Stoke Pogis or Poges 
 is first mentioned in a deed of 1291, and passed through 
 the hands of a variety of eminent personages down to the 
 
54 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 great Earl of Huntingdon, in the reign of Henry VIII. 
 The village, if such it can be called, is sparsely scattered 
 over a wide extent of country. The church, a very pict- 
 uresque structure of the fourteenth century, with a wood- 
 en spire, is believed to have been built by Sir John Molines 
 about 1340. It stands on a little level space about four 
 miles north of the Thames at Eton. From the neigh- 
 bourhood of the church no vestige of hamlet or village 
 is visible, and the aspect of the place is slightly artificial, 
 like a rustic church in a park on the stage. The traveller 
 almost expects to see the grateful peasantry of an opera, 
 cheerfully habited, make their appearance, dancing on the 
 greensward. As he faces the church from the south the ' 
 white building, extravagantly Palladian, which lies across 
 the meadows on his left hand, is Stoke Park, begun under 
 the direction of Alexander Nasmyth, the landscape-painter, 
 in 1789, and finished by James Wyatt, R.A., for the Hon. 
 Thomas Penn, who bought the manor from the represen- 
 tatives of Gray's friend, Lady Cobham. At the back of 
 the visitor stands a heavy and hideous mausoleum, bear- 
 ing a eulogistic inscription to Gray, and this also is due I 
 to the taste of Wyatt, and was erected in 1799. If we I 
 still remain on the south side of the church -yard, the { 
 chimneys seen through the thick, umbrageous foliage on 
 our right hand, and behind the church, are those of the 
 ancient Manor House, celebrated by Gray in the Long 
 Story, and built by the Earl of Huntingdon in 1555. 
 The road from Farnham Royal passes close to it, but there 
 is little to be seen. Although in Gray's time it seems to 
 have been in perfect preservation as an exquisite specimen 
 of Tudor architecture, with its high gables, projecting 
 windows, and stacks of clustered chimney -shafts, it did 
 not suit the corrupt Georgian taste of the Penns, and was J 
 
in.] WEST'S DEATH. 55 
 
 pulled down in 1789. Wyatt refused to have anything 
 to say to it, and remarked that u the style of the edifice 
 was deficient in those excellences which might have plead- 
 ed for restoration." Of the historical building in which 
 Sir Christopher Hatton lived and Sir Edward Coke died 
 nothing is left but the fantastic chimneys, and a rough 
 shell which is used as a stable. This latter was for some 
 time fitted up as a studio for Sir Edwin Landseer, and he 
 was working here in 1852, when he suddenly became de- 
 ranged. This old ruin, so full of memories, is only one 
 of a number of ancient and curious buildings within the 
 boundaries of the parish of Stoke -Pogis. When Gray 
 came to Stoke, in 1742, the Manor House was inhabited 
 by the Ranger of Windsor Forest, Viscount Cobham, who 
 died in 1749. It was his widow w 7 ho, as we shall present- 
 ly see, became the intimate friend of Gray and inspired 
 his remarkable poem of the Long Story. 
 
 The house of Mrs. Rogers, to which Gray and his moth- 
 er now proceeded, was situated at West End, in the north- 
 ern part of the parish. It was reached from the church 
 by a path across the meadows, along-side the hospital, a 
 fine brick building of the sixteenth century, and so by the 
 lane leading out into Stoke Common. Just at the end of 
 this lane, on the left-hand side, looking southwards, with 
 the common at its back, stood West End House, a simple 
 farmstead of two stories, with a rustic porch before the 
 front door, and this was Gray's home for many years. 
 It is now thoroughly altered and enlarged, and no longer 
 contains any mark of its original simplicity. The charm 
 of the house to the poet must have been that Burnham 
 Beeches, Stoke Common, and Brockhurst Woods were all 
 at hand, and within reach of the most indolent of pedes- 
 trians. 
 E 
 
56 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 Gray had been resident but very few days at Stoke- 
 Pogis before he wrote the poem with which his poetical 
 works usually open, his Ode to Spring. Amongst the MS. 
 at Pembroke there occurs a copy of this poem, in Gray's 
 handwriting, entitled Noon- Tide : an Ode; and in the 
 margin of it there is found this interesting note : " The 
 beginning of June, 1742, sent to Fav: not knowing he 
 was then dead." Favonius was the familiar name of 
 West, and this shows that Gray received no intimation 
 of his friend's approaching end, and no summons to his 
 bedside. The loss of West was one of the most profound 
 that his reserved nature ever suffered ; when that name 
 was mentioned to him, nearly thirty years afterwards, he 
 became visibly agitated, and to the end of his life he 
 seemed to feel in the death of West "the affliction of a 
 recent loss." We are therefore not surprised to find the 
 Ode to Spring, which belongs to a previous condition of 
 things, lighter in tone, colder in sentiment, and more triv- 
 ial in conception than his other serious productions. We 
 are annoyed that, in the very outset, he should borrow 
 from Milton his " rosy-bosomed Hours," and from Pope 
 his " purple year." Again, there is a perplexing change 
 of tone from the beginning, where he was perhaps inspired 
 by that exquisite strain of florid fancy, the Pervigilium 
 Veneris, to the stoic moralizings of the later stanzas : 
 
 " How vain the ardour of the crowd, 
 How low, how little are the proud, 
 How indigent the great!" 
 
 It may be noted, by-the-way, that for many years the 
 last two adjectives, now so happily placed, were awkward- 
 ly transposed. The best stanza, without doubt, is the 
 penultimate : 
 
in.] WEST'S DEATH. 61 
 
 " To Contemplation's sober eye 
 
 Such is the race of man : 
 And they that creep and they that fly 
 
 Shall end where they began. 
 Alike the busy and the gay 
 But flutter through life's little day, 
 
 In Fortune's varying colours drest : 
 Brush' d by the hand of rough Mischance 
 Or chill'd by age, their airy dance 
 
 They leave, in dust to rest." 
 
 The final stanza, with its "glittering female," and its 
 " painted plumage," is puerile in its attempted excess of 
 simplicity, and errs, though in more fantastic language, 
 exactly as such crude studies of Wordsworth's as Andreiv 
 Jones or The Two Thieves erred half a century later. 
 Nothing was gained by the poet's describing himself "a 
 solitary fly " without a hive to go to. The mistake was 
 one which Gray never repeated, but it is curious to find 
 two of the most sublime poets in our language, both spe- 
 cially eminent for loftiness of idea, beginning by eschewing 
 all reasonable dignity of expression. 
 
 But, although the Ode to Spring no longer forms a 
 favourite part of Gray's poetical works, it possessed con- 
 siderable significance in 1742, and particularly on account 
 of its form. It was the first note of protest against the 
 hard versification which had reigned in England for more 
 than sixty years. The Augustan age seems to have suf- 
 fered from a dulness of ear, which did not permit it to 
 detect a rhyme unless it rang at the close of the very next 
 pause. Hence, in the rare cases where a lyric movement 
 was employed, the ordinary octosyllabic couplet took the 
 place of those versatile measures in which the Elizabethan 
 and Jacobite poets had delighted. Swift, Lady Winchil- 
 sea, Parnell, Philips, and Green, the five poets of the be- 
 
58 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 ginning of the eighteenth century who rebelled against 
 heroic verse, got no farther in metrical innovation than 
 the shorter and more ambling couplet. Dyer, in his 
 greatly overrated piece called Grongar Hill, followed these 
 his predecessors. But Gray, from the very first, showed a 
 disposition to return to more national forms, and to work 
 out his stanzas on a more harmonic principle. He seems 
 to have disliked the facility of the couplet, and the vague 
 length to which it might be repeated. His view of a 
 poem was, that it should have a vertebrate form, which 
 should respond, if not absolutely to its subject, at least to 
 its mood. In short, he was a genuine lyrist, and our 
 literature had possessed none since Milton and the last 
 Cavalier song-writers. Yet his stanzas are built up from 
 very simple materials. Here, in the Ode to Spring, we 
 begin with a quatrain of the common ballad measures ; 
 an octosyllabic couplet is added, and this would close it 
 with a rustic effect, were the music not prolonged by the 
 addition of three lines more, whilst the stanza closes grave- 
 ly with a short line of six syllables. 
 
 The news of the death of West deepened Gray's vein 
 of poetry, but did not stop its flow. He poured forth 
 his grief and affection in some impassioned hexameters, 
 full of earnest feeling, which he afterwards tried, ineptly 
 enough, to tack on to the icy periods of his De Principiis 
 Cogitandi. In no other of his writings does Gray employ 
 quite the same personal and emotional accents, in none 
 does he speak out so plainly from the heart, and with so 
 little attention to his singing robes : 
 
 " Vidi egomet duro graviter concussa dolore 
 Pectora, in alterius non unquam lenta dolorem ; 
 Et languere oculos vidi, et pallescere amantem 
 Vultum, quo nunquam Pietas nisi rara, Fidesque, 
 
in.] WEST'S DEATH. 59 
 
 Altus amor Veri, et purum spirabat Honestum. 
 Visa tamen tardi demum inclementia morbi 
 Cessere est, reducemque iterum roseo ore Salutem 
 Speravi, atque una tecum, dilecte Favoni !" 
 
 This fragment, the most attractive of his Latin poems, 
 trips on a tag from Prcpertius, and suddenly ceases, nor is 
 there extant any later effusion of Gray's in the same lan- 
 guage. He celebrated the death of Favonius in another 
 piece, which is far more familiar to general readers. The 
 MS. of this sonnet, now at Cambridge, is marked "at 
 Stoke: Aug. 1742;" it was not published till Mason 
 included it in his Memoirs: 
 
 " In vain to me the smiling mornings shine, 
 
 And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire ; 
 The birds in vain their amorous descant join, 
 
 Or cheerful fields resume their green attire : 
 These ears, alas ! for other notes repine, 
 
 A different object do these eyes require ; 
 My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine, 
 
 And in my breast th' imperfect joys expire. 
 Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer, 
 
 And new-born pleasure brings to happier men ; 
 The fields to all their wonted tribute bear ; 
 
 To warm their little loves the birds complain ; 
 I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear, 
 
 And weep the more because I weep in vain." 
 
 This little composition has suffered a sort of notoriety 
 from the fact that Wordsworth, in 1800, selected it as an 
 example of the errors of an ornate style, doing so because, 
 as he frankly admitted, " Gray stands at the head of those 
 who by their reasonings have attempted to widen the 
 space of separation betwixt prose and metrical composi- 
 tion, and was more than any other man curiously elaborate 
 in the structure of his own poetic diction." Wordsworth 
 
60 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 declares that out of the fourteen lines of his poem only 
 five are of any value, namely, the sixth, seventh, eighth, 
 thirteenth, and fourteenth, the language of which " differs 
 in no respect from that of prose." But this does not 
 appear to be particularly ingenuous. If we allow the sun 
 to be called Phoebus, and if we pardon the "green attire," 
 there is not a single expression in the sonnet which is 
 fantastic or pompous. It is simplicity itself in comparison 
 with most of Milton's sonnets, and it seems as though 
 Wordsworth might have found an instance of fatuous 
 grandiloquence much fitter to his hand in Young, or better 
 still in Armstrong, master of those who go about to call 
 a hat a " swart sombrero." Gray's graceful sonnet was 
 plainly the result of his late study of Petrarch, and we 
 may remind ourselves, in this age of flourishing sonneteers, 
 that it is almost the only specimen of its class that had 
 been written in English for a hundred years, certainly the 
 only one that is still read with pleasure. One other fact 
 may be noted, that in this little poem Gray first begins to 
 practise the quatrain of alternate heroics, which later on 
 became, as we shall see, the basis of all his harmonic ef- 
 fects, and which he learned to fashion with more skill 
 than any other poet before or since. 
 
 In the same month of August was written the Ode on a 
 Distant Prospect of Eton College, or, as in Gray's own MS., 
 which I have examined, of Eton College, Windsor, and the 
 adjacent country. East and west from the church of 
 Stoke -Pogis, towards Stoke Green in the one direction, 
 and towards Farnham Royal in the other, there rises a 
 gentle acclivity, from which the ground gradually slopes 
 southward to the Thames, and which lies opposite those 
 "distant spires" and "antique towers" which Gray has 
 sung in melodious numbers. The woodland parish of 
 
in.] WEST'S DEATH. 61 
 
 Stoke is full of little rights-of-way, meadow-paths without 
 hedges that skirt the breast of the ridge I speak of, and 
 reveal against the southern sky the embattled outline of 
 Windsor. The Eton Ode is redolent of Stoke-Pogis, and 
 to have sauntered where Gray himself must have muttered 
 his verses as they took shape gives the reader a certain 
 sense of confidence in the poet's sincerity. Gray had of 
 late been much exercised about Eton ; to see a place so 
 full of reminiscences, and yet be too distant to have news 
 of it, this was provoking to his fancy. In his last letter 
 to West he starts the reflection that he developed a few 
 months later in the Ode. It puzzled him to think that 
 Lord Sandwich and Lord Halifax, whom he could remem- 
 ber as " dirty boys playing at cricket," were now states- 
 men, whilst, " as for me, I am never a bit the older, nor the 
 bigger, nor the wiser than I was then, no, not for having 
 been beyond the sea." Lord Sandwich, of course, as all 
 readers of lampoons remember, remained Gray's pet aver- 
 sion to the end of his life, the type to him of the man 
 who, without manners, or- parts, or character, could force 
 his way into power by the sheer insolence of wealth. The 
 Eton Ode was inspired by the regret that the illusions of 
 boyhood, the innocence that comes not of virtue but ^f in- 
 experience, the sweetness born not of a good heart but of 
 a good digestion, the elation which childish spirits give, 
 and which owes nothing to anger or dissipation, that these 
 simple qualities cannot be preserved through life. Gray 
 was, or thought he was, "never a bit the older" than he 
 was at Eton, and it seemed to him that the world would 
 be better if Lord Sandwich could have been kept forever 
 in the same infantile simplicity. This description of the 
 joyous innocence of boyhood — a theme requiring, indeed, 
 the optimism of a Pangloss — has never been surpassed as 
 
62 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 an ex parte statement on the roseate and ideal side of the 
 question. That the view of ethics is quite elementary, and 
 would have done honour to the experience and science of 
 one of Gray's good old aunts, detracts in no sense from 
 the positive beauty of the poem as a strain of reflection ; 
 and it has enjoyed a popularity with successive generations 
 which puts it almost outside the pale of verbal criticism. 
 When a short ode of one hundred lines has enriched our 
 language with at least three phrases which have become 
 part and parcel of our daily speech, it may be taken for 
 granted that it is very admirably worded. Indeed, the 
 Eton Ode is one of those poems which have suffered from 
 a continued excess of popularity, and its famous felicities, 
 " to snatch a fearful joy," " regardless of their doom, the 
 little victims play," " where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to 
 be wise," have suffered the extreme degradation as well as 
 the loftiest honour which attends on passages of national 
 verse, since they have been so universally extolled that they 
 have finally become commonplace witticisms to the mill- 
 ion. It is well to take the stanza in which such a phrase 
 occurs and read it anew, with a determination to forget that 
 one of its lines has been almost effaced in vulgar traffic : 
 
 " While some on earnest business bent 
 
 Their murmuring labours ply 
 'Gainst graver hours that bring constraint 
 
 To sweeten liberty, 
 Some bold adventurers disdain 
 The limits of their little reign, 
 
 And unknown regions dare descry; 
 Still as they run they look behind, 
 They hear a voice in every wind, 
 
 And snatch a fearful joy." 
 
 It is only in the second stanza of the Eton Ode tha 
 Gray permits himself to refer to the constant pressure 
 
in.] FIRST ENGLISH POEMS. 63 
 
 regret for his lost friend ; the fields are beloved in vain, 
 and, in Wordsworth's exquisite phrase, he turns to share 
 the rapture — ah! with whom? In yet one other poem 
 composed during this prolific month of August, 1742, that 
 regret serves simply to throw a veil of serious and pathetic 
 sentiment over the tone of the reflection. The Ode on 
 Adversity, so named by Gray himself and by his first edi- 
 tor, Mason, but since styled, I know not why, the Hymn to 
 Adversity, is remarkable as the first of Gray's poems in 
 which he shows that stateliness of movement and pomp of 
 allegorical illustration which give an individuality in his 
 mature style. No English poet, except perhaps Milton and 
 Shelley, has maintained the same severe elevation through- 
 out a long lyrical piece. Perhaps the fragments of such 
 lyrists as Simonides gave Gray the hint of this pure and 
 cold manner of writing. The shadowy personages of alle- 
 gory throng around us, and we are not certain that we dis- 
 tinguish them from one another. The indifferent critic 
 may be supposed to ask, which is Prosperity and which is 
 Folly, and how am I to distinguish them from the Summer 
 Friend and from Thoughtless Joy ? Adversity herself is 
 an abstraction which has few terrors and few allurements 
 for us, and in listening to the address made to her by the 
 poet we are apt to forget her in our appreciation of the 
 balanced rhythm and rich, persuasive sound : 
 
 "Wisdom, in sable garb arrayed, 
 
 Immersed in rapt'rous thought profound ; 
 And Melancholy, silent maid, 
 
 With leaden eye that loves the ground, 
 Still on thy solemn steps attend ; 
 Warm Charity, the general friend, 
 With Justice, to herself severe, 
 And Pity, dropping soft the sadly-pleasing tear. 
 4 
 
64 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 " gently on thy suppliant's head, 
 
 Dread goddess, lay thy chast'ning hand ! 
 
 Not in thy Gorgon terrors clad, 
 Not circled with the vengeful band 
 
 (As by the impious thou art seen), 
 
 With thund'ring voice, and threat'ning mien, 
 With screaming Horror's funeral cry, 
 
 Despair, and fell Disease, and ghastly Poverty. 
 
 "Thy form benign, goddess, wear ; 
 Thy milder influence impart, 
 Thy philosophic train be there, 
 v To soften, not to wound, my heart. 
 The gen'rous spark extinct revive, 
 Teach me to love, and to forgive, 
 Exact my own defects to scan, 
 What others are to feel, and know myself a man." 
 
 This last stanza, where he gets free from the allegorical 
 personages, is undoubtedly the best; and the curious coup- 
 let about the " generous spark " seems to me to be proba- 
 bly a reference to the quarrel with Walpole. If this be 
 thought fantastic, it must be remembered that Gray's cir- 
 cle of experience and emotion was unusually narrow. To 
 return to the treatment of allegory and the peculiar style 
 of this ode, we are confronted by the curious fact that it 
 seems impossible to claim for these qualities, hitherto un- 
 observed in English poetry, precedency in either Gray or 
 Collins. Actual priority, of course, belongs to Gray, for 
 Collins wrote nothing of a serious nature till 1745 or 
 1746 ; but his Odes, though so similar, or rather so analo- 
 gous, to Gray's that every critic has considered them as 
 holding a distinct place together in literature, were certain- 
 ly not in any way inspired by Gray. The latter published 
 nothing till 1747, whereas in December, 1746, Collinses 
 precious little volume saw the light. 
 
in.] FIRST ENGLISH POEMS. 65 
 
 It is difficult to believe that Collins, at school at Win- 
 chester until 1741, at college at Oxford until 1744, could 
 have seen any of Gray's verses, which had not then begun 
 to circulate in MS., in the way in which long afterwards 
 the Elegy and the Bard passed from eager hand to hand. 
 We shall see that Gray read Collins eventually, but with- 
 out interest, whilst Collins does not appear to have been 
 ever conscious of Gray's existence ; there was no mutual 
 magnetic attraction between the two poets, and we must 
 suppose their extraordinary kinship to have been a mere 
 accident, the result of certain forces acting simultaneously 
 on more or less similar intellectual compounds. There 
 was no other resemblance between them, as men, than 
 this one gift of clear, pure, Simonidean song. Collins 
 was simply a reed, cut short and notched by the great 
 god Pan, for the production of enchanting flute-melodies 
 at intervals; but for all other human purposes a vain and 
 empty thing indeed. In Gray the song, important as it 
 was, seemed merely one phase of a deep and consistent 
 character, of a brain almost universally accomplished, of 
 a man, in short, and not of a mere musical instrument. 
 
 One more work of great importance was begun at 
 Stoke in the autumn of 1742, the Elegy wrote in a Coun- 
 try Church-yard, It is, unfortunately, impossible to say 
 what form it originally took, or what lines or thoughts 
 now existing in it are part of the original scheme. We 
 shall examine this poem at length when we reach the 
 period of Gray's career to which it belongs in its com- 
 
 ! pleted form ; but as the question is often asked, and 
 vaguely answered, where was the Elegy written, it may at 
 once be said that it was begun at Stoke in October or Nb- 
 
 I vember, 1742, continued at Stoke immediately after the 
 funeral of Gray's aunt, Miss Mary Antrobus, in November, 
 

 66 GRAY. [chap. | 
 
 1749, and finished at Cambridge in June, 1750. And it I 
 may here be remarked as a very singular fact that the 
 death of a valued friend seems to have been the stimulus 
 of greatest efficacy in rousing Gray to the composition of 
 poetry, and did in fact excite him to the completion of 
 most of his important poems. He was a man who had % 
 very slender hold on life himself, who walked habitually 
 in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and whose periods, 
 of greatest vitality were those in which bereavement 
 proved to him that, melancholy as he was, even he had 
 something to lose and to regret. 
 
 It is, therefore, perhaps more than a strong impressio 
 that makes me conjecture the beginning of the Eleg\ 
 wrote in a Country Church-yard to date from the fun en 
 of Gray's uncle, Jonathan Rogers, who died at Stokei 
 Pogis on the 31st of October, 1742, and who was buried 
 with the Antrobus family in the church of the neighbour- 
 ing parish of Burnham. An ingenious Latin inscription/ 
 to him, in a marble tablet in the church of that name,j 
 has always been ascribed to Gray himself. Rogers died at. 
 the age of sixty-five, having spent thirty-two years in un-J 
 disturbed felicity with his wife, born Anna Antrobus, who* 
 survived him till near the end of her celebrated nephew's 
 life. The death of Mr. Rogers completely altered Gray's 
 prospects. Mrs. Rogers appears to have been left with a 
 very small fortune, just enough to support her and heii 
 sisters, Mrs. Gray and Miss Antrobus, in genteel comfort^ 
 if they shared a house together, and had no extraneous! 
 expenses. The ladies from Cornhill accordingly came* 
 down to West End House at Stoke, and there the three} 
 sisters lived until their respective deaths. But Gray'J 
 dream of a life of lettered ease was at an end ; he savsj 
 that what would support these ladies would leave but litJ 
 
ii.] ' FIRST ENGLISH POEMS. 67 
 
 tie margin for him. His temperament and his mode of 
 study shut him out from every energetic profession. He 
 was twenty-five years of age, and hitherto had not so 
 much as begun any serious study of the law, for which 
 his mother still imagined him to be preparing. Only one 
 course was open to him, namely, to return to Cambridge, 
 [where living was very cheap, and to reside in college, 
 .spending his vacations quietly at Stoke-Pogis. As Mason 
 iputs it, "he was too delicate to hurt two persons for 
 j whom he had so tender an affection by peremptorily de- 
 claring his real intentions, and therefore changed, or pre- 
 tended to change, the line of his study." Henceforward, 
 (Until 1759, his whole life was a regular oscillation be- 
 i tween Stoke and Cambridge, varied only by occasional 
 visits to London. The first part of his life was now over. 
 At twenty-five Gray becomes a middle-aged man, and 
 loses, among the libraries of the University, his last pre- 
 tensions to physical elasticity. From this time forward 
 we find that his ailments, his melancholy, his reserve, and 
 his habit of drowning consciousness in perpetual study, 
 have taken firm hold upon him, and he begins to plunge 
 into an excess of reading, treating the acquisition of 
 knowledge as a narcotic. In the winter of 1742 he pro- 
 ceeded to Peterhouse, and taking his bachelor's degree in 
 Civil Law, was forthwith installed as a resident of that 
 college. 
 

 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 Gray took up his abode at Peterhouse, in the room near- 
 est the road on the second floor on the north side, a room 
 which still exists, and which commands a fine view of 
 Pembroke College, further east, on the opposite side of 
 Trumpington Street. It would seem, indeed, that Gray's 
 eyes and thoughts were forever away from home, and 
 paying a visit to the society across the road. His letters 
 are full of minute discussions of what is going on at Pem- 
 broke, but never a word of Peterhouse ; indeed, so natu- 
 rally and commonly does he discuss the politics of the 
 former college, often without naming it, that all his biog- 
 raphers — except, of course, Mason — seem to have taken 
 for granted that he was describing Peterhouse. Oddly 
 enough, Mason, who might have explained this circum- 
 stance in half a dozen words, does not appear to have 
 noticed the fact, so natural did it seem to him to read 
 about events which went on in his own college of Pem- 
 broke. Nor is it explained why Gray never became a 
 Fellow of Peterhouse. In all the correspondence of Gray 
 I have only noted one solitary instance in which he has 
 mentioned a Petrusian ; on this one occasion he does 
 name the Master, J. Whalley, afterwards Bishop of Ches- 
 ter, in connexion with an anecdote which does more hon- 
 
chap. iv.J LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE. 69 
 
 our to liira as a kind old soul than as a disciplinarian. 
 But all Gray's friends, and enemies, and interests were 
 centered in Pembroke, and he shows such an intimate 
 knowledge of all the cabals and ridiculous little intrigues 
 which thrilled the common-room of that college, as re- 
 quires an explanation that now can never be given. These 
 first years of his residence are the most obscure in his 
 whole .career. It must be remembered that of his three 
 most intimate correspondents one, West, was dead ; an- 
 other, Walpole, estranged ; and the third, Wharton, a resi- 
 dent in Cambridge like himself, and therefore too near at 
 hand to be written to. On the 27th of December, 1742, 
 a few years after his arrival at the University, he wrote a 
 letter to Dr. Wharton, which has been preserved, and his 
 Hymn to Ignorance, Mason tells us, dates from the same 
 time. But after this he entirely disappears from us for a 
 couple of years, a few legends of the direction taken by 
 his studies and his schemes of literary work being the 
 only glimpses we get of him. 
 
 But although Gray tells us nothing about his own col- 
 lege, it is still possible to form a tolerably distinct idea 
 of the society with whom he moved at Pembroke. The 
 Master, Dr. Roger Long, was a man of parts, but full of 
 eccentricities, and gifted with a very disagreeable temper. 
 He was a species of poetaster, oddly associated in verse, at 
 different extremes of his long life, with Laurence Eusden, 
 the poet laureate, and the great Erasmus Darwin. When 
 Gray settled in the University, Roger Long was sixty-two 
 years of age, had been Master of Pembroke nine years, 
 and, after being appointed Lowndes Professor of Astron- 
 omy in 1750, was to survive until 1770, dying in his 
 ninety-first year. He was fond of exercising his inven- 
 tion on lumbering constructions, which provoked the ridi- 
 
70 . GRAY. [chap. 
 
 cule of young wits like Gray ; such as a sort of orrery 
 which he built in the north-eastern corner of the inner 
 court of Pembroke ; and a still more remarkable water- 
 velocipede, upon which Dr. Long was wont to splash 
 about in Pembroke basin, " like a wild goose at play," 
 heedless of mocking undergraduates. This eccentric per- 
 sonage was the object of much observation on the part of 
 Gray, who frequently mentioned him in his letters, and 
 was delighted when any new absurdity gave him an op- 
 portunity of writing to his correspondents about " the high 
 and mighty Prince Roger surnaraed the Long, Lord of the 
 great Zodiac, the glass Uranium, and the Chariot that goes 
 without horses." As the astronomer grew older he more 
 and more lost his authority with the Fellows, and Gray 
 describes scenes of absolute rebellion which are, I believe, 
 recorded by no other historian. Gray was, undoubtedly, 
 in possession of information denied to the rest of the 
 world. Part of this information came, we cannot doubt, 
 from Dr. Wharton, and part from another intimate friend I 
 of Gray's, William Trollope, who had taken his degree in 
 1730, and who was one of the senior Fellows of Pembroke. 
 Another excellent friend of Gray's, also a leading man at 
 Pembroke, was the gentle and refined Dr. James Brown, 
 who eventually succeeded Long in the Mastership, and in 
 whose arms Gray died. Outside this little Pembroke cir- 
 cle Gray had few associates. He knew Conyers Middle- 
 ton very well, and seems to have gained, a little later, 
 while haunting the rich library of Emmanuel College, the 
 acquaintance of a man whose influence on him was dis- 
 tinctly hurtful, the satellite of Warburton, Richard Hurd, * 
 long afterwards Bishop of Worcester. But his association! 
 with Conyers Middleton, certainly one of the most remark- i 
 able men then moving in the University, amounted almost 
 
iv.] LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE. 11 
 
 to friendship. They probably met nearly every day, Mid- 
 dleton being Librarian of Trinity. There was much that 
 Gray would find sympathetic in the broad theology of 
 Middleton, who had won his spurs by attacking the deists 
 from ground almost as sceptical as their own, yet strictly 
 within the pale of orthodoxy ; nor would the irony and 
 free thought of a champion of the Church, of England be 
 shocking to Gray, whose own tenets were at this time no 
 less broad than his hatred of an open profession of deism 
 was pronounced. Gray's feeling in religion seems to have 
 been one of high and dry objection to enthusiasm, or 
 change, or subversion. He was willing to admit a certain 
 breadth of conjecture, so long as the forms of orthodoxy 
 were preserved, but he objected excessively to any attempt 
 to tamper with those forms, collecting Shaftesbury, Vol- 
 taire, Rousseau, and Hume under one general category of 
 abhorrence. As he says, in a cancelled stanza of one of 
 his poems — 
 
 " No more, with reason and thyself at strife, 
 
 Give anxious cares and endless wishes room ; 
 But through the cool, sequestered vale of life 
 Pursue the silent tenour of thy doom" — 
 
 an attitude which would not preclude a good deal of sym- 
 pathy with the curious speculations of Conyers Middleton. 
 There is no doubt, however, that, in spite of a few com- 
 panions of this class, most of them, like Middleton, much 
 older than himself, he found Cambridge exceedingly dreary. 
 He talks in one of his letters of " the strong attachment, 
 or rather allegiance, which I and all here owe to our sov- 
 ereign lady and mistress, the president of presidents, and 
 head of heads (if I may be permitted to pronounce her 
 name, that ineffable Octogrammaton), the power of Lazi- 
 F 4* 
 

 n GRAY. [chap. 
 
 ness. You must know that she has been pleased to ap- 
 point me (in preference to so many old servants of hers, 
 who had spent their whole lives in qualifying themselves 
 for the office) Grand Picker of Straws and Push-pin 
 Player in ordinary to her Supinity." This in 1744, and 
 the same note had been struck two years earlier in his 
 curiously splenetic Hymn to Ignorance : 
 
 " Hail, horrors, hail ! ye ever gloomy bowers, 
 Ye Gothic fanes, and antiquated towers, 
 Where rushy Camus 7 slowly-winding flood 
 Perpetual draws his humid train of mud : 
 Glad I revisit thy neglected reign. 
 take me to thy peaceful shade again. 7 ' 
 
 This atmosphere of apathy and ignorance was by no 
 means favourable to the composition of poetry. It was, 
 indeed, absolutely fatal to it, and being at liberty to write 
 odes any hour of any day completely took away from the 
 poet the inclination to compose them at all. The flow of 
 verse which had been so full and constant in 1742 ceased 
 abruptly and entirely, and his thoughts turned in a wholly 
 fresh direction. He gave himself up almost exclusively 
 for the first four or five years to a consecutive study of 
 the whole existing literature of ancient Greece. If he had- 
 seen cause to lament the deadness of classical enterprise at 
 Cambridge when he was an- undergraduate, this lethargy 
 had become still more universal since the death of Bentley 
 and Snape. Gray insisted, almost in solitude, on the ne-v 
 cessity of persistence in the cultivation of Greek literature, 
 and he forms the link between the school of humanity 
 which flourished in Cambridge in the beginning of the 
 eighteenth century and that of which Porson was to be 
 the representative. 
 
 One of Gray's earliest schemes was a critical text of. 
 
iv.] LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE. IS 
 
 Strabo, an author of whom he knew no satisfactory edi- 
 tion. Amongst the Pembroke MSS. may still be found his 
 painstaking and copious notes collected for this purpose, 
 and Mason possessed in Gray's handwriting " a great num- 
 ber of geographical disquisitions, particularly with respect 
 to that part of Asia which comprehends Persia and India; 
 concerning the ancient and modern names and divisions 
 of which extensive countries his notes are very copious." 
 This edition of Strabo never came to the birth, and the 
 same has to be said of his projected Plato, the notes for 
 every section of which were in existence when Mason came 
 to examine his papers. Another labour over which he toil- 
 ed in vain was a text of the Greek Anthology, with trans- 
 lations of each separate epigram into Latin elegiac verse, a 
 task on which he wasted months of valuable time, and 
 ■which he then abandoned. His MS., however, of this last- 
 mentioned work came into his executors' hands, copied 
 out as if for the press, with the addition, even, of a very 
 full index, and it is a little surprising that Mason should 
 not have hastened to oblige the world of classical students 
 with a work which would have had a value at that time 
 that it could not be said to possess nowadays. Lord 
 Chesterfield confidently " recommends the Greek epigrams 
 to the supreme contempt " of his precious son, and in so 
 doing gauged rightly enough the taste of the age. It 
 would seem that Gray had the good-sense to enjoy the 
 delicious little poems of Meleager and his fellow-singers, 
 but had not moral energy enough to insist on forcing them 
 upon the attention of the world. He lamented, too, the 
 neglect into which Aristotle had fallen, and determined to 
 restore him to the notice of English scholars. As in the 
 previous cases, however, his intentions remained unfulfilled, 
 and we turn with pleasure from the consideration of all 
 
H GRAY. [chap. 
 
 this melancholy waste of energy and learning. It is hard 
 to conceive of a sadder irony on the career of a scholar of 
 Gray's genius and accomplishment than is given by the 
 dismal contents of the so-called second volume of his 
 Works, published by Mathias in 1814, fragments and jot- 
 tings which bear the same relation to literature that dough 
 bears to bread. 
 
 The unfortunate difference with Horace Walpole came 
 to a close in the winter of 1744. A lady, probably Mrs. 
 Conyers Middleton, made peace between the friends. Wal- 
 pole expressed a desire that Gray would write to him, and 
 as Gray was passing through London, on his way from 
 Cambridge to Stoke, in the early part of November, a 
 meeting came off. The poet wrote Walpole a note as 
 soon as he arrived, " and immediately received a very civil 
 answer." Horace Walpole was then living in the minis- 
 terial neighbourhood of Arlington Street, and thither on 
 the following evening Gray went to visit him. Gray's ac- 
 count to Wharton of the interview is entertaining : " I was 
 somewhat abashed at his confidence ; he came to meet me, 
 kissed me on both sides with all the ease of one who re- 
 ceives an acquaintance just come out of the countiy, squat- 
 ted me into a fauteuil, began to talk of the town, and this 
 and that and t'other, and continued with little interruption 
 for three hours, when I took my leave, very indifferently 
 pleased,*but treated with monstrous good - breeding. I 
 supped with him next night, as he desired. Ashton was 
 there, whose formalities tickled me inwardly, for he, I 
 found, was to be angry about the letter I had wrote him. 
 However, in going home together our hackney-coach jum- 
 bled us up into a sort of reconciliation. . . . Next morn- 
 ing I breakfasted alone with Mr. Walpole ; when me had 
 all the eclaircissement I ever expected, and I left him much 
 
iv.] LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE. 75 
 
 better satisfied than I had been hitherto." Gray's pride 
 we see struggling against a very hearty desire in Walpole 
 to let by-gones be by-gones; the stately little poet, however, 
 was not able to hold out against so many courteous seduc- 
 tions, and he gradually returned to his old intimacy and 
 affection for Walpole. It is nevertheless doubtful whether 
 he ever became so fond of the latter as Walpole was of 
 him. He accepted the homage, however, to the end of 
 his days, and was more admired, perhaps, by Horace Wal- 
 pole, and for a longer period, than any other person. 
 
 Perhaps in consequence of the " eclaircissement " with 
 Walpole, Gray began at this time a correspondence with 
 Mr. Chute and Mr. Whithead, the gentlemen with whom 
 he had spent some months in Venice. Chute was a Hamp- 
 shire squire, a dozen years senior to Gray and Walpole, 
 but a great admirer of them both, and they both wrote to 
 him some of their brightest letters. Chute was what our 
 Elizabethan forefathers called u Italianate;" he sympathized 
 with Gray's tastes in music and statuary, and vowed that 
 life was not worth living north of the Alps, and spent 
 the greater part of his time in Casa Ambrosio, Sir Hor- 
 ace Mann's house in Florence. He was an accomplished 
 person, who played and sang, and turned a neat copy 
 of verses, and altogether was a very agreeable exception 
 amongst country gentlemen. He lived on until 1776, 
 carefully preserving the letters he had interchanged with 
 his sprightly friends. 
 
 About this time (May 30, 1744) Pope had died, and 
 both Gray and Walpole refer frequently to the circum- 
 stance in their letters. It seems that Gray had had .at 
 least one interview with the great poet of the age before 
 him, an interview the date of which it would be curious 
 to ascertain. Gray's words are interesting. He writes to 
 
76 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 Walpole (Feb. 3, 1746), referring probably to the scandals 
 about Atossa and the Patriot King : "I can say no more 
 for Mr. Pope, for what you keep in reserve may be worse 
 than all the rest. It is natural to wish the finest writer — 
 one of them — we ever had should be an honest man. It 
 is for the interest even of that -virtue, whose friend he 
 professed himself, and whose beauties he sung, that he 
 should not be found a dirty animal. But, however, this 
 is Mr. Warburton's business, not mine, who may scribble 
 his pen to the stumps and all in vain, if these facts are 
 so. It is not from what he told me about himself that I 
 thought well of him, but from a humanity and goodness 
 of heart, ay, and greatness of mind, that runs through his 
 private correspondence, not less apparent than are a thou- 
 sand little vanities and weaknesses mixed with those good 
 qualities, for nobody ever took him for a philosopher. " 
 There exists a book in which Pope has written his own 
 name, and Gray his underneath, with a date in Pope's 
 lifetime. Evidently there had been personal intercourse 
 between them, in which Walpole may have had a part; 
 for the latter said, very late in his own career, " Remem- 
 ber, I have lived with Gray and seen Pope." 
 
 In 1744 appeared two poems of some importance in 
 the history of eighteenth century literature, Akenside's 
 Pleasures of the Imagination and Armstrong's Art of 
 Preserving Health. Gray read them instantly, for the 
 authors were friends of his friend Wharton. The first 
 he found often obscure and even unintelligible, but yet in 
 many respects admirable ; and he checked himself in the 
 act of criticising Akenside — " a very ingenious man, worth 
 fifty of myself." For Armstrong he showed less interest. 
 The reading of these and other poems, a fresh beat of the 
 pulse of English Poetry in her fainting-fit, set him think- 
 
iv.] LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE. 11 
 
 ing of his own neglected epic, the De Principiis Cogitandi, 
 or " Master Tommy Lucretius," as he nicknamed it. This 
 unwieldy production, however, could not be encouraged to 
 flourish : " 'tis but a puleing chitt," says its author, and 
 Mason tells us that about this time the posthumous pub- 
 lication of the Anti-Lucretius of the Cardinal Melchior 
 de Polignac, a book long awaited and received at last with 
 great disappointment, made Gray decide to let Locke and 
 the Origin of Ideas alone. It may be noted that in July, 
 1745, Gray had serious thoughts, which came to nothing, 
 of moving over from Peterhouse to Trinity Hall. 
 
 We get glimpses of him now and then from his letters. 
 He does not entirely forget the pleasures of " strumming," 
 he tells Chute ; " I look at my music now and then, that 
 I may not forget it;" and in September, 1746, he has 
 been writing " a few autumnal verses," the exact nature 
 of which it is now impossible to specify. In August of 
 the same year he had been in London, spending his morn- 
 ings with Walpole in Arlington Street, and his afternoons 
 at the trial of the Jacobite Lords. His account of Kil- 
 marnock and Cromartie is vivid, and not as unsympathetic 
 as it might be. Now, as for many years to come, Gray 
 usually went up to town in the middle of June, saw what 
 was to be seen, proceeded to Stoke, and returned to Cam- 
 bridge in September. Late in August, 1746, Horace Wal- 
 pole took a house within the precincts of the Castle of 
 Windsor, and Gray at Stoke found this very convenient, 
 for the friends were able to spend one day of each week 
 together. In May, 1747, W'alpole rented, and afterwards 
 bought, that estate on the north bank of the Thames 
 which He has made famous under the name of Strawberry 
 Hill, and in future Gray scarcely ever passed a long va- 
 cation without spending some of his time there. It was 
 
IS GRAY. [chap. 
 
 now that his first poem was published. Walpole per- 
 suaded him to allow Dodsley to print the Ode on a Dis- 
 tant Prospect of Eton College, and it accordingly appeared 
 anonymously, in the summer of 1747, as a thin folio pam- 
 phlet. In the autumn of this same year, whilst Gray was 
 Wal pole's guest at Strawberry Hill, he sat for the most 
 pleasing, though the most feminine, of his portraits, that 
 by John Giles Eckhardt, a German who had come over 
 with Van loo, and to whom Walpole had addressed his 
 poem of The Beauties, The Eton Ode fell perfectly still- 
 born, in spite of Walpole's enthusiasm ; even less observed 
 by the critics of the hour than Collins's little volume of 
 Odes, which had appeared six months earlier. We may 
 observe that Gray was now thirty years of age, and not 
 only absolutely unknown, but not in the least persuaded 
 in himself that he ought to be known. 
 
 It seems to have been about this time that the remark- 
 able interview took place between Gray and Hogarth. 
 The great painter, now in his fiftieth year, had just reach- 
 ed the summit of his reputation by completing his Mar- 
 riage a la Mode, which Gray admired like the rest of the 
 world. The vivacious Walpole thought that he would 
 bring these interesting men together, and accordingly ar- 
 ranged a little dinner, from which he anticipated no small 
 intellectual diversion. Unfortunately, Hogarth was more 
 surly and egotistical than usual, and Gray was plunged in 
 one of his fits of melancholy reserve, so that Walpole had 
 to rely entirely upon his own flow of spirits to prevent 
 absolute silence, and vowed at the end of the repast that 
 he had never been so dull in his life. To show, however, 
 how Gray could sparkle when the cloud happened to rise 
 from off his spirits, we may quote entire the delightful 
 letter to Walpole, in which one of the brightest of his 
 lesser poems first appeared : 
 
iv.] LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE. Id 
 
 " Cambridge, March, 1, 1747. 
 " As one ought to be particularly careful to avoid blunders in a 
 compliment of condolence, it would be a sensible satisfaction to me, 
 before I testify my sorrow, and the sincere part I take in your mis- 
 fortune, to know for certain who it is I lament. I knew Zara and 
 Selima (Selima, was it ? or Fatima ?), or rather I knew them both to- 
 gether ; for I cannot justly say which was which. Then as to your 
 1 handsome Cat,' the name you distinguish her by, I am no less at a 
 loss, as well knowing one's handsome cat is always the cat one loves 
 best ; or if one be alive and one dead, it is usually the latter that is 
 the handsomest. Besides, if the point were never so clear, I hope 
 you do not think me so ill-bred or so imprudent as to forfeit all my 
 interest in the survivor; oh no ! I would rather seem to mistake, and 
 imagine to be sure it must be the tabby one that had met with this 
 sad accident. Till this matter is a little better determined, you will 
 excuse me if I do not begin to cry — 
 
 • Tempus inane peto, requiem, spatiumque doloris.* 
 
 Which interval is the more convenient, as it gives me time to rejoice 
 with you on your new honours [Walpole had just been elected F.R.S.], 
 This is only a beginning ; 1 reckon next week we shall hear you are 
 a Freemason, or a Gormagon at least. Heigh-ho ! I feel (as you to 
 be sure have long since) that I have very little to say, at least in 
 prose. Somebody will be the better for it ; I do not mean you, but 
 your Cat, feue Mademoiselle Selime, whom I am about to immortalize 
 for one week or fortnight, as follows : 
 
 " 'Twas on a lofty vase's side 
 Where China's gayest art had dyed 
 
 The azure flowers that blow, 
 The pensive Selima reclined, 
 Demurest of the tabby kind, 
 
 Gaz'd on the lake below. 
 
 "Her conscious tail her joy declar'd : 
 The fair, round face, the showy beard, 
 
 The velvet of her paws, 
 Her coat that with the tortoise vies, 
 Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes, 
 
 She saw ; and purred applause. 
 
 "Still had she gaz'd ; but midst the tide 
 Two beauteous forms were seen to glide, 
 
[chap. 
 
 80 GRAY. 
 
 The Genii of the stream ; 
 Their scaly armour's Tyriau hue, 
 Through richest purple, to the view 
 
 Betray'd a golden gleam. 
 
 " The hapless nymph with wonder saw: 
 A whisker first, and then a claw, 
 
 With many an ardent wish. 
 She stretch'd, in vain, to reach the prize. 
 What female heart can gold despise ? 
 
 What Cat's averse to fish ? 
 
 "Presumptuous maid ! With looks intent 
 Again she stretched, again she bent, 
 
 Nor knew the gulf between. 
 (Malignant Fate sat by, and smil'd.) 
 The slipp'ry verge her feet beguil'd, 
 
 She tumbled headlong in. 
 
 "Eight times emerging from the flood, 
 She mewed to ev'ry wat'ry god 
 
 Some speedy aid to send. 
 No dolphin came, no Nereid stirr'd, 
 No cruel Tom nor Harry heard— 
 
 What favourite has a friend ? 
 
 " From hence, ye beauties, undeceiv'd, 
 Know one false step is ne'er retriev'd, 
 
 And be with caution bold. 
 Not all that tempts your wand'ring eyes 
 And heedless hearts is lawful prize, 
 Nor all, that glisters, gold. 
 
 " There's a poem for you ; it is rather too long for an epitaph." 
 
 It is rather too long for a quotation, also, but the reader 
 may find some entertainment in seeing so familiar a poem 
 restored to its original readings. Johnson's comment on 
 this piece is more unfortunate than usual. He calls it 
 " a trifle, but not a happy trifle." Later critics have been 
 unanimous in thinking it one of the happiest of all trifles; 
 and there can be no doubt that in its ease and lightness it 
 shows that Gray had been reading Gresset and Piron to 
 advantage, and that he remembered the gay suppers with 
 
iv.] LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE. 81 
 
 Mile. Quinault. A French poet of the neatest class, how- 
 ever, would certainly have avoided the specious little error 
 detected by Johnson in the last line, and would not have 
 laid himself open to the charge of supposing that what 
 cats really like is, not gold-fish, but gold itself. 
 
 We must return, however, to the dreary days in which 
 Gray divided his leisure from Greek literature between 
 drinking tar-water, on the recommendation of Berkeley's 
 Siris, and observing the extraordinary quarrelling and 
 bickering which went on in the combination-room at 
 Pembroke. These dissensions reached a climax in the 
 summer of 1746. The cause of the Master, Dr. Roger 
 Long, was supported by a certain Dr. Andrews, whilst 
 James Brown, popularly styled Obadiah Fusk, led the 
 body of the Fellows, with whom Gray sympathized. "Mr. 
 Brown wants nothing but a foot in height and his own 
 hair to make him a little old Roman," we are told in Au- 
 gust of that year, and has been so determined that the 
 Master talks of calling in the Attorney-general to decide. 
 Even in the Long Vacation, Fellows of Pembroke can talk 
 of nothing else, and " tremble while they speak." Tuthill, 
 for some occult reason, is threatened with the loss of his 
 fellowship, and Gray at Stoke, in September, 1746, will 
 hurry to Cambridge at any moment, so as not to be ab- 
 sent during the Pembroke audit. 
 
 All this time not one word is said of his own college. 
 Nor was he always so anxious to return to Cambridge. 
 In the winter of 1746 he had a very bright spell of en- 
 joyment in London. " I have been in town," he says to 
 Wharton (December 11th), "flaunting about at public 
 places of all kinds with my two Italianized friends [Chute 
 and Whithead], The world itself has some attractions 
 in it to a solitary of six years' standing ; and agreeable, 
 
82 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 well-meaning people of sense (thank Heaven there are so 
 few of them) are my peculiar magnet ; it is no wonder, 
 then, if I felt some reluctance at parting with them so 
 soon, or if my spirits, when I return to my cell, should 
 sink for a time, not indeed to storm or tempest, but a 
 good deal below changeable." He was considerably trou- 
 bled by want of money at this time ; he had been to town 
 partly to sell off a little stock to pay an old debt, and had 
 found the rate of exchange so low that he would have lost 
 twelve per cent. He was saved from this necessity by a 
 timely loan from Wharton. He spent his leisure at Christ- 
 mas in making a great chronological table, the form of 
 which long afterwards suggested to Henry Clinton his 
 Fasti Hellenici. Gray's work began with the 30th Olym- 
 piad, and was brought down to the 113th, covering, there- 
 fore, 332 years. Each page of it was divided into nine 
 columns — one for the Olympiad, the second for the Ar- 
 chons, the third for the public affairs of Greece, the fourth, 
 fifth, and sixth for the Philosophers, the seventh for the 
 Poets, the eighth for the Historians, and the ninth for the 
 Orators. 
 
 The same letter which announces this performance men- 
 tions the Odes of Collins and Joseph Warton. Gray had 
 been briskly supplied with these little books, which had 
 only been published a few days before. The former was 
 the important volume, but the public bought the latter. 
 Gray's comment on Warton and Collins is remarkable : 
 " Each is the half of a considerable man, and one the 
 counterpart of the other. The first has but little inven- 
 tion, very poetical choice of expression, and a good ear. 
 The second, a fine fancy, modelled upon the antique, a 
 bad ear, great variety of words and images, with no choice 
 at all. They both deserve to last some years, but ivill not.'' 1 
 
it.] LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE. 83 
 
 This last clause is an example of the vanity of prophesy- 
 ing. It is difficult to understand what Gray meant by 
 accusing Collins of a " bad ear," the one thing in which 
 Collins was undoubtedly Gray's superior; in other respects 
 the criticism, though unsympathetic, is not without acu- 
 men, and, for bad or good, was the most favourable thing 
 said of Collins for many years to come. In 1748 Gray 
 and Collins were destined to meet, for once during their 
 lives, between the covers of the same book, at which we 
 shall presently arrive. 
 
 Gray was thirty years old on the day that he read Col- 
 lins's Odes. He describes himself as " lazy and listless 
 and old and vexed and perplexed," with all human evils 
 but the gout, which was soon to follow. The proceed- 
 ings at Pembroke had reached such a pass that Gray began 
 to sympathize with the poor old Master, him of the water- 
 velocipede. The Fellows had now grown so rebellious as 
 to abuse him roundly to his face, never to go into com- 
 bination-room till he went out, or if he entered whilst they 
 were there to continue sitting even in his own magisterial 
 chair. They would bicker with him about twenty paltry 
 matters till he would lose his temper, and tell them they 
 were impertinent. Gray turned from all this to a scheme 
 which he had long had in view, the publication of his 
 friend West's poems. Walpole proposed that he should 
 bring out these and his own odes in a single volume, and 
 Gray was not disinclined to carry out this notion. But 
 when he came to put their " joint-stock" together he 
 found it insufficient in bulk. Nor, as we have already 
 seen, did the few and scattered verses of West see the 
 light till long after the death of Gray. All that came 
 of this talk of printing was the anonymous publication 
 of the Eton Ode. Meanwhile, as he says to Wharton, in 
 
84 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 March, 1747, " my works are not so considerable as you 
 imagine. I have read Pausanias and Athenseus all through, 
 and JEschylus again. I am now in Pindar and Lysias, for 
 I take verse and prose together like bread and cheese." 
 
 About this time the excellent Wharton married and 
 left Cambridge. A still worse misfortune happened to 
 Gray in the destruction of his house in Cornhill, which 
 was burnt down in May, 1748. He seems to have been 
 waked up a little by this disaster, and to have spent seven 
 weeks in town as the guest of various friends, who were 
 " all so sorry for my loss that I could not choose but 
 laugh : one offered me opera tickets, insisted upon carry- 
 ing me to the grand masquerade, desired me to sit for my 
 picture ; others asked me to their concerts, or dinners and 
 suppers at their houses; or hoped I would drink choco- 
 late with them while I stayed in town. All my gratitude 
 — or, if you please, my revenge — was to accept everything 
 they offered me ; if it had been but a shilling I should 
 have taken it : thank Heaven, I was in good spirits, else I 
 could not have done it." London was amusing for him 
 at this time, with Horace Walpole flying between Arling- 
 ton Street and Strawberry Hill, and Chute and his nephew 
 Whithead full of sprightly gaieties and always glad to 
 see him. Whithead, who was in the law, undertook with 
 success about this time some legal business for Gray, the 
 exact nature of which does not appear, and the poet de- 
 scribes him as " a fine young personage in a coat all over 
 spangles, just come over from the tour of Europe to take 
 possession and be married. Say I wish him more span- 
 gles, and more estates, and more wives." Poor Whithead 
 did not live long enough to marry one wife; whilst his 
 engagement loitered on he fell ill of a galloping consump- 
 tion, and died in 1751, his death being accelerated by the 
 
IV.] LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE. 85 
 
 imprudence of his brother, a clergyman, who insisted on 
 taking him out hunting when he ought to have been in 
 bed. Gray's house in Cornhill had been insured for 500/., 
 but the expenses of rebuilding it amounted to 650/. One 
 of his aunts, probably Miss Antrobus, made him a present 
 of 100/.; another aunt, still more probably Mrs. Oliffe, 
 lent him an equal sum for his immediate wants on a de- 
 cent rate of interest, and for the remainder he was in- 
 debted to the kindness of Wharton. It appears from all 
 this that Gray's income was strictly bounded, at that 
 time, to his actual expenses, and that he had no margin 
 whatever. He declined, in fact, in June, 1748, an invi- 
 tation from Dr. Wharton to come and stay with him in 
 the North of England, on the ground that " the good 
 people here [at Stoke] would think me the most care- 
 less and ruinous of mortals, if I should think of a jour- 
 ney at this time." 
 
 In the letter from which a quotation has just been 
 given Gray mentions for the first time a man whose 
 name was to be inseparably associated with his own, 
 without whose pious care for his memory, indeed, the 
 task of writing Gray's life in any detail would be impos- 
 sible. In the year 1747 Gray's attention was directed by 
 a friend to a modest publication of verses in imitation of 
 Milton ; the death of Pope was sung in an elegy called 
 Musceus, to resemble Lycidas, and Milton's odes found 
 counterparts in 77 Bellicoso and II Pacifico. These 
 pieces, which were not entirely without a meritorious 
 ease of metre, were the production of William Mason, a 
 young man of twenty-two, the son of a Yorkshire clergy- 
 man, and a scholar of St. John's College, Cambridge. His 
 intelligence first attracted the notice of a fellow of his 
 own college, Dr. William Heberden, the distinguished 
 
86 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 Professor of Medicine, who was a friend of Gray, and who 
 was very possibly the person who showed Mason's poems 
 to the latter. In the course of the same year (1747), 
 through the exertions of Heberden and Gray, Mason was 
 nominated a Fellow of Pembroke, and proposed to him- 
 self to enter that remarkable bear-garden. But Dr. Roger 
 Long refused his consent, and it was not until February, 
 1749, and after much litigation, that Mason was finally 
 elected. 
 
 There was something about Mason which Gray liked, 
 a hearty simplicity and honest ardtfur that covered a good 
 deal of push which Gray thought vulgar and did not hesi- 
 tate to chastise. Mason, on his side, was a faithful and 
 affectionate henchman, full of undisguised admiration of 
 Gray and fear of his sarcasm, not unlike Boswell in his 
 persistence, and in his patience in enduring the reproofs 
 of the great man. Gray constantly crushed Mason, but 
 the latter was never offended, and after a few tears re- 
 turned manfully to the charge. Gray's description of 
 him in the second year of their acquaintance, when Ma- 
 son was only twenty-three, was this : " Mason has much 
 fancy, little judgment, and a good deal of modesty. I 
 take him for a good and well-meaning creature ; but then 
 he is really in simplicity a child, and loves everybody he 
 meets with ; he reads little or nothing, writes abundance, 
 and that with a desire to make his fortune by it." This 
 literary fluency was a matter of wonder to Gray, whose 
 own attar of roses was distilled slowly and painfully, drop 
 by drop, and all through life he was apt to overrate Ma- 
 son's verses; It was very difficult, of course, for him to 
 feel unfavourably towards a friend so enthusiastic and 
 so anxious to please, and we cannot take Gray's earnest 
 approval of Mason's odes and tragedies too critically. 
 
iv.] LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE. 87 
 
 Moreover, he was Gray's earliest and most slavish disci- 
 ple ; before he left St. John's to come within the greater 
 poet's more habitual influence, he had begun to imitate 
 poems which he can only have seen in manuscript. 
 
 Henceforward, in spite of his somewhat coarse and 
 superficial nature, in spite of his want of depth in im- 
 agination and soundness in scholarship, in spite of a gen- 
 eral want of the highest qualities of character, Mason be- 
 came a great support and comfort to Gray. His physi- 
 cal vigour and versatility, his eagerness in the pursuit of 
 literature, his unselfish ardour and loyalty, were refresh- 
 ing to the more fastidious and retiring man, who enjoyed, 
 moreover, the chance of having at last found a person 
 with whom he could discourse freely about literature, in 
 that constant easy interchange of impressions which is the 
 luxury of a purely literary life. Moreover, we must do 
 Mason the justice to say that he supplied to Gray's fancy 
 whatever stimulus such a mind as his was calculated to 
 offer, receiving his smallest and most fragmentary effusions 
 with interest, encouraging him to the completion of his 
 poems, and receiving each fresh ode as if a new planet 
 had risen above the horizon. With Walpole to be playful 
 with, and Mason to be serious with, Gray was no longer 
 for the rest of his life exposed to that east wind of solitary 
 wretchedness which had parched him for the first three 
 years of his life at Cambridge. At the same time, grate- 
 ful as we must be to Mason for his affection and good- 
 heartedness, we cannot refrain from wishing that his 
 poems had been fastened to a mill-stone and cast into the 
 river Cam. They are not only barren and pompous to the 
 very last degree, but to the lovers of Gray they have this 
 disadvantage, that they constantly resolve that poet's true 
 sublime into the ridiculous, and leave on the ear an uncom- 
 G 5 
 
88 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 fortable echo, as of a too successful burlesque or parody. 
 Of this Gray himself was uot unconscious, though he put 
 the thought behind him, as one inconsistent with friendship. 
 A disreputable personage who crossed Gray's orbit about 
 this time, and was the object of his cordial dislike and 
 contempt, has left on the mind of posterity a sense of 
 higher natural gifts than any possessed by the respectable 
 Mason. Christopher Smart, long afterwards author of the 
 Song to David, was an idle young man who had been ad- 
 mitted to Pembroke in October, 1739, under the protec- 
 tion of the Earl of Darlington, and who in 1745 was 
 elected a Fellow of his college. As early as 1740 he be- 
 gan to be celebrated for the wit and originality of his 
 Latin tripos verse, of which a series are still in existence. 
 One of these, a droll celebration of the Nativity of Yawn- 
 ing, is not unlike Gray's own Hymn to Ignorance in its 
 contempt for the genius of Cambridge. But Smart lost 
 credit by his pranks and levities no less quickly than he 
 gained it by his skill. Gray writes in March, 1747, that 
 Smart's debts are increasing daily, and that he drinks 
 hartshorn from morning till night. A month later he had 
 scandalized the University by performing in the Zodiac 
 Room, a club which had been founded in 1725, a play of 
 his own called A Trij) to Cambridge ; or, the Grateful 
 Fair, a piece which was never printed and now no longer 
 is in existence. Already, at this time, Gray thought 
 Smart mad. " He can't hear his own Prologue without 
 being ready to die with laughter. He acts five parts him- 
 self, and is only sorry he can't do all the rest. ... As for 
 his vanity and faculty of lying, they have come to their 
 full maturity. All this, you see, must come to a jail, or 
 Bedlam." It did come to Bedlam, in 1763, but not until 
 Smart had exhausted every eccentricity and painful folly 
 
it.] LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE. 89 
 
 possible to man. But the minor catastrophe was much 
 nearer, namely, the jail. In November, 1747, he was ar- 
 rested at the suit of a London tailor, was got out of prison 
 by means of a subscription made in the college, and re- 
 ceived a sound warning to behave better in future, a warn- 
 ing which Gray, who w T atched him narrowly and noted his 
 moral symptoms with cold severity, justly predicted would 
 be entirely frustrated by his drunkenness. 
 
 The frequent disturbances caused in the University by 
 such people as Smart had by this time led to much public 
 scandal. Gray says : " The Fellow-commoners — the bucks 
 — are run mad ; they set women upon their heads in the 
 streets at noonday, break open shops, game in the coffee- 
 houses on Sundays, and in short," he adds, in angry irony, 
 "act after my own heart." The Tuns Tavern at Cam- 
 bridge was the scene of nightly orgies, in which Professors 
 and Fellows set an example of roistering to the youth of 
 the University. Heavy bills were run up at inns and cof- 
 fee-houses, which were afterwards repudiated with effron- 
 tery. The breaking of windows and riots in public parts 
 of the town were indulged rn to such an extent as to make 
 Cambridge almost intolerable, and the work of James 
 Brown, Gray's intimate friend, who held the post of Sen- 
 ior Proctor, was far from being a sinecure. In 1748 the 
 Duke of Somerset, who had absolutely neglected his re- 
 sponsibilities, was succeeded in the Chancellorship by the 
 Duke of Newcastle, whose installation promised little hope 
 of reform. Gray described the scene to Wharton : " Every 
 one whilst it lasted was very gay and very busy in the 
 morning, and very owlish and very tipsy at night : I make 
 no exception, from the Chancellor to blue-coat," who was 
 the Vice-chancellor's servant. However, it presently ap- 
 peared that the Duke of Newcastle was not inclined to 
 
00 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 sacrifice discipline. The Bishops united with him in con- 
 cocting a plan by which the license of the resident mem- 
 bers of the University should be checked, and in May, 
 1750, the famous code of Orders and Regulations was 
 brought before the Senate. It was not, however, easy to 
 restore order to a community which had so long been de- 
 voted to the Lord of Misrule, and it was not until more 
 than twenty persons of good family had been " expelled or 
 rusticated for very heinous violations of our laws and dis- 
 cipline" that anything like decent behaviour was restored, 
 the fury of the undergraduates displaying itself in a final 
 outburst of mutiny, in which they rushed along the streets 
 brandishing lighted links. 
 
 This scene of rebellion and confusion could not fail to 
 excite strong emotion in the mind of a man like Gray, of 
 orderly tastes and timid personal character, to whom a 
 painted Indian would be scarcely a more formidable object 
 than a noisy young buck, flushed with wine, flinging his 
 ash-stick against college windows, and his torch into the 
 faces of passers-by. A life at the University given up to 
 dice and horses, and the loud,. coarse Georgian dissipation 
 of that day, could not seem to a thinker to be one which 
 brought glory either to the teacher or the taught, and in 
 the midst of this sensual riot Gray sat down to write his 
 poem on The Alliance of Education and Government. Of 
 his philosophical fragments this is by far the best, and it 
 is seriously to be regretted that it does not extend beyond 
 one hundred and ten lines. The design of the poem, 
 which has been preserved, is highly interesting, and the 
 treatment at least as poetical as that of so purely didactic 
 a theme could be. Short as it is, it attracted the warm 
 enthusiasm of Gibbon, who ejaculates: " Instead of com- 
 piling tables of chronology and natural history, why did 
 
iv.] LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE. 91 
 
 not Mr. Gray apply the powers of his genius to finish the 
 philosophical poem of which he has left such an exquisite 
 specimen ?" The heroic couplet is used with great skill ; 
 as an example may be cited the lines describing the inva- 
 sion of Italy by the Goths — 
 
 " As oft have issued, host impelling host, 
 The blue-eyed myriads from the Baltic coast ; 
 The prostrate South to the destroyer yields 
 Her boasted titles and her golden fields : 
 With grim delight the brood of winter view 
 A brighter day, and heavens of azure hue, 
 Scent the new fragrance of the breathing rose> 
 And quaff the pendant vintage as it grows "— 
 
 whilst one line, at least, lives in the memory of every lover 
 of poetry : 
 
 " When love could teach a monarch to be wise, 
 And Gospel-light first dawn? d from Bullerfs eyes." 
 
 On the 19th of August, 1748, Gray copied the first fifty- 
 seven lines of this poem in a letter he was writing to 
 Wharton, saying that his object would be to show that 
 education and government must concur in order to pro- 
 duce great and useful men. But as he was pursuing his 
 plan in the leisurely manner habitual to him, Montes- 
 quieu's celebrated work, & Esprit des Lois, was published, 
 and fell into his hands. He found, as he told Mason, 
 that the Baron had forestalled some of his best thoughts, 
 and from this time forth his interest in the scheme lan- 
 guished, and soon after it entirely lapsed. Some years 
 later he thought of taking it up again, and was about to 
 compose a prefatory Ode to M. de Montesquieu when that 
 writer died, on the 10th of February, 1755, and the whole 
 thing was abandoned. Gray's remarks on V Esprit des 
 
92 GRAY. [chap. iv. 
 
 Lois are in his clearest and acutest vein : " The subject 
 is as extensive as mankind ; the thoughts perfectly new, 
 generally admirable, as they are just ; sometimes a little 
 too refined ; in short, there are faults, but such as an or- 
 dinary man could never have committed : the style very 
 lively and concise, consequently sometimes obscure — it is 
 the gravity of Tacitus, whom he admires, tempered with 
 the gaiety and fire of a Frenchman." Gray was proba- 
 bly the only Englishman living capable of criticising a 
 new French book with this delicate justice. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 -SIX POEMS. DEATHS OF GRAY S AUNT 
 
 AND MOTHER. 
 
 Early in 1748 Dodsley published the first three volumes 
 of his useful miscellany, called A Collection of Poems, for 
 the plan of which he claimed an originality that it scarcely 
 deserved, since, like the earlier miscellanies of Gildon and 
 Tonson, it merely aimed at embracing in one work the 
 best scattered poetry of the day. In the second volume 
 were printed, without the author's name, three of Gray's 
 odes — those To Spring, On Mr, WalpoWs Cat, and the 
 Eton Ode, Almost all the poets of this age, and several 
 of the preceding, were contributors to the collection. 
 Pope, Green, and Tickell represented the past generation ; 
 whilst Collins, Dyer, and Shenstone, in the first volume ; 
 Lyttelton, Gilbert West, J. H. Browne, and Edwards, the 
 sonneteer, in the second volume ; and Joseph Warton, 
 Garrick, Mason, and Walpole himself, in the third volume, 
 showed to the best of their ability what English poetry in 
 that age was capable of; whilst three sturdy Graces, bare 
 and bold, adorned the title-page of each instalment, and 
 gave a kind of visible pledge that no excess of refinement 
 should mar the singing, even when Lowth, Bishop of 
 London, held the lyre. 
 
 As in the crisis of a national history some young man, 
 
94 GRAY. [chap^ 
 
 unknown before, leaps to the front by sheer force of char- 
 acter, and takes the helm of state before his elders, so in 
 the confusion and mutiny at the University the talents of 
 Dr. Edmund Keene, the new Master of Peterhouse, came 
 suddenly into notice, and from comparative obscurity he 
 rose at once into the fierce light that beats upon a success- 
 ful reformer. His energy and promptitude pointed him 
 out as a fit man to become Vice-chancellor in the troub- 
 lous year 1749, although he was only thirty -six years of 
 age, and it was practically owing to his quick eye and 
 hard hand that order was re-instated in the University. 
 With his Mastership of the college Gray began to take an 
 interest for the first time in Peterhouse, and cultivated the 
 acquaintance of Keene, in whom he discovered an energy 
 and practical power which he had never suspected. The 
 reign of Mum Sharp, as the undergraduates nicknamed 
 Keene, was as brief as it was brilliant. In 1752 the Gov- 
 ernment rewarded his action in the University with the see 
 of Chester, and two years later he resigned his nominal 
 headship of Peterhouse, dying Bishop of Ely nearly thirty 
 years afterwards. 
 
 At Pembroke Hall, meanwhile, all was going well at 
 last. In the spring of 1749 there was a pacification be- 
 tween the Master and the Fellows, and Pembroke, says 
 Gray to Wharton, "is all harmonious and delightful." 
 But the rumours of dissension had thinned the ranks of 
 the undergraduates ; " they have no boys at all, and unless 
 you can send us a hamper or two out of the North to be- 
 gin with, they will be like a few rats straggling about a 
 deserted dwelling-house. " 
 
 Gray was now about to enter the second main period of 
 his literary activity, and he opens it with a hopeless pro- 
 testation of his apathy and idleness. He writes (April 
 
v.] THE "ELEGY." 9h 
 
 25, 1749), from Cambridge, this amusing piece of proph 
 ecy : " The spirit of laziness, the spirit of this place, begins 
 to possess even me, that have so long declaimed against it. 
 Yet has it not so prevailed but that I feel that discontent 
 with myself, that ennui that ever accompanies it in its be- 
 ginnings. Time will settle my conscience, time will recon- 
 cile my languid companion ; we shall smoke, we shall tip- 
 ple, we shall doze together, we shall have our little jokes, 
 like other people, and our long stories. Brandy will finish 
 what port began ; and a month after the time you will see 
 in some corner of a London Evening Post, i Yesterday died 
 the Rev. Mr. John Gray, Senior Fellow of Clare Hall, a 
 facetious companion, and well respected by all that knew 
 him. His death is supposed to have been occasioned by a 
 fit of the apoplexy, being found fallen out of bed/ " But 
 this whimsical anticipation of death and a blundering mort- 
 uary inscription was startled out of his thoughts by the 
 sudden approach of death itself to one whom he dearly 
 loved. His aunt, Miss Mary Antrobus, died somewhat 
 suddenly, at the age of sixty-six, at Stoke, on the 5th of 
 November, 1749. The letter which Gray wrote to his 
 mother on receiving news of this event is so characteristic 
 of his wise and tender seriousness of character, and allows 
 us to observe so much more closely than usual the real 
 working of his mind, that no apology is needed for quot- 
 ing it here. It was written from Cambridge, on the 7th 
 of November, 1749 : 
 
 "The unhappy news I have just received from you equally sur- 
 prises and afflicts me. I have lost a person I loved very much, and 
 have been used to from my infancy ; but am much more concerned 
 for your loss, the circumstances of which I forbear to dwell upon, as 
 you must be too sensible of them yourself; and will, I fear, more and 
 more need a consolation that no one can give, except He who had 
 5* 
 
96 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 preserved her to you so many years, and at last, when it was His 
 pleasure, has taken her from us to Himself ; and, perhaps, if we re- 
 flect upon what she felt in this life, we may look upon this as an in- 
 stance of His goodness both to her and to those that loved her. She 
 might have languished many years before our eyes in a continual in- 
 crease of pain, and totally helpless ; she might have long wished to 
 end her misery without being able to attain it ; or perhaps even lost 
 all sense and yet continued to breathe ; a sad spectacle for such as 
 must have felt more .for her than she could have done for herself. 
 However you may deplore your own loss, yet think that she is at last 
 easy and happy, and has now more occasion to pity us than we her. 
 I hope, and beg, you will support yourself with that resignation we 
 owe to Him who gave us our being for good, and who deprives us of 
 it for the same reason. I would have come to you directly, but you 
 do not say whether you desire I should or not; if you do, I beg I 
 may know it, for there is nothing to hinder me, and I am in very 
 good health." 
 
 It is impossible to imagine anything more sweet-nat- 
 ured and unaffected than this letter, and it opens to us 
 for a moment the closed and sacred book of Gray's home- 
 life, those quiet autumn days of every year so peacefully 
 spent in loving and being loved by these three placid old 
 ladies at Stoke, in a warm atmosphere of musk and pot- 
 pourri. 
 
 The death of his aunt seems to have brought to his 
 recollection the Elegy in a Country Church-yard, begun 
 seven years before within sight of the ivy-clustered spire 
 under whose shadow she was laid. He seems to have 
 taken it in hand again, at Cambridge, in the winter of 
 1749, and tradition, which would fain see the poet always 
 writing in the very precincts of a church-yard, has fabled 
 that he wrote some stanzas amongst the tombs of Gran- 
 chester. He finished it, however, as he began it, at 
 Stoke-Pogis, giving the last touches to it on the 12th of 
 June, 1750. "Having put an end to a thing whose be- 
 
v.] THE "ELEGY." 97 
 
 ginning you have seen long ago," he writes on that day 
 to Horace Walpole, " I immediately send it to you. You 
 will, I hope, look upon it in the light of a thing with an 
 end to it : a merit that most of my writings have wanted, 
 and are like to want." Walpole was only too highly 
 delighted with this latest effusion of his friend, in which 
 he was acute enough to discern the elements of a lasting 
 success. It is curious to reflect upon the modest and 
 careless mode in which that poem was first circulated 
 which was destined to enjoy and to retain a higher repu- 
 tation in literature than any other English poem, perhaps 
 than any other poem of the world, written between Mil- 
 ton and Wordsworth. The fame of the Elegy has spread 
 to all countries, and has exercised an influence on all the 
 poetry of Europe, from Denmark to Italy, from France 
 to Russia. With the exception of certain works of By- 
 ron and Shakspeare, no English poem has been so widely 
 admired and imitated abroad; and, after more than a 
 century of existence, we find it as fresh as ever, when its 
 copies, even the most popular of all, Lamartine's Le Lac, 
 are faded and tarnished. It possesses the charm of in- 
 comparable felicity, of a melody that is not too subtle to 
 charm every ear, of a moral persuasiveness that appeals 
 to every generation, and of metrical skill that in each 
 line proclaims the master. The Elegy may almost be 
 looked upon as the typical piece of English verse, our 
 poem of poems f not that it is the most brilliant or orig- 
 inal or profound lyric in our language, but because it 
 combines in more balanced perfection than any other all 
 the qualities that go to the production of a fine poetical 
 effect. The successive criticisms of a swarm of Dryas- 
 dusts, each depositing his drop of siccative, the boundless 
 vogue and consequent profanation of stanza upon stanza, 
 

 98 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 the changes of fashion, the familiarity that breeds indif- 
 ference, all these things have not succeeded in destroying 
 the vitality of this humane and stately poem. The sol- 
 itary writer of authority who since the death of Johnson 
 has ventured to depreciate Gray's poetry, Mr. Swinburne, 
 who, in his ardour to do justice to Collins, has been deeply 
 and extravagantly unjust to the greater man, even he, 
 coming to curse, has been obliged to bless this " poem of 
 such high perfection and such universal appeal to the 
 tenderest and noblest depths of human feeling," admit- 
 ting, again, with that frankness which makes Mr. Swin- 
 burne the most generous of disputants, that " as an elegiac 
 poet Gray holds for all ages to come his unassailable and 
 sovereign station." 
 
 We may well leave to its fate a poem with so splendid 
 a history, a poem more thickly studded with phrases that 
 have become a part and parcel of colloquial speech than 
 any other piece, even of Shakspcare's, consisting of so few 
 consecutive lines. A word or two, however, may not be 
 out of place in regard to its form and the literary his- 
 tory of its composition. The heroic quatrain, in the use 
 of which, here and elsewhere, Gray easily excels all other 
 English writers, was not new to our literature. Amongst 
 the Pembroke MSS. I find copious notes by Gray on the 
 JVosce Teipsum of Sir John Davies, a beautiful philosoph- 
 ical poem first printed in 1599, and composed in this 
 measure. Davenant had chosen the same for his fragmen- 
 tary epic of Gondibert, and Dry den for his metallic and 
 gorgeous poem of the Annus Mirabilis. AH these essays 
 were certainly known to Gray, and he was possibly not 
 uninfluenced by the Love Elegies of James Hammond, a 
 young cousin of Horace Walpole's, who had died in 1742, 
 and had affected to be the Tibullus of the a^e. Hammond 
 
v.] THE " ELEGY." 99 
 
 had more taste than genius, yet after reading, with much 
 fatigue, his forgotten elegies, I cannot avoid the impression 
 that Gray was influenced by this poetaster, in the matter 
 of form, more than by any other of his contemporaries. 
 A familiar quotation of West — 
 
 " Ah me ! what boots us all our boasted power, 
 Our golden treasure and our purple state ? 
 They cannot ward the inevitable hour, 
 Nor stay the fearful violence of fate " — 
 
 was probably the wild-wood stock on which Gray grafted 
 his wonderful rose of roses, borrowing something from all 
 his predecessors, but justifying every act of plagiarism by 
 the brilliance of his new combination. Even the tiresome 
 singsong of Hammond became in Gray's hands an instru- 
 ment of infinite variety and beauty, as if a craftsman by 
 the mere touch of his fingers should turn ochre into gold. 
 The measure itself, from first to last, is an attempt to 
 render in English the solemn alternation of passion and 
 reserve, the interchange of imploring and desponding 
 tones, that is found in the Latin elegiac, and Gray gave his 
 poem, when he first published it, an outward resemblance 
 to the text of Tibullus by printing it without any stanzaic 
 pauses. It is in this form and with the original spelling 
 that the poem appears in an exquisite little volume, pri- 
 vately printed a few years ago at the Cambridge Univer- 
 sity Press, in which Mr. Munro has placed his own Ovidi- 
 an translation of the Elegy opposite the original text : as 
 pretty a tribute as was ever paid by one great University 
 scholar to the memory of another. 
 
 Wal pole's enthusiasm for the Elegy in a Country 
 Church-yard led him to commit the grave indiscretion 
 of handing it about from, friend to friend, and even of 
 
100 GRAY. 
 
 [chap. ♦ 
 
 distributing manuscript copies of it, without Gray's cogni- 
 zance. At the Manor House at Stoke, Lady Cobham, who 
 seems to have known Horace Walpole, read the Elegy in 
 a Country Church-yard in manuscript before it had been 
 many months in existence, and conceived a violent desire 
 to know the author. So quiet was Gray, and so little in- 
 clined to assert his own personality, that she was unaware 
 that he and she had lived together in the same country 
 parish for several years, until a Rev. Mr. Robert Purt, a 
 Cambridge Fellow settled at Stoke, told her that " there- 
 abouts there lurked a wicked imp they call a poet." Mr. 
 Purt, however, enjoyed a very slight acquaintance with 
 Gray (he was offended shortly afterwards at the introduc- 
 tion of his name into the Long Story, and very properly 
 died of small-pox immediately), and could not venture to 
 introduce him to her ladyship. Lady Cobham, however, 
 had a guest staying with her, a Lady Schaub, who knew 
 a friend of Gray's, a Lady Brown. On this very meagre 
 introduction Lady Schaub and Miss Speed, the niece of 
 Lady Cobham, were persuaded by her ladyship, who shot 
 her arrow like Teucer from behind the shield of Ajax, to 
 call boldly upon Gray. They did so in the summer of 
 1751, but when they had crossed the fields to West-End 
 House they found that the poet had gone out for a walk. 
 They begged the ladies to say nothing of their visit, but 
 they left amongst the papers in Gray's study this piquant 
 little note : " Lady Schaub's compliments to Mr. Gray ; she 
 is sorry not to have found him at home, to tell him that 
 Lady Brown is very well." This little adventure assumed 
 the hues of mystery and romance in so uneventful a life 
 as Gray's, and curiosity combined with good-manners to 
 make him put his shyness in his pocket and return Lady 
 Schaub's polite but eccentric call. That far-reaching spi- 
 
 
v.] THE "ELEGY." 101 
 
 der, the Viscountess Cobham, bad now fairly caught him 
 in her web, and for the remaining nine years of her life 
 she and her niece, Miss Speed, were his fast friends. In- 
 deed, his whole life might have been altered if Lady Cob- 
 ham had had her way, for it seems certain that she would 
 have been highly pleased to have seen him the husband 
 of Harriet Speed and inheritor of the fortunes of the 
 family. At one time Gray seems to have been really 
 frightened lest they should marry him suddenly, against 
 his will ; and perhaps he almost wished they would. At 
 all events the only lines of his which can be called ama- 
 tory were addressed to Miss Speed. She was seven years 
 his junior, and when she was nearly forty she married a 
 very young French officer, and went to live abroad, to 
 which events, not uninteresting to Gray, we shall return 
 in their proper place. 
 
 The romantic incidents of the call just described in- 
 spired Gray with his fantastic account of them given in 
 the Long Story. He dwells on the ancient seat of the 
 Huntingdons and Hattons, from the door of which one 
 morning issued 
 
 " A brace of warriors, not in buff, 
 
 But rustling in their silks and tissues. 
 
 " The first came cap-a-pee from France, 
 
 Her conquering destiny fulfilling, 
 
 Whom meaner beauties eye askance, 
 
 And vainly ape her art of killing. 
 
 " The other Amazon kind Heaven 
 
 Had armed with spirit, wit, and satire ; 
 But Cobham had the polish given, 
 
 And tipped her arrows with good-nature. 
 

 102 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 " With bonnet blue and capuchine, 
 
 And aprons long, they hid their armour ; 
 And veiled their weapons, bright and keen, 
 In pity to the country farmer." 
 
 These warriors sallied forth in the cause of a lady of 
 high degree, who had just heard that the parish contained 
 a poet, and who 
 
 " Swore by her coronet and ermine 
 
 She'd issue out her high commission 
 To rid the manor of such vermin." 
 
 At last they discover his lowly haunt, and bounce in 
 without so much as a tap at the door : 
 
 " The trembling family they daunt, 
 
 They flirt, they sing, they laugh, they tattle; 
 Rummage his mother, pinch his aunt, 
 And up-stairs in a whirlwind rattle : 
 
 " Each hole and cupboard they explore, 
 Each creek and cranny of his chamber, 
 Run hurry-scurry round the floor, 
 And o'er the bed and tester clamber : 
 
 "Into the drawers and china pry, 
 
 Papers and books, a huge imbroglio ; 
 Under a teacup he might lie, 
 
 Or creased, like dog's-ears, in a folio." 
 
 The pitying Muses, however, have conveyed him away, 
 and the proud Amazons are obliged to retreat; but they 
 have the malignity to leave a spell behind them, which 
 their victim finds when he slinks back to his home : 
 
 " The words too eager to unriddle 
 The poet felt a strange disorder ; 
 Transparent bird-lime formed the middle, 
 And chains invisible the border. 
 
v.] THE " ELEGY." 103 
 
 "So cunning was the apparatus, 
 
 The powerful pot-hooks did so move him, 
 That, will he nill he, to the great house 
 He went as if the devil drove him." 
 
 When he arrives at the Manor House, of course, he is 
 dragged before the great lady, and is only saved from 
 destruction by her sudden fit of clemency : 
 
 " The ghostly prudes with haggard face 
 Already had condemned the sinner. 
 My lady rose, and with a grace — 
 
 She smiled, and bid him come to dinner." 
 
 All this is excellent fooling, charmingly arch and easy in 
 its humorous romance, and highly interesting as a pict- 
 ure of Gray's home-life. In the Pembroke MS. of the 
 Long Story he says that he wrote it in August, 1750. 
 It was included in the semi-private issue of the Six 
 Poems in 1753, but in no other collection published 
 daring Gray's lifetime. He considered its allusions too 
 personal to be given to the public. 
 
 In this one instance Walpole's indiscretion in circu- 
 lating the Elegy brought Gray satisfaction ; in others it 
 annoyed him. On the 10th of February, 1751, he re- 
 ceived a rather impertinently civil letter from the pub- 
 lisher of a periodical called the Magazine of Magazines, 
 coolly informing him that he was actually printing his 
 " ingenious poem called Reflections in a Country Church- 
 ! yard," and praying for his indulgence and the honour of 
 I his correspondence. Gray immediately wrote to Horace 
 Walpole (February 11) : " As I am not at all disposed to 
 j be either so indulgent or so correspondent as they de- 
 ! sire, I have but one bad way left to escape the honour 
 they would inflict upon me : and therefore am obliged to 
 
104 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 desire you would make Dodsley print it immediately 
 (which may be done in less than a week's time) from 
 your copy, but without my name, in what form is most 
 convenient for him, but on his best paper and character; 
 he must correct the press himself, and print it without 
 any interval between the stanzas, because the sense is in 
 some places continued without them." All this was done 
 with extraordinary promptitude, and five days after this 
 letter of Gray's, on the 16th of February, 1751, Dodsley 
 published a large quarto pamphlet, anonymous, price six- 
 pence, entitled An Elegy wrote in a Country Church- 
 yard. It was preceded by a short advertisement, un- 
 signed, but written by Horace Walpole. At this point 
 may be inserted a note, which Gray has appended in the 
 margin of the Pembroke MS. of this poem. It settles a 
 point of bibliography which has been discussed by com- 
 mentator after commentator: 
 
 "Published in Feb^', 1751, by Dodsley, & went thro' four editions, 
 in two months ; and afterwards a fifth, 6 th , 7 th , & 8 th , 9 th , 10 th , & 11 th , 
 printed also in 1753 with Mr. Bentley's Designs, of w ch there is a 2 d 
 edition, & again by Dodsley in his Miscellany vol. 4 th & in a Scotch 
 Collection calPd the Union; translated into Latin by Ch r : Anstey, 
 Esq. and the Rev d M r * Roberts, & published in 1762, & again in the 
 same year by Rob : Lloyd, M. A." 
 
 Gray here cites fifteen authorised editions of the Eng- 
 lish text of the Elegy ; its pirated editions were count- 
 less. The Magazine of Magazines persisted, although 
 Gray had been neither indulgent nor correspondent, and 
 the poem appeared in the issue for February, published, 
 as was then the habit of periodicals, on the last of that 
 month. The London Magazine stole it for its issue for 
 March, and the Grand Magazine of Magazines copied it 
 in April. Everybody read it, in town and country; 
 
v.] THE "ELEGY." 105 
 
 Shenstone, far away from the world of books, had seen it 
 before the 28th of March. It achieved a complete popu- 
 lar success from the very first, and the name of its author 
 gradually crept into notoriety. The attribution of the 
 Elegy to Gray was more general than has been supposed. 
 A pamphlet, printed soon after this date, speaks of " the 
 Maker of the Church-yard Essay" as being a Cambridge 
 celebrity whose claims to preferment had been notoriously 
 overlooked ; and by far the cleverest of all the parodies, 
 An Evening Contemplation, 1753, a poem of special in- 
 terest to students of university manners, is preceded by 
 an elaborate compliment to Gray. The success of his 
 poem, however, brought him little direct satisfaction, and 
 no money. He gave the right of publication to Dods- 
 ley, as he did in all other instances. He had a Quixotic 
 notion that it was beneath a gentleman to take money 
 for his inventions from a bookseller, a view in which 
 Dodsley warmly coincided; and it was stated by another 
 bookseller, who after Gray's death contended with Mason, 
 that Dodsley was known to have made nearly a thousand 
 pounds by the poetry of Gray. Mason had no such 
 scruples as his friend, and made frantic efforts to regain 
 Gray's copyright, launching vainly into litigation on the 
 subject, and into unseemly controversy. 
 
 The autumn of 1750 had been marked in Gray's un- 
 eventful annals by the death of Dr. Middleton, and by 
 the visit of a troublesome Indian cousin, Mrs. Forster, 
 who stayed a month in London, and wearied Gray by her 
 insatiable craving after sight-seeing. In Conyers Middle- 
 ton, who died on the 28th of July, 1750, at the age of 
 sixty-seven, Gray lost one of his most familiar and most 
 intellectual associates, a person of extraordinary talents, to 
 whom, without ever becoming attached, he had become 
 
106 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 accustomed. His remark on the event is full of his fine 
 reserve and sobriety of feeling: "You have doubtless 
 heard of the loss I have had in Dr. Middleton, whose 
 house was the only easy place one could find to converse 
 in at Cambridge. For my part, I find a friend so uncom- 
 mon a thing, that I cannot help regretting even an old 
 acquaintance, which is an indifferent likeness of it ; and 
 though I don't approve the spirit of his books, methinks 
 'tis pity the world should lose so rare a thing as a good 
 writer." 
 
 In the same letter he tells Wharton that he himself is 
 neither cheerful nor easy in bodily health, and yet has the 
 mortification to find his spiritual part the most infirm 
 thing about him. He is applying himself heartily to the 
 study of zoology, and has procured for that purpose the 
 works of M. de Buffon. In reply to Wharton's urgent 
 entreaties for a visit he agrees that he " could indeed wish 
 to refresh my kvepyita a little at Durham by a sight of 
 you, but when is there a probability of my being so hap- 
 py?" However, it seems that he would have contrived 
 this expedition, had it not been for the aforesaid cousin, 
 Mrs. Forster, " a person as strange, and as much to seek, 
 as though she had been born in the mud of the Ganges." 
 At the same time he warns Wharton against returning to 
 Cambridge, saying that Mrs. Wharton will find life very 
 dreary in a place where women are so few, and those 
 " squeezy and formal, little skilled in amusing themselves 
 or other people. All I can say is, she must try to make 
 up for it amongst the men, who are not over-agreeable 
 neither." 
 
 In spite of this warning the Whartons appear to have 
 come back to Cambridge. At all events, we find Dr. 
 Wharton wavering between that town and Bath as the 
 
 
v.] THE "ELEGY." 107 
 
 best place for him to practise in as a physician, and there- 
 upon there follows a gap of two years in Gray's corre- 
 spondence with him. The affectionate familiarity of the 
 poet with both Dr. and Mrs. Wharton when they re-emerge 
 in his correspondence, the pet names he has for the chil- 
 dren, and the avuncular air of intimacy implied, make it 
 almost certain that in 1751 and 1752 he had the pleasure 
 of seeing these dear friends settled at his side, and enjoyed 
 in their family circle the warmth and brightness of a 
 home* At all events, after the publication of the Elegy, 
 Gray is once more lost to us for two years, most unac- 
 countably, since, if the Whartons were close beside him, 
 and Mason across the street at Pembroke, Walpole all this 
 time was exercising his vivacious and importunate pen at 
 Strawberry Hill, and trying to associate Gray in all his 
 schemes .and fancies. V 
 
 One of Walpole's sudden whims was a friendship for 
 that eccentric and dissipated person, Eichard Bentley, only 
 son of the famous Master of Trinity, whose acquaintance 
 Walpole made in 1750. This man was an amateur artist 
 of more than usual talent, an elegant scholar in his way, 
 and with certain frivolous gifts of manner that were alter- 
 nately pleasing and displeasing to Walpole. The artistic 
 merit of Bentley was exaggerated in his own time and 
 has been underrated since, nor does there now exist any 
 important relic of it except his designs for Gray's poems. 
 In the summer of 1752 Horace Walpole seems to have 
 suggested to Dodsley the propriety of publishing an edi- 
 tion de luxe of Gray, with Bentley's illustrations ; but as 
 early as June, 1751, these illustrations were being made. 
 As Gray gave the poems for nothing, and as Walpole paid 
 Bentley to draw and Miiller to engrave the illustrations, 
 it is not surprising that Dodsley was eager to close with 
 
108 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 the offer. Bentley threw himself warmly into the project ; 
 it is quite certain that he consulted Gray step by step, for 
 the designs show an extraordinary attention to the details! 
 and even to the hints of the text. Most probably the! 
 three gentlemen amused themselves during the long va- 
 cation of 1752 by concocting the whole thing together. 
 Gray, who, it must be remembered, was a connoisseur in 
 painting, was so much impressed by Bentley's talents and 
 versatility, that he addressed to him a copy of beautiful 
 verses, which unfortunately existed only in a single manu- 
 script, and had been torn before Mason found them. In 1 1 
 these he says : 
 
 " The tardy rhymes that used to linger on, 
 To censure cold, and negligent of fame, 
 In swifter measures animated run, 
 And catch a lustre from his genuine flame. 
 
 "Ah ! could they catch his strength, his easy grace, 
 His quick creation, his unerring line, 
 The energy of Pope they might efface, 
 And Dryden's harmony submit to mine. 
 
 " But not to one in this benighted age 
 Is that diviner inspiration given, 
 That burns in Shakspeare's or in Milton's page, 
 The pomp and prodigality of heaven. 
 
 " As when, conspiring in the diamond's blaze, 
 The meaner gems that singly charm the sight 
 Together dart their intermingled rays, 
 And dazzle with a luxurv of light." 
 
 This is the Lan dorian manner of praising, and almost 
 the only instance of a high note of enthusiasm in the en- 
 tire writings of Gray. Bentley was not ludicrously un- 
 worthy of such eulogy ; his designs are extremely remark- 
 
 
v.] SIX POEMS. 109 
 
 able in their way. In an age entirely given up to com- 
 posed and conventional forms he seems to have drawn 
 from nature and to have studied the figure from life. 
 
 Early in March, 1753, the Poemata-Grayo-Bentleiana, as 
 Walpole called them, appeared, a small, thin folio, on very 
 thick paper, printed only on one side, and entitled Designs 
 by Mr. R. Bentley for Six Poems by Mr. T. Gray. This is 
 the editio princeps of Gray's collected poems, and consists 
 of the Ode to Spring (here simply called Ode), and of the 
 Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, of both of which it 
 was the second edition ; a third edition of the Eton Ode ; a 
 first appearance of A Long Story and Hymn to Adversity ; 
 and a twelfth edition of the Elegy written in a Country 
 Church-yard. Bentley's illustrations consist of a frontis- 
 piece, and a full-page design for each poem, with head- 
 pieces, tail-pieces, and initial letters. The frontispiece is a 
 border of extremely ingenious rococo ornament surround- 
 ing a forest glade, in which Gray, a graceful little figure, 
 sits in a pensive attitude. This has a high value for us, 
 since, to any one accustomed to the practice of art, it is 
 obvious that this is a sketch from life, not a composed 
 study, and we have here in all probability a portrait of the 
 poet in his easiest attitude. The figure is that of a young 
 man, of small stature, but elegantly made, with a melan- 
 choly and downcast countenance. 
 
 The portraiture becomes still more certain when we turn 
 to the indiscreet, but extremely interesting, design for A 
 Long Story, where we not only have a likeness of Gray in 
 1753, which singularly resembles the more elaborate por- 
 trait of him painted by Eckhardt in 1747, but we have 
 also Lady Schaub, Mr. Purt, and, what is most interesting 
 of all, the pretty, delicate features of Miss Speed. The 
 Rev. Mr. Purt is represented as blowing the trumpet of 
 
110 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 Fame, whilst the Amazon ladies fly through the air, seek- 
 ing for their victim the poet, who is being concealed by the 
 Muses otherwhere than in a gorge of Parnassus. The de- ' 
 signs are engraved on copper by two well-known men of 
 that day. The best are by John Sebastian M tiller, some of 
 whose initial letters are simply exquisite in execution ; the 
 rest are the work of a man of greater reputation in that 
 day, Charles Grignion, whose work in this instance lacks 
 the refinement of Miiller's, which is indeed of a very high 
 order. Grignion was the last survivor amongst persons as- 
 sociated with the early and middle life of Gray ; he lived 
 to be nearly a hundred years old, and died as late as 1810. 
 It might be supposed that the merits of the designs to the 
 Six Poems lay in the interpretation given by engravers of 
 so much talent to poor drawings, but we happen to pos- 
 sess Gray's implicit statement that this was not the case. 
 If, therefore, we are to consider Bentley responsible, for 
 instance, for such realistic forms as the nude figures in the 
 head-piece to the Hymn to Adversity, or for such feeling 
 for foliage as is shown in the head and tail pieces to the 
 first ode, we must claim for him a higher place in English 
 art than has hitherto been conceded to him. At all events 
 the Six Poems of 1753 is one of the few really beautiful 
 books produced from an English press during the middle 
 of the eighteenth century, and in spite of its rococo style 
 it is still a desirable possession. 
 
 It is pleasant to think of Gray reclining in the blue par- 
 lour over the supper-room at Strawberry Hill, turning over 
 prints with Horace Walpole, and glancing down the gar- 
 den to the Thames that flashed in silver behind the syrin- 
 gas and honeysuckles; or seated, with a little touch of sen- 
 tentious gravity, in the library, chiding Chute and their 
 host for their frivolous taste in heraldry, or incited by 
 
t.] DEATH OF GRAY'S MOTHER. Ill 
 
 the dark panels and the old brass grate to chat of archi- 
 tecture and decoration, and the new-found mysteries of 
 Gothic. It is, perhaps, pleasanter still to think of him 
 dreaming in the garden of Stoke-Pogis, or chatting over a 
 dish of tea with his old aunts, as he called his mother and 
 his aunt collectively, or strolling, with a book in his hand, 
 along the southward ridge of meadows to pay Lady Cob- 
 ham a stately call, or flirt a little with Miss Harriet Speed. 
 
 But this quietude was not to last much longer. Wal- 
 pole, indeed, was surprised to have a visit from him in 
 January, 1753, just when Bentley's prints were going to 
 press, for Gray had been suddenly called up from Cam- 
 bridge to Stoke by the news of his mother's illness. He 
 had not expected to find her alive, but when he arrived 
 she was much better, and remained so for more than a 
 month. He did not choose, however, to leave her, and 
 was at Stoke when the proof of Bentley's cul-de-lampe for 
 the Elegy arrived. This represents a village funeral ; and 
 being examined by the old ladies, was conceived by them 
 to be a burying-ticket. They asked him whether any- 
 body had left him a ring ; and hereupon follows a remark 
 which shows that Gray had never mentioned to his mother 
 or either of his aunts that he wrote verses ; nor would 
 now do so, lest they should " burn me for a poet." A 
 week or two later, Walpole and Gray very nearly had an- 
 other quarrel. Walpole, in his officiousness, had had Eck- 
 hardt's portrait of Gray, which hung in the library at 
 Strawberry Hill, engraved for the Six Poems, a step which, 
 taken as it was without the poet's cognizance, drew down 
 on Walpole an excessively sharp letter — "Gray does not 
 hate to find fault with me " — and a final veto on any such- 
 parade of personality. 
 
 Mrs. Gray soon ceased to rally, and after a painful strug- 
 6 
 
.. 
 
 112 GRAY. [ch 
 
 gle for life, expired on the 11th of March, 1*753, at the age 
 of sixty-seven. Her son saw her buried, in the family 
 tomb, on the south side of the church -yard, near th 
 church, where may still be read the exquisitely simple and 
 affecting epitaph which he inscribed on her tombstone : 
 
 " In the same pious confidence, beside her friend and sister, here 
 sleep the remains of Dorothy Gray, widow, the careful, tender mothed 
 of many children, one of whom alone had the misfortune to survive 
 her." 
 
 When, a few months later, Mason had been standing by 
 the death-bed of his father, and spoke to his friend of thdl I 
 awe that he experienced, Gray's thoughts went back to hia I 
 mother, and he wrote: "I have seen the scene you dell 
 scribe, and know how dreadful it is : I know too I am the 
 better for it. We are all idle and thoughtless things, and 
 have no sense, no use in the world any longer than that 
 sad impression lasts ; the deeper it is engraved the better. n J 
 These are the words which came into Byron's memory! I 
 when he received the news of his mother's death. 
 
 The Whartons had by this time returned to Durham, 
 and thither at last, in the autumn of 1753, Gray resolved 
 to visit them. He had been unable to remain at Stoke 
 now that it was haunted by the faces of the dead that he} 
 had loved, and he went into tliese lodgings over the ho- 
 sier's shop in the eastern part of Jermyn Street, which were 
 his favourite haunt in London. He left town for Cam- 
 bridge in May, and in June wrote to Wharton to say that 
 he was at last going to set out with Stonehewer in a post- 
 chaise for the North. In the middle of July they started, 
 proceeding leisurely by Belvoir, Burleigh, and York, takingl 
 a week to reach Studley. The journey was very agree-j 
 able, and every place on the route which offered anything 
 curious in architecture, the subject at this moment most in] 
 
v.] DEATH OF GRAY'S MOTHER. 118 
 
 Gray's thoughts, was visited and described in the note- 
 book. Gray remained for two whole months and more 
 in Dr. Wharton's house at Durham, associating with the 
 Bishop, Dr. Trevor, and having " one of the most beauti- 
 ful vales in England to walk in, with prospects that change 
 every ten steps, and open something new wherever I turn 
 me, all rude and romantic." It had been proposed that 
 on the return journey he should visit Mason at Hull, but 
 the illness of that gentleman's father prevented this scheme, 
 and the friends met at York instead. Gray travelled south- 
 wards for two days with " a Lady Swinburne, a Roman 
 Catholic, not young, that has been much abroad, seen a 
 great deal, knew a great many people, very chatty and 
 communicative, so that I passed my time very well." I 
 regret that the now-living and illustrious descendant of 
 this amusing lady is unable to tell me anything definite 
 of her history. 
 
 Gray came back to Cambridge to find the lime-trees 
 changing colour, stayed there one day, and was just pre- 
 paring to proceed to his London lodgings, when an express 
 summoned him to Stoke, where his aunt, Mrs. Rogers, had 
 suffered a stroke of the palsy. He arrived on the 6th of 
 October, to find everything " resounding with the wood- 
 lark and robin, and the voice of the sparrow heard in 
 the land." His aunt, who was in her seventy-eighth year, 
 had rallied to a surprising degree, and her recovery was 
 not merely temporary. It would seem, from an expres- 
 sion in one of his letters, that his paternal aunt, Mrs. 
 Oliffe, had now gone down from Norwich to Stoke, to 
 live with Mrs. Rogers. I do not remember that the his- 
 tory of literature presents , us with the memoirs of any 
 other poet favoured by nature with so many aunts as Gray 
 possessed. Stoke was not a home for Gray with Mrs/ 
 
114 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 Rogers bedridden and with Mrs. Oliffe for its other in- 
 mate. The hospitable AVhartons seem again to have taken 
 pity on trim, and he went from Jenny n Street up to Dur- 
 ham to spend with them Christmas of this same year, 1753. 
 Walpole remarked that Gray was u in flower" during 
 these years, 1750- 55. It was the blossoming of a shrub 
 which throws out only one bud each season, and that bud 
 sometimes nipped by an untimely frost. The rose on 
 Gray's thorn for 1754 was an example of these blighted! 
 flowers that never fully expanded. The Ode on Vicissw 
 tude, which was found, after the poet's death, in a pocket-? 
 book of that year, should have been one of his finest pro-* 
 ductions, but it is unrevised, and hopelessly truncated. | 
 Poor Mason rushed in where a truer poet might havel 
 feared to tread, and clipped the straggling lines, and 
 finished it; six complete stanzas, however, are the gen- 
 uine work of Gray. The verse-form has a catch in thej 
 third line, which is, perhaps, the most delicate metrical! 
 effect Gray ever attained ; whilst some of the nature-paint- j 
 ing in the poem is really exquisite : 
 
 " New-born flocks, in rustic dance, 
 
 Frisking ply their feeble feet ; 
 Forgetful of their wintry trance, 
 
 The birds his presence greet ; 
 But chief the skylark warbles high 
 His trembling, thrilling ecstasy, 
 And, lessening from the dazzled sight, 
 Melts into air and liquid light." 
 
 Here is a stanza which might almost be Wordsworth's : 
 
 " See the wretch, that long has tost 
 On the thorny bed of pain, 
 At length repair his vigour lost, 
 And breathe and walk again : 
 
<r] THE "ODE ON VICISSITUDES 115 
 
 The meanest floweret of the vale, 
 The simplest note that swells the gale, 
 The common sun, the air, the skies, 
 To him are opening paradise." 
 
 That graceful trifler with metre, the sprightly Gresset, 
 had written an Upitre a ma Soeur to which Gray frankly 
 avowed that he owed the idea of his poem on Vicissitude. 
 But it was only a few commonplaces which the English 
 poet borrowed from the French one, who might, indeed, 
 remind him that — 
 
 " Mille spectacles, qu'autrefois 
 On voyait avec nonchalance, 
 Transportent aujourd'hui, presentant des appas 
 Inconnus a Pindifference " — 
 
 but was quite incapable of Gray's music and contempla- 
 tive felicities. This Ode on Vicissitude seems, in some 
 not very obvious way, to be connected with the death of 
 Pope. It is possible that these were the " few autumn 
 | verses" which Gray began to write on that occasion. His 
 manner of composition, his slow, half-hearted, desultory 
 ! touch, his whimsical fits of passing inspiration, are unique 
 in their kind ; there never was a professional poet whose 
 mode was so thoroughly that of the amateur. 
 
 A short prose treatise, first printed in 1814, and named 
 i by the absurd Mathias Architectura Gothica, although the 
 I subject of it is purely Norman architecture, seems to be- 
 long to this year, 1754. Gray was the first man in Eng- 
 land to understand architecture scientifically, and his taste 
 was simply too pure to be comprehended in an age that 
 took William Kent for its architectural prophet. Even 
 amongst those persons of refined feeling who desired to 
 cultivate a taste for old English buildings there was a sud 
 absence of exact knowledge. Akenside thought that the 
 
116 GRAY. [chap. v. 
 
 ruins of Persepolis formed a beautiful example of the 
 Gothic style ; and we know that Horace Walpole dazzled 
 his contemporaries with the gimcrack pinnacles of Straw- 
 berry Hill. We may see from Bentley's frontispiece to 
 the Elegy, where a stucco moulding is half torn away, and 
 reveals a pointed arch of brick-work, that even amongst 
 the elect the true principles of Gothic architecture were 
 scarcely understood. What Georgian amateurs really ad- 
 mired was a grotto with cockle-shells and looking-glass, 
 such as the Greatheads made at Guy's Cliff, or such fol- 
 lies in foliage as Shenstone perpetrated at Leasowes. Gray 
 strove hard to clear his memory of all such trifling, and 
 to arm his reason against arguments such as those of Po- 
 cocke, who held that the Gothic arch was a degradation 
 of the Moorish cupola, or of Batty Langley, who invented 
 five orders in a new style of his own. Gray's treatise on 
 Norman architecture is so sound and learned that it is 
 much to be regretted that he has not left us more of his 
 architectural essays. He formed his opinions from per- 
 sonal observation and measurement. Amongst the Pem- 
 broke MSS. there are copious notes of a tour in the Fens, 
 during which he jotted down the characteristics of all the 
 principal minsters, as far as Crowland and Boston. It is 
 not too much to say that Gray was the first modern stu- 
 dent of the history of architecture. Norton Nichols has 
 recorded that when certain would-be people of taste were 
 wrangling about the style in which some ancient building 
 was constructed, Gray cut the discussion short by saying, 
 in the spirit of Mr. Ruskin, " Call it what you please, but 
 allow that it is beautiful." He did not approve of WaL- 
 pole's Gothic constructions at Strawberry Hill, and frankly 
 told him, when he was shown the gilding and the glass, 
 that he had " degenerated into finery." 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE PINDARIC ODES. 
 
 It is not known at what time Gray resolved on composing 
 poems which should resemble in stanzaic structure the tri- 
 umphal odes or epinikia of Pindar, but it is certain that to- 
 wards the close of 1754 he completed one such elaborate 
 lyric. On the 26th of December of that year he gave the 
 finishing touches to an " ode in the Greek manner," and 
 sent it from Cambridge to Dr. Wharton, with the remark, 
 I If this be as tedious to you as it is grown to me, I shall 
 be sorry that I sent it you. ... I desire you would by 
 no means suffer this to be copied, nor even show it, unless 
 to very few, and especially not to mere scholars, that can 
 fecan all the measures in Pindar, and say the scholia by 
 heart." Months later Mason was pleading for a copy, but 
 in vain. The poem thrown off so indifferently was that 
 now known to us as The Progress of Poesy, and it marked 
 a third and final stage in Gray's poetical development. In 
 the early odes he had written for his contemporaries; in 
 the Elegy in a Country Church-yard he had written for 
 all the world; in the Pindaric Odes he was now to write 
 for poets. In the Elegy he had dared to leave those trod- 
 den paths of phraseology along which the critics of the 
 hour, the quibbling Hurds and Warburtons, could follow 
 him step by step, but his startling felicities had carried his 
 
118 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 readers captive by their appeal to a common humanity. 
 He was now about to launch upon a manner of writing in 
 which he could no longer be accompanied by the plaudits 
 of the vulgar, and where his style could no longer appeal 
 with security to the sympathy of the critics. He was now, 
 in other words, about to put out his most original qualities 
 in poetry. 
 
 That he could not hope for popularity he was aware at 
 the outset : " Be assured," he consoled his friends, " that 
 my taste for praise is not like that of children for fruit : 
 if there were nothing but medlars and blackberries in the 
 world, I could be very well content to go without any at 
 all." He could wait patiently for the suffrage of his peers. 
 The very construction of the poem was a puzzle to his 
 friends, although it is one of the most intelligibly and 
 rationally built of all the odes in the language. It is, in 
 point of fact, a poem of three stanzas, in an elaborately 
 consistent verse-form, with forty-one lines in each stanza. 
 The length of these periods is relieved by the regular di- 
 vision of each stanza into strophe, antistrophe, and epode, 
 the same plan having been used by no previous English 
 poet but Congreve, who had written in 1705 a learned and 
 graceful Discourse on the Pindarique Ode, which Gray was 
 possibly acquainted with. Congreve's practice, however, 
 had been as unsatisfactory as his theory was excellent, 
 and Gray was properly the first poet to comprehend and 
 follow the mode of Pindar. 
 
 Mr. Matthew Arnold has pointed out that the evolution 
 of The Progress of Poesy is no less noble and sound than 
 its style. It is worthy of remark that the power of evolu- 
 tion has not been common amongst lyrical poets even of a 
 high rank. Even in Milton it is strangely absent, and we 
 feel that all his odes, beautiful as they are, do not bud and 
 
vi. J THE PINDARIC ODES. 119 
 
 branch and fall in fruit, closing with the exhaustion of 
 their functions, but merely cease, because all poems must 
 stop somewhere. The Nativity Ode does not close because 
 the poet has nothing more to say, but merely because " 'tis 
 time our tedious song should here have ending." In Col- 
 lins, surely, we find the same failing ; the poem is a burst 
 of emotion, but not an organism. The much-lauded Ode 
 to Liberty, with its opening peal of trumpet-music, ends 
 with a foolish abruptness, as if the poet had got tired of 
 his instrument and had thrown it away. Shelley, again, in 
 his longer odes, seems to lose himself in beautiful, mean- 
 dering oratory, and to stop, as he began, in response to a 
 mere change of purpose. Keats, on the other hand, is al- 
 ways consistent in his evolution, and so is Wordsworth at 
 his more elevated moments ; the same may even be re- 
 marked of a poet infinitely below these in intellectual 
 value, Edgar Poe. Gray, however, is the main example 
 in our literature of a poet possessing this Greek quality 
 of structure in his lyrical work, and it is to be noted that 
 throughout his career it never left him, even on occasions 
 when he was deserted by every other form of inspiration. 
 His poems, whatever they are, are never chains of consecu- 
 tive stanzas ; each line, each group of lines, has its proper 
 place in a structure that could not be shorter or longer 
 without a radical re-arrangement of ideas. 
 
 . The strophe of the opening stanza of The Progress of 
 Poesy invokes that lyre of iEolian strings, the breathings 
 of those ^Eolian flutes, which Pindar had made the symbol 
 of the art of poetry, and the sources, progress, and various 
 motion of that art, " enriching every subject wuh a pomp 
 of diction and luxuriant harmony of numbers," are de- 
 scribed under the image of a thousand descending streams. 
 The antistrophe returns to the consideration of the power 
 I 6* 
 
120 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 of poetry, not now in motion, but an alluring and sooth- 
 ing force around which the Passions throng and are sub- 
 dued, a thought being here borrowed apparently from 
 Collins; the epode continues and combines these two 
 strains of thought, and shows that poetry, whether in 
 motion or at rest, is working the good-will of Love, who 
 deigns herself to move in a rhythmic harmony and be the 
 slave of verse. In the second stanza the strophe recalls the 
 miserable state of man, relieved by the amenities of the 
 heavenly Muse, who arms Hyperion against the sickly com- 
 pany of Night ; the antistrophe shows us how the need of 
 song arose in savage man, and illuminated "their feather- 
 cinctured chiefs and dusky loves" whilst the epode breaks 
 into an ecstatic celebration of the advent of poetic art to 
 
 Greece : 
 
 " Woods, that wave o'er Delphi's steep, 
 Isles, that crown th' ^Egean deep, 
 
 Fields, that cool Ilissus laves, 
 
 Or where Maeander's amber waves 
 In lingering labyrinths creep, 
 
 How do your tuneful echoes languish, 
 
 Mute but to the voice of anguish ! 
 Where each old poetic mountain 
 
 Inspiration breathed around ; 
 Every shade and hallowed fountain 
 
 Murmured deep a solemn sound." 
 
 But the Muses, "in Greece's evil hour," went to Rome, 
 and " when Latium had her lofty spirit lost," it was to 
 Albion that they turned their steps. The third strophe 
 describes how the awful mother unveiled her face to Shak- 
 speare ; the antistrophe celebrates the advent of Milton 
 and Dryden, whilst the final epode winds the whole poem 
 to a close with a regret that the lyre once held by the last- 
 named poet has degenerated into hands like Gray's: 
 
vl] THE PINDARIC ODES. 121 
 
 " Hark ! his hands the lyre explore ! 
 
 Bright-eyed Fancy, hovering o'er, 
 
 Scatters from her pictured urn 
 
 Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. 
 
 But ah ! 'tis heard no more — 
 
 Oh ! lyre divine, what daring spirit 
 
 Wakes thee now ? Though he inherit 
 Not the pride, nor ample pinion, 
 
 That the Theban eagle bear, 
 Sailing with supreme dominion 
 
 Thro' the azure deep of air : 
 Yet oft before his infant eyes would run 
 
 Such forms as glitter in the Muse's ray, 
 With orient* hues, unborrowed of the sun: 
 
 Yet shall he mount, and keep his distant way 
 Beyond the limits of a vulgar fate, 
 Beneath the Good how far ! — but far above the Great." 
 
 In these passages, especially where he employs the double 
 rhyme, we seem to catch in Gray the true modern accent, 
 the precursor of the tones of Shelley and Byron, both of 
 whom, but especially the former, were greatly influenced 
 by this free and ringing music. The reader has only to 
 compare the epode last quoted with the choruses in Hellas 
 to see what Shelley owed to the science and invention of 
 Gray. This manner of rhyming, this rapid and recurrent 
 beat of song, was the germ out of which have sprung all 
 later metrical inventions, and without which Mr. Swin- 
 burne himself might now be polishing the heroic coup- 
 let to its last perfection of brightness and sharpness. 
 
 Another Pindaric ode on The Liberty of Genius was 
 planned about the same time, but of this there exists only 
 the following fragment of an argument : " All that men of 
 power can do for men of genius is to leave them at their 
 liberty, compared to birds that, when confined to a cage, 
 do but regret the loss of their freedom in melancholy 
 
122 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 strains, and lose the luscious wildness and happy luxuriance 
 of their notes, which used to make the woods resound." 
 The subject is one well fitted to its author's power, and 
 we regret its loss as we regret that of Collins' s Ode on the 
 Music of the Grecian Theatre. Unlike that blue rose of 
 the bibliophile^ however, Gray's ode probably was never 
 written at all. 
 
 In the meantime not much was happening to Gray him- 
 self. His friend Mason had taken holy orders, and in 
 November, 1754, had become rector of Ashton and chap- 
 lain to the Earl of flolderncsse. " We all are mighty glad," 
 says Gray, " that he is in orders, and no better than any 
 of us." yearly ,in 1755 both Mason and Walpole set upon 
 Gray to publish a new volume of poems, whereupon he 
 held up 'the 'sifrgle ode On the Progress of Poesy, and ask- 
 ed if they , wis]] odl|im to publish a "little sixpenny flam" 
 li^e^at^aH; by itself. He threatened if Wharton be tire- 
 s^me^sjnc^ §!$■ publishing faction had gained him over to 
 tjieir^si^jtOj write an ode against physicians, with some 
 vcryiSjtringQiit lines about magnesia apd alicant soap. 
 Pembroke meanwhile had just receiyecji .ajn^unolejrgraduate 
 of quality, Lord Strathmore, Thane^ o^^^mis,"^, tall, 
 genteel figure;' that pleased Gray, and prese^^ '[Was, ^ad- 
 mitted within, the narrow circle of his^e^^s.^,,^^ lo : 
 
 According; to Mason, the exordium o^.Tfyf.^pr^ w ( |^,| 
 completed in j March , 1755, having .occupied Gray, ^pr? aj^o.u^ j 
 three months. In the case of this very el^bor^tejpoem^ 
 Gray seems to have laid aside his custom^ jrqtiqeflc^ja^nd 
 to have freely consulted his friends. Mason h^ad SQerjjJ^ie 
 beginning of it before he went to Germany in May o^haj , 
 Wfh^Riflfl found in Hamburg a literary lady w^^a^ 
 read th^ "Nitt Toats" of Young, ar^d thpught the Elegy { \ 
 in a C?i^w ghurch-yard " bien JoH^ et ii me J i.£incholiqqe.;; h 
 
tl] THE PINDARIC ODES. 123 
 
 Mason at Hanover meets Lord Nuneham, and is sure that 
 Gray would delight in him, because he is so peevish and 
 sensible and so good a hater, which gives us a passing- 
 glance at Gray himself. The Bard was exactly two years 
 and five months in reaching completion, and the slowness 
 of its growth was the subject of mirth with Gray him- 
 self, who called it "Odikle," and made fun of its stunted 
 proportions. 
 
 On the 15th of July, 1755, Gray went down to the 
 Vine, in Hampshire, to visit his old friend Chute, who 
 was now beginning to recover a little from the shock of 
 the death of his beloved heir and nephew. In the con- 
 genial company of the Italianate country gentleman Gray 
 stayed a few days, and then went on to Southampton, 
 Winchester, Portsmouth, and Netley Abbey, returning to 
 Stoke on the 31st of July. Unfortunately, he either took 
 a chill on this little tour or overtaxed his powers, and 
 from this time to the end of his life, a period of sixteen 
 years, he was seldom in a condition of even tolerable 
 health. In August he was obliged to put himself under 
 medical treatment ; one alarming attack of gout after the 
 other continued to undermine his constitution, and his 
 system was further depressed by an exhausting regimen 
 of magnesia and salts of wormwood. He had to lie up 
 at Stoke for many weeks, with aching feet and temples, 
 and was bled until he was too giddy and feeble to walk 
 with comfort. All this autumn and winter of 1755 his 
 symptoms were very serious. He could not sleep ; he was 
 troubled by a nervous deafness, and a pain in the region 
 of the heart which seldom left him. Meanwhile, he did 
 not leave The Bard untouched, but progressed slowly with 
 it, as though he were a sculptor, deliberately pointing and 
 chiselling a statue. He adopted the plan of copying stro- 
 
124 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 phes and fragments of it in his letters, and many such 
 scraps exist in MS. Late in the autumn, however, he 
 thought that he was falling into a decline, and in a fit 
 of melancholy he laid The Bard aside. 
 
 Gray was altogether in a very nervous, distracted con- 
 dition at this time, and first began to show symptoms of 
 that fear of fire which afterwards became almost a mania 
 with him, by desiring Wharton to insure the two houses, 
 at Wanstead and in Cornhill, which formed a principal 
 part of his income. From the amount of the policies of 
 these houses, we can infer that the first was a property of 
 considerable value. The death of his mother, following 
 on that of Miss Antrobus, had, it may here be remarked, 
 removed all pressure of poverty from Gray for the re- 
 mainder of his life. He was never rich, but from this 
 time forward he was very comfortably provided for. 
 Horace Walpole appears to have been alarmed at his 
 friend's condition of health, and planned a change of 
 scene for him, which it seems unfortunate that he could 
 not persuade himself to undertake. George Hervey, Earl 
 of Bristol, was named English Minister at Lisbon, and he 
 offered to take Gray with him ' as his secretary, but the 
 proud little poet refused. Perhaps the climate of Portu- 
 gal might have proved too relaxing for him, and he might 
 have laid his bones beside that grave where the grass was 
 hardly green yet over the body of Fielding. 
 
 Gray's terror of fire has already been alluded to, and it 
 had now become so marked as to be a subject of conver- 
 sation in the college. He professed rather openly to be- 
 lieve that some drunken fellow or other would burn the 
 college down about their heads. On the 9th of January, 
 1756, he asked Dr. Wharton to buy him a rope-ladder of 
 a man in Wapping who advertised such articles. It was 
 
vi.] THE PINDARIC ODES. 125 
 
 to be rather more than thirty-six feet long, with strong 
 hooks at the top. This machine Wharton promptly for- 
 warded, and Gray proceeded to have an iron bar fixed 
 within his bedroom-window. Tins bar, crossing a window 
 which looks towards Pembroke, still exists and marks 
 Gray's chambers at Peterhouse. Such preparations, how- 
 ever, could not be made without attracting great attention 
 in the latter college, where Gray was by no means a fa- 
 vourite amongst the high-coloured young gentlemen who 
 went bull-baiting to Heddington, or came home drunk 
 and roaring from a cock-shying at Market Hill. Accord- 
 ingly, the noisy fellow -commoners determined to have a 
 lark at the timid little poet's expense, and one night in 
 February, 1756, when Gray was asleep in bed, they sud- 
 denly alarmed him with a cry of fire on his staircase, hav- 
 ing previously placed a tub of water under his window. 
 The ruse succeeded only too well : Gray, without staying 
 to put on his clothes, hooked his rope-ladder to the iron 
 bar, and descended nimbly into the tub of water, from 
 which he was rescued, with shouts of laughter, by the un- 
 mannerly youths. But the jest might easily have proved 
 fatal ; as it was, he shivered in the February air so exces- 
 sively that he had to be wrapped in the coat of a passing 
 watchman, and to be carried into the college by the friend- 
 ly Stonehewer, who now appeared on the scene. To our 
 modern ideas this outrage on a harmless middle-age man 
 of honourable position, who had done nothing whatever 
 to provoke insult or injury, is almost inconceivable. But 
 there was a deep capacity for brutal folly underneath the 
 varnish of the eighteenth century, and no one seems to 
 have sympathized with Gray, or to have thought the con- 
 duct of the youths ungentlemanly. As, when Dryden was 
 beaten by Rochester's hired and masked bravos, it was 
 
126 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 felt that Dryden was thereby disgraced, so Gray's friends 
 were consistently silent on this story, as though it were a 
 shame to him, and we owe our knowledge of the particu- 
 lars to strangers, more especially to a wild creature called 
 Archibald Campbell, who actually ventured to tell the tale 
 daring Gray's lifetime. 
 
 Gray was very angry, and called upon the authorities 
 of his college to punish the offenders. Mason says : " Af- 
 ter having borne the insults of two or three young men 
 of fortune longer than might reasonably have been ex- 
 pected from a man of less warmth of temper, Mr. Gray 
 complained to the governing part of the Society ; and not 
 thinking that his remonstrance was sufficiently attended 
 to, quitted the college." He went over to his old friends 
 at Pembroke, 1 who welcomed him with one accord as if 
 he had been " Mary of Valens in person." Under the 
 foundation of this sainted lady he remained for the rest 
 of his life, comfortably lodged, surrounded by congenial 
 friends, and " as quiet as in the Grande Chartreuse." He 
 does not seem to have ever been appointed to a fellowship 
 at Pembroke. The chambers he is supposed to have oc- 
 cupied are still shown — a large, low room, at the western 
 end of the Hitcham Building, bright and pleasant, with 
 windows looking east and west. He adopted habits at 
 Pembroke which he had never indulged in at Peterhonse. 
 He was the first, and for a long while the only, person in 
 the University who made his rooms look pretty. He took 
 care that his windows should be always full of mignonette 
 or some other sweetly-scented plant, and he was famous 
 for a pair of huge Japanese vases, in blue and white china. 
 His servant, Stephen Hempstead, had to keep the room 
 
 1 In the Admission Book at Pembroke there is this entry: " Thomas 
 Gray, LL.B., admissus est ex Collegio Divi Petro. March (sic) 6, 1756." 
 
tl] THE PINDARIC ODES. 127 
 
 as bright and spick as an old lady's bandbox, and not an 
 atom of dust was allowed to rest on the little harpsichord 
 where the poet used to sit in the twilight and play toc- 
 catas of Scarlatti or Pergolesi. Here for fifteen quiet 
 years, the autumn of his life, Gray lived amongst his books, 
 his china, and his pictures, and here at last we shall see 
 him die, with the good Master of Pembroke, le Petit Bon 
 Homme, holding his hand in the last services of friend- 
 ship. Well might Gray write to Wharton (March 25, 
 1756) : "Removing myself from Peterhouse to Pembroke 
 may be looked upon as a sort of sera in a life so barren 
 of events as mine." 
 
 Curiously enough, the shock and agitation of the scene 
 that has been just described appear to have had no ill 
 effect upon Gray's health. His letters at this time became, 
 on the contrary, much more buoyant in tone. In April, 
 1756, an extraordinary concert of spiritual music, in which 
 the Stabat Mater of Pergolesi was for the first time given 
 in England, drew him up to London for three days, dur- 
 ing which time he lodged with Wharton. All the ensu- 
 ing summer Mason, now and henceforth known as " Scrod- 
 dles" in Gray's correspondence, was perpetrating reams 
 of poetry, or prose astonished out of its better nature at 
 the sudden invasion of its provinces by rhyme. A terri- 
 ble tragedy of Caractacus, suggested by the yet unfinished 
 Bard, with much blank-verse invocation of " Arviragus, 
 my bold, my breathless boy," belongs to this year 1756, 
 and can now be read only by a very patient student bent 
 on finding how nimble Mason could be in borrowing the 
 mere shell and outward echo of Gray's poetical perform- 
 ances. The famous 
 
 " While through the west, where sinks the crimson day, 
 Meek twilight slowly sails, and waves her banners gray,'* 
 
128 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 which Gray pronounced " superlative," and which the 
 modern reader must admit to be pretty, belong also to 
 this year, and are to be found in an ode of Mason's, To 
 a Friend, in which occurs the first contemporary celebra- 
 tion of a greater name in literature than his : 
 
 " Through this still valley let me stray, 
 
 Rapt in some strain of pensive Gray, 
 
 Whose lofty genius bears along 
 
 The conscious dignity of song ; 
 
 And, scorning from the sacred store 
 
 To waste a note on pride or power, 
 
 Roves through the glimmering twilight gloom, 
 
 And ivarbles round each rustic tomb ; 
 
 He, too, perchance (for well I know 
 
 His heart can melt with friendly woe) — 
 He, too, perchance, when these poor limbs are laid, 
 Will heave one tuneful sigh, and soothe my hovering shade." 
 
 Gray must have smiled at this foolish tribute, but he 
 valued the affection that prompted it, and he deigned in 
 a fatherly way to beg Wharton to let him hear if these 
 odes were favourably spoken of in London. 
 
 The scene of Mason's Caractacus was laid in Mona, and 
 Gray was at this time engaged in the spiritual ascension 
 of Snowdon, with " Odikle " at his side : " I hope we shall 
 be very good neighbours. Any Druidical anecdotes that 
 I can meet with I will be sure to send you. I am of 
 opinion that the ghosts" — for, alas! there are ghosts in 
 Caractacus — " will spoil the picture, unless they are 
 thrown at a huge distance, and extremely kept down." 
 In June, 1756, having " no more pores and muscular in.. 
 flations, and troubled only with depression of mind," Gra^ 
 at Stoke rather vaguely proposed to Mason at Tunbridg«. 
 that they should spend the summer together on the Coo- 
 
vi.] THE PINDARIC ODES. 129 
 
 tinent. " Shall we go in time, and have a Louse together 
 in Switzerland ? It is a fine poetical country to look at, 
 and nobody there will understand a word we say or write." 
 Mason was probably too much a child of his age to relish 
 going to Switzerland ; moreover, there was a chaplaincy to 
 Lord John Cavendish towards which Mason was extending 
 a greedy finger and thumb, and he preferred to remain in 
 the happy hunting-grounds of endowment. Gray laughed 
 with indulgent contempt at his young friend's grasping 
 wishes, though when this intense desire for place passed 
 all decent limits he could reprove it sharply enough. To 
 the sober and self-respecting Gray, who had never asked 
 for anything in his life, to intrigue for Church preferment 
 was the conduct of a child or a knave, and he accordingly 
 persisted in treating Mason as a child. 
 
 Very little progress was made with The Bard in 1756. 
 In December of that year " Odikle is not a bit grown, 
 though it is fine mild open weather." Suddenly, in May, 
 1757, it was brought to a conclusion in consequence of 
 some concerts given at Cambridge by John Parry, the 
 famous blind harper, who lived until 1782, and whose son 
 was one of the first A.R.A.'s. Gray's account of the ex- 
 traordinary effect that this man's music made on him is 
 expressed in that light vein with which he loved to con- 
 ceal deep emotion : " There is no faith in man, no, not 
 in a Welshman ; and yet Mr. Parry has been here, and 
 scratched out such ravishing blind harmony, such tunes of 
 a thousand years old, with names enough to choke you, as 
 have set all this learned body a-dancing, and inspired them 
 with due reverence for my old Bard his countryman, 
 wherever he shall appear. Mr. Parry, you must know, has 
 put my ode in motion again, and has brought it at last to 
 a conclusion. 'Tis to him, therefore, that you owe the 
 
130 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 treat which I send } 7 ou enclosed ; namely, the breast anc 1 
 merry-thought, and rump too, of the chicken which I have 
 been chewing so long that I would give it to the world 
 for neck-beef or cow-heel." 
 
 The ode so rudely spoken of is no less than that Bard 
 which for at least a century remained almost without a 
 rival amongst poems cherished by strictly poetical persons! 
 for the qualities of sublimity and pomp of vision. It is 
 only in the very latest generation, and amongst a school 
 of extremely refined critics, that the ascendency of this! 
 ode has been questioned, and certain pieces by Collins and 
 even by Blake preferred to it. There is a great and even 
 a legitimate pleasure in praising that which plainly pos- 
 sesses very high merit, and which has too long been over- 
 looked or neglected ; but we must beware of the paradox 
 which denies beauty in a work of art, because beauty has 
 always been discovered there. Gray's Bard has enjoyed 
 an instant and sustained popularity, whilst Collins's noble 
 Ode to Liberty has had few admirers, and Blake's Book of 
 Thel till lately has had none ; but there is no just reason 
 why a wish to assert the value of the patriotic fervour of 
 the one poem and the rosy effusion of the other should 
 prevent us from acknowledging that, great as are the qual- 
 ities of these pieces, the human sympathy, historical imag- 
 ination, and sustained dithyrambic dignity of The Bard 
 are also great, and probably greater. All that has been 
 said of the evolution of the Progress of Poesy is true ofl 
 that of The Bard, whilst those attributes which our old 
 critics used to term "the machinery" are even more brill- J 
 iant and appropriate in the longer poem than in the shorter. 
 In form the poems are sufficiently analogous ; each has 
 three main divisions, with strophe, antistrophe, and epode, 
 ^nd in each the epode is dedicated to briskly rhyming] 
 
tl] THE PINDARIC ODES. 131 
 
 measures and experiments in metre. The opening is ad- 
 mirably startling and effective ; the voice that meets us 
 with its denunciations is that of the last survivor of the 
 ancient race of Celtic bards, a venerable shape who is seat- 
 ed on a rock above the defile through which the forces of 
 Edward I. are about to march. This mysterious being, in 
 Gray's own words, " with a voice more than human, re- 
 proaches the King with all the misery and desolation which 
 he had brought on his country ; foretells the misfortunes 
 of the Norman race; and with prophetic spirit declares 
 that all his cruelty shall never extinguish the noble ardour 
 of poetic genius in this island, and that men shall never 
 be wanting to celebrate true virtue and valour in immortal 
 strains, to expose vice and infamous pleasure, and boldly 
 censure tyranny and oppression." The scheme of the 
 poem, therefore, is strictly historical, and yet is not very 
 far removed from that of Gray's previous written and un- 
 written Pindaric odes. In these three poems the dignity 
 of genius and its function as a ruler and benefactor of 
 mankind are made the chief subject of discourse, and a 
 mission is claimed for artists in verse than which none 
 was ever conceived more brilliant or more august. But, 
 fortunately for his readers, Gray was diverted from his 
 purely abstract consideration of history into a concrete 
 observation of its most picturesque forms, and forgot to 
 trace the "noble ardour of poetic genius" in painting 
 vivid pictures of Edward II. enduring his torture in Berke- 
 ley Castle, and of the massacre of the Bards at the battle 
 of Camlan. Some of the scenes which pass across the 
 magic mirror of the old man's imagination are unrivalled 
 for concision and force. That in which the court of Eliz- 
 abeth, surrounded by her lords and her poets, flashes upon 
 the inner eye, is of an inimitable felicity : 
 
[chap. 
 
 132 GRAY. 
 
 " Girt with many a baron bold, 
 Sublime their starry fronts they rear ; 
 
 And gorgeous dames, and statesmen old 
 In bearded majesty, appear. 
 In the midst a form divine ! 
 Her eye proclaims her of the Briton-line ; 
 Her lion port, her awe-eommanding face, 
 Attempered sweet to virgin grace. 
 What strings symphonious tremble in the air, 
 
 What strains of vocal transport round her play ! 
 Hear from the grave, great Taliessin, hear ; 
 They breathe a soul to animate thy clay. 
 Bright Rapture calls, and, soaring as she sings, 
 Waves in the eye of Heaven her many-coloured wings." 
 
 This closing vision of a pretty but incongruous " Rapt- 
 ure " may remind us that the crowning fault of Gray and 
 his school, their assumption that a mythology might be 
 formed out of the emotions of the human mind, and a 
 new Olympus be fitted out with brand-new, gods of a mor- 
 alist's making, is rarely prominent in The Bard or the El- 
 egy in a Country Church - yard, his two greatest works. 
 Some use of allegorical abstraction is necessary to the very 
 structure of poetry, and is to be found in the works of our 
 most realistic writers. It is in its excess that it becomes 
 ridiculous or tedious, as in Mason and other imitators of 
 Gray. The master himself was not by any means able at 
 all times to clothe his abstractions with flesh and blood, 
 but he is never ridiculous. He felt, indeed, the danger 
 of the tendency in himself and others, and he made some 
 remarks on the subject to Mason which were wholly salu- 
 tary : 
 
 "I had rather some of these personages, * Resignation,' 'Peace,' 
 ' Revenge/ 4 Slaughter,' ' Ambition,' were stripped of their allegorical 
 garb, A little simplicity here and there in the expression would 
 
vi.j THE PINDARIC ODES. 133 
 
 better prepare the high and fantastic strain, and all the imaginable 
 harpings that follow. . . . The true lyric style, with all its flights of 
 fancy, ornaments, and heightening of expression, and harmony of 
 sound, is in its nature superior to every other style ; which is just 
 the cause why it could not be borne in a work of great length, no 
 more than the eye could bear to see all this scene that we constantly 
 gaze upon — the verdure of the fields and woods, the azure of the sea 
 and skies — turned into one dazzling expanse of gems. The epic, 
 therefore, assumed a style of graver colours, and only stuck on a 
 diamond (borrowed from her sister) here and there, where it best be- 
 came her. When we pass from the diction that suits this kind of 
 writing to that which belongs to the former, it appears natural, and 
 delights us ; but to pass on a sudden from the lyric glare to the epic 
 solemnity (if I may be allowed to talk nonsense) has a very differ- 
 ent effect. We seem to drop from verse into mere prose, from light 
 into darkness. Do you not think if Mingotti stopped in the middle 
 of her best air, and only repeated the remaining verses (though the 
 best Metastasio ever wrote), that they would not appear very cold to 
 you, and very heavy ?" 
 
 Between Dry den and Wordsworth there was no man 
 but Gray who could write in prose about his art with 
 such coherence and science as this. These careless sen- 
 tences outweigh tomes of Blair's glittering rhetoric and 
 Hurd's stilted disquisitions on the Beautiful and the Ele- 
 vated. 
 
 Almost directly after Gray had finished The Bard he 
 was called upon to write an epitaph for a lady, Mrs. Jane 
 Clarke, who had died in childbirth at Epsom, where her 
 husband was a physician, on the 27th of April, 1757. 
 Dr. Clarke had been an early college friend of Gray's, and 
 he applied to Gray to write a copy of verses to be in- 
 scribed on a tablet in Beckenham church, where his wife 
 was buried. Gray wrote sixteen lines, not in his happiest 
 vein, and these found their way into print after his death. 
 In his tiny nosegay there is, perhaps, no flower so incon- 
 
134 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 siderable as this perfunctory Epitaph. One letter, sev- 
 eral years later than the date of this poem, proves thai 
 Gray continued to write on intimate terms to Dr. Clarke, 
 who does not seem to have preserved the poet's corre- 
 spondence, and is not otherwise interesting to us. In 
 April Gray made another acquaintance, of a very differ- 
 ent kind. Lord Nuneham, a young man of fashion and 
 fortune, with a rage for poetry, came rushing down upon 
 him with a letter of introduction and a profusion of com- 
 pliments. He brought a large bouquet of jonquils, which 
 he presented to the poet with a reverence so profound 
 that Gray could not fail to smell the jessamine-powder in 
 his periwig, and indeed he was too fine "even for me," 
 says the poet, " who love a little finery." Lord Nuneham 
 came expressly, in Newmarket week, to protest against 
 going to Newmarket, and sat devoutly at Gray's feet, half 
 enthusiast, for three whole days, talking about verses and 
 the fine arts. Gray was quite pleased with him at last; 
 and so " we vowed eternal friendship, embraced, and 
 parted." Lord John Cavendish, too, was in Cambridge 
 at this time, and also pleased Gray, though in a very dif- 
 ferent and less effusive manner. 
 
 In the summer of 1757 Horace Walpole set up a print- 
 ing-press at Strawberry Hill, and persuaded Gray to let 
 his Pindaric Odes be the first issue of the establishment. 
 Accordingly Gray sent him a MS. copy of the poems, and 
 they were set up with wonderful fuss and circumstance 
 by Walpole's compositor; Gray being more than usually 
 often at Strawberry Hill this summer. Dodsley agreed 
 to publish the book, and 2000 copies were struck off. 
 On the 29th of June Gray received forty guineas, the 
 only money he ever gained by literature. On the 8th of 
 August there was published a large, thin quarto, entitled] 
 
vi.] THE PINDARIC ODES. 135 
 
 " Odes by Mr. Gray. Qiovavra awzroioi. Printed at 
 Strawberry Hill for R. and J. Dodsley, in Pall Mali," 
 with an engraving of Walpole's little gimcrack dwelling 
 on the title-page. The two odes have no other titles 
 than Ode L, Ode II. ; they form a pamphlet of twenty- 
 one pages, and were sold at one shilling. Small as the 
 volume was, however, it was by no means insignificant, 
 and it achieved a very great success. Garrick and War- 
 burton led the chorus of praise ; the famous actor pub- 
 lishing some verses in honour of the odes, the famous 
 critic pronouncing them above the grasp of the public; 
 and this, indeed, w r as true. In fact, Gray lamented, as 
 most men of genius have had to lament, that the praise 
 he received was not always judicious praise, and therefore 
 of little worth. "The SvvetoI" he says, " appear to be 
 still fewer than even I expected." He became, however, 
 a kind of lion. Goldsmith wrote an examination of the 
 Odes for the Monthly Review. The Cobhams, at Stoke, 
 were very civil, and Mr. and Mrs. Garrick came dowm 
 there to stay with him ; the stiff, prim demeanour of 
 Dr. Hurd melted into smiles and compliments ; the Criti- 
 cal Review was in raptures, though it mistook the ^Eolian 
 Lyre for the Harp of ^Eolus ; and at York races sporting 
 peers were heard to discuss the odes in a spirit of bewil- 
 dered eulogy. Within two months 1300 copies had been 
 sold. Best of all, Miss Speed seemed to understand, and 
 whispered " (pwrdrra trvvETciiai" in the most amiable and 
 sympathetic tones. But Gray could enjoy nothing; sev- 
 eral little maladies hung over him, the general wreck of 
 his frail constitution began to be imminent. Meanwhile 
 small things worried him. The great Mr. Fox did not 
 wonder Edward I. could not understand what the Bard 
 was saying, and chuckled at his own wit; young Lord 
 
 k n 
 
136 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 Nuneham, for all his jonquils and his jessamine-powder, 
 did not trouble himself to acknowledge his presentation 
 copy ; people said Gray's style was " impenetrable and 
 inexplicable," and altogether the sweets were fewer than 
 the bitters in the cup of notoriety. 
 
 Gray had placed himself, however, at one leap at the 
 head of the living English poets. Thomson and Blair were 
 now dead, Dyer was about to pass away, and Collins, hope- 
 lessly insane, was making the cloisters of Chichester re- 
 sound with his terrible shrieks. Young, now very aged, 
 had almost abandoned verse. Johnson had retired from 
 all competition with the poets. Smart, whose frivolous 
 verses had been collected in 1754, had shown himself, in 
 his few serious efforts, a direct disciple and imitator of 
 Gray's early style. Goldsmith, Churchill, and Cowper 
 were still unheard of ; and the only men with whom 
 Gray could for a moment be supposed to contend were 
 Shenstone and Akenside. Practically both of these men, 
 also, had retired from poetry, the latter, indeed, having 
 been silent for twelve years. The Odes could hardly fail 
 to attract attention in a year which produced no other 
 even noticeable publication in verse, except Dyer's tire- 
 some descriptive poem of The Fleece. Gray seems to have 
 felt that his genius, his " verve," as he called it, was trying 
 to breathe in a vacuum ; and from this time forward he 
 made even less and less effort to concentrate his powers. 
 In the winter of 1757, it is true, he began to plan an epic 
 or didactic poem on the Revival of Learning, but we hear 
 no more of 'it. His few remaining poems were to be 
 lyrics, pure and simple, swallow-flights of song. 
 
 On the 12th of December, 1757, Colley Cibber died, 
 having held the office of poet-laureate for twenty-seven 
 years. Lord John Cavendish immediately suggested to 
 
vi.] THE PINDARIC ODES. 137 
 
 his brother, the Duke of Devonshire, who was then Lord 
 Chamberlain, that, as Gray was the greatest living poet, 
 the post should be offered to him. This was immediately 
 done, in very handsome terms, the duke even offering to 
 waive entirely the perfunctory writing of odes, which had 
 hitherto been deemed an annual duty of all poets-laureate. 
 Gray directed Mason, through whom the offer had been 
 made, to decline it very civilly : 
 
 u Though I well know the bland, emollient, saponaceous qualities 
 both of sack and silver, yet if any great man would say to me, 'I 
 make you rat-catcher to his Majesty, with a salary of 300/. a year 
 and two butts of the best Malaga ; and though it has been usual to 
 catch a mouse or two, for form's sake, in public once a year, yet to 
 you, sir, we shall not stand upon these things/ I cannot say I should 
 jump at it ; nay, if they would drop the very name of the office, and 
 call me sinecure to the King's Majesty, I should still feel a little awk- 
 ward, and think everybody I saw smelt a rat about me ; but I do not 
 pretend to blame any one else that has not the same sensations ; for 
 my part, I would rather be serjeant-trumpeter or pin-maker to the 
 palace. Nevertheless, I interest myself a little in the history of it, 
 and rather wish somebody may accept it that will retrieve the credit 
 of the thing, if it be retrievable, or ever had any credit. Rowe was, 
 I think, the last man of character that had it. As to Settle, whom 
 you mention, he belonged to my Lord Mayor, not to the King. Eus- 
 den was a person of great hopes in his youth, though at last he turn- 
 ed out a drunken parson. Dryden was as disgraceful to the office, 
 from his character, as the poorest scribbler could have been from his 
 verses. The office itself has always humbled the professor hitherto 
 (even in an age when kings were somebody), if he were a poor writer, 
 by making him more conspicuous, and if he were a good one by set- 
 ting him at war with the little fry of his own profession, for there 
 are poets little enough to envy even a poet-laureate." 
 
 The duke acted promptly, for within a week of Cibber's 
 death the laureateship had been offered to Gray, who re- 
 fused, and to Whitehead, who accepted it. This amiable 
 
138 . GRAY. [chap. 
 
 versifier was, perhaps, more worthy of the compliment 
 than Mason, who wished for it, and who raged with dis- 
 appointment. 
 
 In January, 1758, Gray seems to have recovered suffi- 
 ciently to be so busy buying South Sea annuities, and 
 amassing old china jars and three-legged stools with grass- 
 green bottoms, that he could not supply Mason with that 
 endless flood of comment on Mason's odes, tragedies, and 
 epics which the vivacious poetaster demanded. Hurd, in 
 the gentlemanly manner to which Mr. Leslie Stephen has 
 dedicated one stringent page, was calling upon Gray to 
 sympathise with him about the wickedness of " that 
 wretch " Akenside. In all this Gray had but slight in- 
 terest. His father's fortune, which had reached 10,000/. 
 in his mother's careful hands, had been much damaged by 
 the fire in Cornhill, and Gray now sank a large portion of 
 his property in an annuity, that he might enjoy a larger 
 income. During the spring of 1758 he amused himself 
 by writing in the blank leaves of Kitchen's English Atlas 
 A Catalogue of the Antiquities, Houses, etc., in England 
 and Wales, This was considerable enough to form a little 
 volume, and in 1774, after Gray's death, Mason printed a 
 few copies of it privately, and sent them round to Gray's 
 friends; and in 1787 issued a second edition for sale. 
 
 In April of the same year, 1758, Dr. Wharton lost his 
 eldest and, at that time, his only son. Gray not only wrote 
 him a very touching letter of condolence, but some verses 
 on the death of the child, which were in existence thirty 
 years ago, but which I have been unable to trace. In 
 May Gray started on that architectural tour in the Fens 
 of which I have already spoken, and in June was sum- 
 moned to Stoke by the illness of his aunt, Mrs. Oliffe, whol 
 had a sort <? 1 paralytic stroke whilst walking in the garden, j 
 
vi.] THE PINDARIC ODES. 139 
 
 She recovered, however, and Gray returned to London, 
 made a short stay at Hampton with Lord and Lady Cob- 
 ham, and spent July at Strawberry Hill. In August the 
 Garricks again visited him at Stoke, but he had hardly 
 enough physical strength to endure their vivacity. "They 
 are now gone, and I am not sorry for it, for I grow so old 
 that, I own, people in high spirits and gaiety overpower 
 me, and entirely take away mine. I can yet be diverted 
 by their sallies, but if they appear to take notice of my 
 dullness, it sinks me to nothing. ... I continue better 
 than has been usual with me in the summer, though I 
 neither walk nor take anything : 'tis in mind only that I 
 am weary and disagreeable." His position at Stoke, with 
 Mrs. Oliffe laid up, and poor bedridden Mrs. Rogers grow- 
 ing daily weaker and weaker, was not an exhilarating one. 
 Towards the end of September Mrs. Rogers recovered her 
 speech, w r hich had for several years been almost unintel- 
 ligible, flickered up for two or three days, and then died. 
 She left Mrs. Oliffe joint executrix of her small property 
 with Gray, who describes himself in November, 1758, as 
 " agreeably employed in dividing nothing with an old 
 harridan, who is the spawn of Cerberus and the dragon 
 of Wantley." In January, 1759, Mrs. Oliffe having taken 
 herself off to her native county of Norfolk, Gray closed 
 the house at Stoke-Pogis, and from this time forth only 
 , visited that village, which had been his home for nearly 
 twenty years, when he was invited to stay at Stoke House. 
 At the same time, to the distress of Dr. Brown, he ceased 
 to reside at Pembroke, and spent the next three years in 
 London. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 BRITISH MUSEUM. NORTON NICHOLS. 
 
 When the Sloane Collection became national property 
 at the death of its founder in 1753, and was incorporated 
 under an act which styled it the British Museum, scholars 
 and antiquaries expected to enter at once upon their in- 
 heritance. But a site and a building had to be secured, 
 and, when these were discovered, it took a long while to 
 fit up the commodious galleries of Montagu House. On 
 the 15th of January, 1759, the Museum was thrown open 
 to the public, and amongst the throng of visitors was Gray, 
 who had settled himself and his household gods close by, 
 in Southampton Row, and who for some weeks had been 
 awaiting the official Sesame. He had been seeing some- 
 thing of London society meanwhile — entertained by Lady, 
 Carlisle, invited to meet Rousseau, and attending concerts 
 and plays. He gives some account of the performance, 
 of Metastasio's Ciro Riconosciuto, with Cocchi's agreeable 
 music. 
 
 The British Museum he found " indeed a treasure." 
 It was at first so crowded that " the corner room in the 
 basement, furnished with a wainscot table and twenty 
 chairs," was totally inadequate to supply the demand, and 
 in order to be comfortable it was necessary to book a place 
 a fortnight beforehand. This pressure, however, only lasted 
 
chap, vil] BRITISH MUSEUM. 141 
 
 for a very short time ; curiosity was excited by the novelty, 
 but quickly languished, and this little room was found 
 quite ample enough to contain the scholars who frequented 
 it. To reach it the intrepid reader had to pass in dark- 
 ness, like Jonah, through the belly of a whale, from which 
 he emerged into the room of the Keeper of Printed Books, 
 Dr. Peter Templeman, a physician, who had received this 
 responsible post for having translated NordevbS Travels, 
 and who resigned it, wearily, in 1761, for a more conge- 
 nial appointment at the Society of Arts. By July, 1759, 
 the rush on the reading-room had entirely subsided, and 
 on the 23d of that month Gray mentions to Mason that 
 there are only five readers that day. These were Gray 
 himself, Dr. Stukeley the antiquary, and three hack-writers 
 who were copying MSS. for hire. 
 
 A little later on Gray became an amused witness of 
 those factions which immediately broke out amongst the 
 staff of the British Museum, and which practically lasted 
 until a very few years ago. People who w 7 ere the diverted 
 or regretful witnesses of dissensions between a late Prin- 
 cipal Librarian and the scholars whom he governed may 
 be consoled to learn that things were just as bad in 1759. 
 Dr. Gowin Knight, the first Principal Librarian, a pom- 
 pous martinet with no pretence to scholarship, made life 
 so impossible to the keepers and assistants that the Mu- 
 seum was completely broken into a servile and a rebellious 
 faction. Gray, moving noiselessly to and fro, noted all 
 this and smiled : " The whole society, trustees and all, are 
 up in arms, like the fellows of a college." Dr. Knight 
 made no concessions ; the keepers presently refused to 
 salute him when they passed his window, and Gray and 
 his fellow-readers were at last obliged to make a detour 
 every day because Dr. Knight had walled up a passage 
 
142 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 in order to annoy the keepers. Meanwhile the trustees 
 were spending 500/. a year more than their income, and 
 Gray confidently predicts that before long all the books 
 and the crocodiles and Jonah's whale will be put up to 
 public auction. 
 
 At Mr. Jermyn's, in Southampton Row, Bloomsbnry, 
 Gray was very comfortably settled. It w T as a cleaner 
 Bloomsbnry than we know now, and a brighter. Gray 
 from his bedroom window looked out on a south-west 
 garden - wall covered with flowering jessamine through 
 June and July. There had been roses, too, in this Lon- 
 don garden. Gray must always have flowers about him, 
 ami he trudged down to Covent Garden every day for his 
 sweet-peas and pinks, scarlet martagon-lilies, double stocks, 
 and flowering marjoram. His drawing-room looked over 
 Bedford Gardens, and a fine stretch of upland fields, 
 crowned at last, against the sky, by the villages of High- 
 gate and Hampstead. St. Giles's was at his back, with 
 many a dirty court and alley, but in front of him against 
 the mornino- light there was little but sunshine and green- 
 ery and fresh air. He seems to notice nature here on the 
 outskirts of London far more narrowly than at Cambridge; 
 there are little parenthetical notes, asides to himself, about 
 "fair white flying clouds at nine in the morning" of a 
 July day, or wheelbarrows heaped up with small black 
 cherries on an August afternoon. He bought twenty wal- 
 nuts for a penny on the 8th of September, and enjoyed a 
 fine perdrigon-plum upon the 4th. 
 
 Meanwhile he is working every day at the Museum, feast- 
 ing upon literary plums and walnuts, searching the original 
 Ledger-book of the Signet, copying Sir Thomas Wyatt's 
 Defence and his poems, discovering " several odd things 
 unknown to our historians," and nursing his old favourite 
 
vii.] BRITISH MUSEUM. 149 
 
 project of a History of English Poetry. He spent as a 
 rule four hours a day in the reading-room, this being as 
 much as his very delicate health could bear, for repeated 
 attacks of the gout had made even this amount of motion 
 and cramped repose sometimes very difficult. 
 
 On the 23d of September, 1759, poor Lady Cobham, 
 justly believing herself to be dying, summoned Gray down 
 to Stoke House. She was suffering from dropsy, and being 
 in a very depressed condition of mind, desired him not to 
 leave her. He accordingly remained with her three weeks, 
 and then accompanied her and Miss Speed to town, whith- 
 er Lady Cobham was recommended to come for advice. 
 She still did not wish to part from him, and he stayed 
 until late in November in her house in Hanover Square. 
 He has some picturesque notes of the beautiful old garden 
 at Stoke that autumn, rich with carnations, marigolds, and 
 asters, and '♦ith great clusters of white grapes on warm 
 south walls. After watching beside Lady Cobham for 
 ; some weeks, and finding no reason to anticipate a sudden 
 change in her condition, he returned to his own lodging 
 in Southampton Row, and plunged again into MSS. of 
 Lydgate and Hoccleve. 
 
 It was whilst Gray was quietly vegetating in Blooms- 
 bury that an event occurred of which he was quite uncon- 
 scious, which yet has singularly endeared him to the mem- 
 ory of Englishmen. On the evening of the 12th of Sep- 
 tember, 1759 — whilst Gray, sauntering back from the 
 British Museum to his lodgings, noted that the weather 
 was cloudy, with a south-south-west wind — on the other 
 side of the Atlantic the English forces lay along the river 
 Montmorency, and looked anxiously across at Quebec and 
 at the fateful heights of Abraham. When night-fall came, 
 
 and before the gallant four thousand obeyed the word of 
 
 >7* 
 
 I 
 
144 GRAY. [cilip. 
 
 command to steal across the river, General Wolfe, the 
 young officer of thirty-three, who was next day to win 
 death and immortality in victory, crept along in a boat 
 from post to post to see that all was ready for the expedi- 
 tion. It was a fine, silent evening, and as they pulled 
 along, with muffled oars, the General recited to one of his 
 officers who sat with him in the stern of the boat nearly 
 tlic whole of Gray's Elegy in a Country Church-yard, add- 
 ing, as he concluded, lk I would prefer being the author of 
 that poem to the glory of beating the French to-morrow." 
 Perhaps no finer compliment was ever paid by the man 
 of action to the man of imagination, and, sanctified, as it 
 were, by the dying lips of the great English hero, the poem 
 seems to be raised far above its intrinsic rank in literature, 
 and to demand our respect as one of the acknowledged 
 glories of our race and language. This beautiful anecdote 
 of Wolfe rests on the authority of Professor Aobison, the 
 mathematician, who was a recruit in the Engineers during 
 the attack upon Quebec, and happened to be present in the 
 boat when the General recited Gray's poem. 
 
 Poor Gray, ever pursued by the terrors of arson, had a 
 great fright in the last days of November in this year. A 
 fire broke out in the house of an organist on the opposite 
 side of Southampton Row, and the poor householder was 
 burnt to death ; the fire spread to the house of Gray's 
 lawyer, who fortunately saved his papers. A few nights 
 later the poet was roused by a conflagration close at hand 
 in Lincoln's Inn Fields. " 'Tis strange," he says, in a spirit 
 of desperation, "that we all of us here in town lay our- 
 selves down every night on our funereal pile, ready made, 
 and compose ourselves to rest, whilst every drunken foot- 
 man and drowsy old woman has a candle ready to light it 
 before the morning." It is rather difficult to know what, 
 
vii.] NORTON NICHOLS. It:, 
 
 even in so pastoral a Bloomsbury, Gray did with a sow, 
 for which lie thanks Wharton heartily in April, 1760. 
 
 In the spring of this year Gray first met Sterne, who 
 had just made an overwhelming success with Tristram 
 Shandy, and who was sitting to Sir Joshua Reynolds. 
 Gray's opinion of Sterne was not entirely unfavourable ; 
 the great humorist was polite to him, and his works were 
 not by nature so perplexing to Gray as those of Smollett 
 and Fielding. The poet was interested in Sterne's newly 
 discovered emotion, sensibility, and told Nichols after- 
 wards that in this sort of pathos Sterne never failed; for 
 his wit he had less patience, and frankly disapproved his 
 tittering insinuations. lie said that there was good writ- 
 ing and good sense in Sterne's Sermons^ and spoke of him 
 when lie died, in L768, with some respect A less famous 
 but pleasanter man, whose acquaintance Gray began to cul- 
 tivate aboui'this time, was Benjamin Btillingfleet, the Blue- 
 stocking. 
 
 In April, 17G0, Lady Cobhara was at last released from 
 her sufferings. She left the whole of her property, ^0,000/., 
 to Harriet Speed, besides the house in Hanover Square, 
 plate, jewels, and much blue and white china. Gray tells 
 Wharton darkly that Miss Speed does not know her own 
 mind, but that he knows his. The movements of this odd 
 couple during the summer of 17G0 are very dim to us and 
 perplexing. Why they seem associated in some sort of 
 distant intimacy from April to June, why in the latter 
 month they go down together to stay with General Con- 
 way and Lady Ailesbury at Park Place, near Henley, and 
 why Lady Carlisle is of the party, these are questions that 
 now can only tantalize us. Gray himself confesses that all 
 the world expected him to marry Miss Speed, and was 
 astonished that Lady Cobham only left him 20/. for a 
 
146 GRAY. [ciiaI 
 
 mourning-ring. It seems likely on the whole that, had he 
 been inclined to endow Harriet Speed with his gout, his \ 
 poverty, his melancholy, and his fitful genius, she w r ould 
 have accepted the responsibility. When she did marry it 
 was not for money or position. He probably, for his part, 
 did not feel so passionately inclined to her as to convince 
 himself that he ought to think of marriage. He put an 
 air of Geminiani to words for her, not very successfully, 
 and he wrote one solitary strain of amatory experience : 
 
 " With beaut) 7 , with pleasure surrounded, to languish, 
 To weep without knowing the cause of my anguish ; 
 To start from short slumbers, and wish for the morning— 
 To close my dull eyes when I see it returning ; 
 Sighs sudden and frequent, looks ever dejected — 
 Words that steal from my tongue, by no meaning connected ! 
 Ah ! say, fellow-swains, how these symptoms befell me ? 
 They smile, but reply not — sure Delia will tell me|' 
 
 For a month in the summer of 1760 he lived at Park 
 Place, in the company of Miss Speed, Lady Ailesbury, and 
 Lady Carlisle, who laughed from morning to night, and 
 would not allow him to give way to what they called his 
 " sulkiness." They found him a difficult guest to enter- 
 tain. Lady Ailesbury told Walpole afterwards that one 
 day, when they went out for a picnic, Gray only opened 
 his lips once, and then merely to say, " Yes, my lady, I 
 believe so." His own account shows that his nerves were 
 in a very weary condition. " Company and cards at home, 
 parties by land and water abroad, and what they call doing 
 something, that is, racketing about from morning to night, 
 are occupations, I find, that wear out my spirits, especially 
 in a situation where one might sit still, and be alone with 
 pleasure." Early in August he escaped to the quietness 
 of Cambridge in the Long Vacation, and after this saw lit- 
 
vii..] NORTON NICHOLS. 147 
 
 tie of Miss Speed. Next January she married a poor man 
 ten years younger than herself, a Baron de la Peyriere, 
 and went to live at Viry, on the Lake of Geneva. Here, 
 long after the death of the poet, she received a Mr. Le- 
 man, and gave into his hands the lines which Gray had 
 addressed to her. So ended his one feeble and shadowy 
 romance. Gray was not destined to come within the 
 genial glow of any woman's devotion, except his mother's. 
 He lived a life apart from the absorbing emotions of hu- 
 manity, desirous to sympathise with, but not to partake 
 in, the stationary affections and household pleasures of the 
 race. In the annals of friendship he is eminent ; he did 
 not choose to tempt fortune by becoming a husband and a 
 father. There are some beautiful words of Sir Thomas 
 Browne that come before the mind as singularly appro- 
 priate to Gray : " I never yet cast a true affection on a 
 woman ; but I have loved my friend, as I do virtue, my 
 soul, my God." 
 
 In July, 1760, there were published anonymously Two 
 Odes, addressed to Obscurity and to Oblivion, which were 
 attacks on Gray and on Mason respectively: It was not 
 at first recognised that this was a salute fired off by that 
 group of young satirists from Westminster, of whom 
 Cowper, Lloyd, and Churchill are now the best known. 
 These odes, indeed, were probably a joint production, but 
 the credit of them was taken by George Colman (the 
 elder) and by Robert Lloyd, gay young wits of twenty- 
 seven. The mock odes, in which the manners of Gray 
 and Mason were fairly well parodied, attracted a good deal 
 more notice than they were worth, and the Monthly Re- 
 view challenged the poets to reply. But Gray warned 
 Mason not to do so. Colman was a friend of Garrick, 
 whilst Lloyd was an impassioned admirer of Gray himself, 
 
148 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 and there was no venom in the verses. Lloyd, indeed, had 
 the naivete to reprint these odes some years afterwards in 
 a volume which bore his name, and which contained a 
 Latin version of the Elegy in a Country Church- yard. 
 Lloyd was a figure of no importance, a mere shadow cast 
 before by Churchill. 
 
 In 1760 Gray became deeply interested in the Erse 
 Fragments of Macpherson, soon to come before the world 
 as the epic of Ossian. He corresponded with the young 
 Scotchman of twenty-two, whom he found stupid and ill- 
 educated, and, in Gray's opinion, quite incapable of having 
 invented what he was at this time producing. The elabo- 
 rate pieces, the narratives of Croma, Fingal, and the rest, 
 were not at this time thought of, and it seems, on the whole, 
 that the romantic fragments so much admired by the 
 best judges of poetry were genuine. What is interesting 
 to us in Gray's connexion with Ossian is partly critical and 
 partly personal. Critically it is very important to see that 
 the romantic tendency of his mind asserted itself at once 
 in the presence of this savage poetry. He quotes certain 
 phrases with high approbation. Ossian says of the winds, 
 " Their songs are of other worlds :" Gray exclaims, " Did 
 you never observe that pause, as the gust is recollecting it- 
 self, and rising upon the ear in a shrill and plaintive note 
 like the swell of an ^Eolian harp ? I do assure you there 
 is nothing in the world so like the voice of a spirit." 
 These pieces produced on him just the same effect of ex- 
 citing and stimulating mystery that had been caused by 
 his meeting with the ballads of Gil Morice and Chevy 
 Chase in 1757. He began to feel, just as the power of 
 writing verse was leaving him or seemed to be declining, 
 that the deepest chords of his nature as a poet had never 
 yet been struck. From this time forth what little serious . 
 
vii.] NORTON NICHOLS. 149 
 
 poetry he wrote was distinctly romantic, and his studies 
 were all in the direction of what was savage and archaic, 
 the poetry of the precursors of our literature in England 
 and Scotland, the Runic chants of the Scandinavians, the 
 war-songs of the primitive Gaels — everything, in fact, 
 which for a century past had been looked upon as ungen- 
 teel and incorrect in literature. Personally what is inter- 
 esting in his introduction to Ossian is his sudden sympathy 
 with men like Adam Smith and David Hume, for whom 
 he had been trained in the school of Warburton and Hurd 
 to cultivate a fanatic hatred. In the summer of 1760 a 
 variety of civilities on the absorbing question of the Erse 
 Fragments passed between him and the great historian. 
 Hume had written to a friend : "It gives me pleasure to 
 find that a person of so fine a taste as Mr. Gray approves 
 of these fragments, as it may convince us that our fond- 
 ness of them is not altogether founded on national prepos- 
 session ;" and Gray was encouraged by this to enter into 
 correspondence of a most friendly kind with the dangerous 
 enemy of orthodoxy. He never quite satisfied himself 
 about Ossian ; his last word on that subject is : " For me, 
 I admire nothing but Fingal, yet I remain still in doubt 
 about the authenticity of these poems, though inclining 
 i rather to believe them genuine in spite of the world. 
 Whether they are the inventions of antiquity or of a mod- 
 ern Scotchman, either case to me is alike unaccountable. 
 Je m'y perds." Modern scholarship has really not pro- 
 gressed much nearer to a solution of the puzzle. 
 
 Partly at the instance of Mason, Gray took a considera- 
 ble interest in the exhibition of the Society of Arts at the 
 Adelphi, in 1760. This was the first collection of the 
 kind made in London, and was the nucleus out of which 
 the institution of the Royal Academy sprang. The gen- 
 
150 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 ius of this first exhibition was Paul Sandby, a man whom 
 Mason thought he had discovered, and whom he was con- 
 stantly recommending to Gray. Sandby, afterwards emi- 
 nent as the first great English water-colour painter, had at 
 this time hardly discovered his vocation, though he was in* 
 his thirty-fifth year. He was still designing architecture 
 and making profitless gibes and lampoons against Hogarth. 
 Gray and Mason appear to have drawn his attention to 
 landscape of a romantic order, and in October, 1760, Gray 
 tells Wharton of a great picture in oils, illustrating The 
 Bard, with Edward I. in the foreground and Snowdon be- 
 hind, which Sandby and Mason have concocted together, 
 and which is to be the former's exhibition picture for 1761. 
 Sandby either repeated this subject or took another from 
 the same poem, for there exists a picture of his, without 
 any Edward L, in which the Bard is represented as plung- 
 ing into the roaring tide, with his lyre in his hand, and 
 Snowdon behind him. 
 
 During the winter of 1760 and the spring of 1761 Gray 
 seems to have given his main attention to early English 
 poetry. He worked at the British Museum with indefati- 
 gable zeal, copying with his own hand the whole of the 
 very rare 1579 edition of Gawin Douglas's Palace of Hon- 
 our, which he greatly admired, and composing those inter- 
 esting and learned studies on Metre and on the Poetry of 
 John Lydgate which Mathias first printed in 1814. 
 
 Warburton had placed in his hands a rough sketch 
 which Pope had drawn out of a classification of the Brit- 
 ish Poets. Pope's knowledge did not go very far, and j 
 Gray seems to have first formed the notion of himself 
 writing a History of English Poetry whilst correcting hisj 
 predecessor's errors. The scheme of his history is one j 
 which will probably be followed by the historian of our 
 
til] NORTON NICHOLS. 151 
 
 poetry, when such a man arises ; Gray proposed to open 
 by a full examination of the Provencal school, in which 
 he saw the germ of all the modern poetry of Western Eu- 
 rope ; from Provence to France and Italy, and thence to 
 England the transition was to be easy ; and it was only 
 after bringing up the reader to the mature style of Gower 
 and Chaucer that a return was to be made to the native, 
 that is, the Anglo-Saxon elements of our literature. Gray 
 made a variety of purchases for use in this projected com- 
 pilation, and according to his MS. account-book he had 
 some "finds" which are enough to make the modern bib- 
 liomaniac mad with envy c He gave sixpence each for 
 the 1587 edition of Golding's Ovid and the 1607 edition 
 of Phaer's JEneid, whilst the 1550 edition of John Hey- 
 wood's Fables seems to have been thrown in for nothing, 
 to make up the parcel. Needless to say that, after con- 
 suming months and years in preparing materials for his 
 great work, Gray never completed or even began it, and in 
 April, 1770, learning from Hurd that Thomas Warton was 
 about to essay the same labour, he placed all his notes and 
 memoranda in Warton's hands. The result, which Gray 
 never lived to see, was creditable and valuable, and even 
 now is not entirely antiquated ; it was very different, how- 
 ever, from what the world would have had every right to 
 expect from Gray's learning, taste, and method. 
 
 Two short poems composed in the course of 1761 next 
 demand our attention. The first is a sketch of Gray's own 
 character, which was found in one of his note-books: 
 
 " Too poor for a bribe, and too proud to importune, 
 He had not the method of making a fortune ; 
 Could love, and could hate, so was thought somewhat odd; 
 No very great wit, he believed in a God ; 
 A post or a pension he did not desire, 
 
 But left Church and State to Charles Townshend and Squire." 
 L 
 
' 
 
 152 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 It has been commonly supposed that these lines suggest- 
 ed to Goldsmith his character of Burke in fietaliaticn. 
 Charles Townshend is the famous statesman, sumamed 
 the Weathercock; the Rev. Samuel Squire was much more 
 obscure, an intriguing Fellow of a Cambridge college who 
 had just contrived to wriggle into the bishopric of St. Da- 
 vid's. Warburton said that Squire " made religion his 
 trade." At the storming of Belleisle, June 13, 1761, Sir 
 William Williams, a young soldier with whom Gray was 
 slightly acquainted, was killed, and the Montagus, who 
 proposed to erect a monument to him, applied to Gray 
 for an epitaph. After considerable difficulty, in August 
 of that year, Gray contrived to squeeze out three of his 
 stately quatrains. Walpole describes Williams as " a gal- 
 lant and ambitious young man, who had devoted himself 
 to war and politics," and to whom Frederic Montagu was 
 warmly attached. Gray, however, expresses no strong per- 
 sonal feeling, and did not, indeed, know much of the sub- 
 ject of his elegy. It is curious that in a letter to Dr. 
 Brown, dated October 23, 1760, Gray mentions that Sir 
 W. Williams is starting on the expedition that proved fa- 
 tal to him, and predicts that he " may lay his fine Van- 
 dyck head in the dust." 
 
 For two years Gray had kept his rooms at Cambridge 
 locked up, except during the Long Vacation, but in the 
 early spring of 1761 he began to think of returning to 
 what was really home for him. He ran down for a few 
 days in January, but found Cambridge too cold, and told 
 Dr. Brown not to expect him till the codlin hedge at 
 Pembroke was out in blossom. Business, however, de- 
 layed him, against his will, until June, when he settled in 
 college. In September he came up again to London to be 
 present at the coronation of George III., on which occa- 
 
vil] NORTON NICHOLS. 153 
 
 sion he was accommodated with a place in the Lord Cham- 
 berlain's box. "The Bishop of Rochester would have 
 dropped the crown if it had not been pinned to the cush- 
 ion, and the King was often obliged to call out, and set 
 matters right ; but the sword of state had been entirely 
 forgot, so Lord Huntingdon was forced to carry the Lord 
 Mayor's great two-handed sword instead of it. This made 
 it later than ordinary before they got under their canopies 
 and set forward. I should have told you that the old 
 Bishop of Lincoln, with his stick, went doddling by the 
 side of the Queen, and the Bishop of Chester had the 
 pleasure of bearing the gold paten. When they were 
 gone we went down to dinner, for there were three rooms 
 below, where the Duke of Devonshire was so good as to 
 feed us with great cold sirloins of beef, legs of mutton, fil- 
 lets of veal, and other substantial viands and liquors, which 
 we devoured all higgledy-piggledy, like porters ; after which 
 every one scrambled up again, and seated themselves." 
 
 In the winter of 1761 Gray was curiously excited by 
 the arrival at Cambridge of Mr. Delaval, a former Fellow 
 of the college, bringing with him a set of musical glasses. 
 To Mason Gray writes, on the 8th of December: 
 
 " Of all loves come to Cambridge out of hand, for here is Mr. Del- 
 aval and a charming set of glasses that sing like nightingales ; and 
 we have concerts every other night, and shall stay here this month 
 or two ; and a vast deal of good company, and a whale in pickle just 
 come from Ipswich ; and the man will not die, and Mr. Wood is gone 
 to Chatsworth •, and there is nobody but you and Tom and the curled 
 dog; and do not talk of the charge, for we will make a subscription ; 
 besides, we know you always come when you have a mind." 
 
 As early as 1760, probably during one of his flying visits 
 to Cambridge, Gray had a young fellow introduced to him 
 of whom he seems at that time to have taken no notice, 
 
154 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 but who was to become the most intimate and valued of 
 his friends. No person has left so clear and circumstan- 
 tial an account of the appearance, conduct, and sayings 
 of Gray as the Rev. Norton Nichols, of Blandeston, in 
 1760 an undergraduate at Trinity Hall, and between eigh- 
 teen and nineteen years of age. Nichols afterwards told 
 Mathias that the lightning brightness of Gray's eye was 
 what struck him most in his first impression, and he used 
 the phrase "folgorante sguardo" to express what he 
 meant. A little later than this, at a social gathering in 
 the rooms of a Mr. Lobbs, at Peterhouse, Nichols formed 
 one of a party who collected round Gray's chair and 
 listened to his bright conversation. The young man was 
 too modest to join in the talk, until, in reply to something 
 that had been said on the use of bold metaphors in poetry, 
 Gray quoted Milton's " The sun to me is dark, and silent 
 as the moon ;" upon this Nichols ventured to ask whether 
 this might not possibly be imitated from Dante, " Mi ri- 
 pingeva la dove il sol tace." Gray turned quickly round 
 and said, " Sir, do you read Dante?" and immediately 
 entered into conversation with him. He found Nichols 
 an intelligent and sympathetic student of literature; he 
 chiefly addressed him through the remainder of the even- 
 ing ; and when they came to part he pressed him to visit 
 him in his own rooms at Pembroke. 
 
 Gray had never forgotten the Italian which he had 
 learned in his youth, and he was deeply read in Dante, 
 Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, whilst disdaining those pop- 
 ular poets of the eighteenth century who at that time 
 enjoyed more consideration in their native land than the 
 great classics of the country. One of his proofs of favour 
 to his young friend Nichols was to lend him his marked 
 and annotated copy of Petrarch ; and he was pleased 
 
vil] NORTON NICHOLS. 155 
 
 when Nichols was the first to trace in the Purgatorio the 
 lines which suggested a phrase in the Elegy in a Country 
 Church-yard. It was doubtless with a side-glance at his 
 own starved condition of genius that he told Nichols 
 that he thought it " an advantage to Dante to have been 
 produced in a rude age of strong and uncontrolled pas- 
 sions, when the Muse was not checked by refinement and 
 the fear of criticism." For the next three years we must 
 consider Gray as constantly cheered by the sympathy and 
 enthusiasm of young Nichols, though it is not until 1764 
 that we come upon the first of the invaluable letters 
 which the latter received from his great friend. 
 
 Nothing could be more humdrum than Gray's existence 
 about this time. There is no sign of literary life in him, 
 and the whole year 1762 seems only broken by a journey 
 northwards in the summer. Towards the end of June he 
 went to stay at York for a fortnight with Mason, whose 
 " insatiable avarice," as Gray calls it in writing to him, 
 had been lulled for a little while by the office of Residen- 
 tiary of York Cathedral. Mason was now grown lazy and 
 gross, sitting, " like a Japanese divinity, with his hands 
 folded on his fat belly," and so prosperous that Gray 
 recommends him to " shut his insatiable repining mouth." 
 There was a fund of good-humour about Mason, and under 
 all the satire of his friend he does not seem to have shown 
 the least irritation. From York Gray went on to Durham, 
 to stay with Wharton at Old Park, where he was extremely 
 happy : " We take in no newspaper or magazine, but the 
 cream and butter are beyond compare." He made a long 
 stay, and rather late in the autumn set out for a tour in 
 Yorkshire by himself. Through driving rain he saw what 
 he could of Richmond and of Ripon, but was fortunate 
 enough to secure some gleams of sunshine for an exami- 
 
156 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 nation of Fountains Abbey. At Sheffield, then pastoral 
 and pretty still, he admired the charming situation of the 
 town, and so came at last to Chatsworth and Hardwicke, 
 at which latter place " one would think Mary Queen of 
 Scots was bnt just walked down into the park with her 
 guard for half an hour.' 7 After passing through Chester- 
 field and Mansfield, Gray descended the Trent, spent two 
 or three days at Nottingham, and came up to London 
 by the coach. 
 
 He arrived to find letters awaiting him, and a great 
 pother. Dr. Shall et Turner, of Peterhouse, Professor of 
 Modern History and Modern Languages at Cambridge, had 
 been dead a fortnight, and Gray's friends were very anxious 
 to secure the vacant post for him. The chair had been 
 founded by George Lin 1724, and the stipend was 400/. 
 It was not expected that any lectures should be given ; 
 as a matter of fact, not one lecture was delivered until 
 after Gray's death. Shallet Turner had succeeded Samuel 
 Harris, the first prof essor, in 1735, and had held the sine- 
 cure for twenty-seven years. Gray's friends encouraged 
 him to think that Lord Bute would look favourably on his 
 claims, partly because of his fame as a poet, and partly 
 because Bute's creature, Sir Henry Erskine, was a great 
 friend of Gray's; but Sir Francis Blake Delaval had in 
 the mean time secured the interest of the Duke of New- 
 castle for his own kinsman. Early in November it was 
 generally reported that Delaval had been appointed, but 
 a month later the post was actually given to Lawrence 
 Brockett, of Trinity, who held it until 1768, when he was 
 succeeded by Gray. This is the only occasion upon which 
 the poet, in an age when the most greedy and open de 
 mands for promotion were considered in no way dishon- 
 ourable, persuaded his haughty and independent spirit 
 
vil] NORTON NICHOLS. 157 
 
 ask for anything; in this one case he gave way to the 
 importunities of a crowd of friends, who declared that he 
 had but to put out his hand and take the fruit that was 
 ready to drop into it. 
 
 In the spring of 1763 Gray was recalled to the pursuit 
 of literature by the chance that a friend of his, a Mr. 
 Howe, of Pembroke, whilst travelling in Italy, met the 
 celebrated critic and commentator Count Francesco Alga- 
 rotti, to whom he presented Gray's poems. The Count 
 read them with rapturous admiration, and passed them on 
 to the young poet Agostino Paradisi, with a recommen- 
 dation that he should translate them into Italian. The 
 reputation of Algarotti was then a European one, and Gray 
 was very much flattered at the graceful and ardent com- 
 pliments of so famous a connoisseur. "I was not born so 
 far from the sun," he says, in a letter dated February .17, 
 1763, " as to be ignorant of Count Algarotti's name and 
 reputation ; nor am I so far advanced in years, or in phi- 
 losophy, as not to feel the warmth of his approbation. The 
 odes in question, as their motto shows, were meant to be 
 vocal to the intelligent alone. How few they were in my 
 own country Mr. Howe can testify ; and yet my ambition 
 was terminated by that small circle. I have good reason 
 to be proud, if my voice has reached the ear and appre- 
 hension of a stranger, distinguished as one of the best 
 judges in Europe." Algarotti replied that England, which 
 had already enjoyed a Homer, an Archimedes, a Demos- 
 thenes, now possessed a Pindar also, and enclosed " ob- 
 servations, that is, panegyrics," on the Odes. For some 
 months the correspondence of Count Algarotti enlivened 
 " the nothingness" of Gray's history at Cambridge — "a 
 place," he says, " where no events grow, though we pre- 
 serve those of former days by way of hortus siccus in our 
 
158 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 libraries." In November, 1763, the Count announced his 
 intention of visiting England, where he proposed to pub- 
 lish a magnificent edition of his own works; Gray seems 
 to have anticipated pleasure from his company, but Alga- 
 rotti never came, and soon died rather unexpectedly, in 
 Italy, on the 24th of May, 1764, at the age of fifty-two. 
 
 We possess some of the notes which Gray took of the 
 habits of flowers and birds, thus anticipating the charm- 
 ing observations of Gilbert White. At Cambridge, in 
 1763, crocus and hepatica were blossoming through the 
 snow in the college garden on the 12th of February ; nine 
 days later brought the first white butterfly ; on the oth 
 of March Gray heard the thrush sing, and on the 8th the 
 skylark. The same warm day which brought the lark 
 opened the blossom-buds of the apricots, and the almond- 
 treos for once found themselves outrun in the race of 
 spring. These notes show the quickness of Gray's eye 
 and his quiet ways. It is only the silent, clear-sighted 
 man that knows on what day the first fall of lady-birds is 
 seen, or observes the redstart sitting on her eggs. Gray's 
 notes for the spring of 1763 read like fragments of a 
 beautiful poem, and are scarcely less articulate than that 
 little trill of improvised song which Norton^ Nichols has 
 preserved — 
 
 " There pipes the wood-lark, and the song-thrush there 
 Scatters his loose notes in the waste of air " — 
 
 a couplet which Gray made one spring morning as Nich- 
 ols and he were walking in the fields in the neighbour- 
 hood of Cambridge. 
 
 To this period should be attributed the one section of 
 Gray's poems which it is impossible to date with exact- 
 ness, namely, the romantic lyrics paraphrased, in short I 
 
vil] NORTON NICHOLS. 159 
 
 measures, from Icelandic and Gaelic sources. 1 When 
 these pieces were published, in 1768, Gray prefixed to 
 them an " advertisement," which was not reprinted. In 
 this he connected them with his projected History of 
 English Poetry. " In the introduction " to that work, 
 " he meant to have produced some specimens of the style 
 that reigned in ancient times amongst the neighbouring 
 nations, or those who had subdued the greater part of 
 this island, and were only progenitors : the following 
 three imitations made a part of them. 1 ' The three imi- 
 tations are The Fatal Sisters, The Descent of Odin, and 
 The Triumphs of Owen. To these must be added the 
 smaller fragments, The Death of Hoel, Caradoc, and Co- 
 non, discovered amongst Gray's papers, and first printed 
 by Mason. These, then, form a division of Gray's poeti- 
 cal work not inconsiderable in extent, remarkably homo- 
 geneous in style and substance, and entirely distinct from 
 anything else which he wrote. In these paraphrases of 
 archaic chants he appears as a purely romantic poet, and 
 heralds the approach of Sir Walter Scott, and the whole 
 revival of Northern romance. The Norse pieces are, per- 
 haps, more interesting than the Celtic ; they are longer, 
 and to modern scholarship seem more authentic, at all 
 events more in the general current of literature. More- 
 over, they were translated direct from the Icelandic, 
 whereas there is no absolute proof that Gray was a 
 Welsh scholar. It may well inspire us with admiration 
 of the poet's intellectual energy to find that he had mas- 
 tered a language which was hardly known, at that time, 
 by any one in Europe, except a few learned Icelanders, 
 whose native tongue made it easy for them to understand 
 
 1 I notice that Tlie Fatal Sisters and The Descent of Odin bear 
 the date 1761 in the Pembroke MSS. 
 8 
 
, 160 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 , Norrcena. Gray must have puzzled it out for himself, 
 probably with the help of the Index Linguae Scytho- 
 Scandicce of Verelius. At that time what he rightly 
 calls the Norse tongue was looked upon as a sort of. 
 mystery; it was called "Runick," and its roots were sup- 
 posed to be derived from the Hebrew. The Fatal Sis- 
 ters is a lay of the eleventh century, the text of which 
 Gray found in one of the compilations of Torfceus (Thor- 
 mod Torveson), a great collector of ancient Icelandic vel- 
 lums at the close of the seventeenth century. It is a 
 monologue, sung by one of the Valkyriur, or Choosers of 
 the Slain, to her three sisters ; the measure is one of great 
 force and fire, an alternate rhyming of seven-syllable lines, 
 of which this is a specimen: 
 
 " Now the storm begins to lower 
 
 (Haste, the loom of Hell prepare !) : 
 Iron-sleet of arrowy shower 
 Hurtles in the darkened air. 
 
 " Ere the ruddy sun be set 
 
 Pikes must shiver, javelins sing, 
 
 Blade with clattering buckler meet, 
 
 Hauberk crash, and helmet ring. 
 
 " Sisters, hence with spurs of speed ; 
 
 Each her thundering faulchion wield ; 
 Each bestride her sable steed — 
 Hurry, hurry to the field !" 
 
 
 The Descent of Odin is a finer poem, better pa 
 phrased. Gray found the original in a book by Bartol 
 nus, one of the five great physicians of that name who 
 flourished in Denmark during the seventeenth century. 
 The poem itself is the Vegtamskvida, one of the most 
 powerful and mysterious of those ancient lays which 
 
vil] NORTON NICHOLS. 161 
 
 form the earliest collection we possess of Scandinavian 
 poetry. It is probable that Gray never saw the tolerably 
 complete but very inaccurate edition of Soemundar Edda 
 which existed in his time, nor knew the wonderful his- 
 tory of this collection, which was discovered in Iceland, 
 in 1643, by Brynjolfr Sveinnson, Bishop of Skalaholt. 
 The text which Gray found in Bartolinus, however, was 
 sufficiently true to enable him to make a better transla- 
 tion of the Vegtamskvida than any which has been at- 
 tempted since, and to make us deeply regret that he did 
 not " imitate " more of these noble Eddaic chants. He 
 even attempts a philological ingenuity, for, finding that 
 Odin, to conceal his true nature from the Volva, calls 
 himself Vegtam, Gray translates this strange word " trav- 
 eller," evidently tracing it to veg, a way. He omits the 
 first stave, which recounts how the ^Esir sat in council to 
 deliberate on the dreams of Balder, and he also omits 
 four spurious stanzas, in this showing a critical tact little 
 short of miraculous, considering the condition of scholar- 
 ship at that time. The version itself is as poetical as it 
 is exact : 
 
 " Right against the eastern gate, 
 By the moss-grown pile he sate, 
 Where long of yore to sleep was laid 
 The dust of the prophetic maid. 
 Facing to the Northern clime, 
 Thrice he traced the Runic rhyme ; 
 Thrice pronounced, in accents dread, 
 The thrilling verse that wakes the dead ; 
 Till from out the hollow ground 
 Slowly breathed a sullen sound." 
 
 Or— 
 
 " Mantling in the goblet see 
 The pure beverage of the bee ; 
 
162 GRAY. [chap, j 
 
 O'er it hangs the shield of gold ; 
 Tis the drink of Balder bold. 
 Balder's head to death is given. 
 Pain can reach the sons of Heaven ! 
 Unwilling I my lips unclose — 
 Leave me, leave me to repose — " 
 
 must be compared with the original to show how thor- j 
 oughly the terse and rapid evolution of the strange old 
 lay has been preserved, though the concise expression has I 
 throughout been modernized and rendered intelligible. 
 
 In these short pieces we see the beginning of that re- 
 turn to old Norse themes which has been carried so fat 
 and so brilliantly by later poets. It is a very curious 
 thing that Gray in this anticipated, not merely his own 
 countrymen, but the Scandinavians themselves.. The first 
 poems in which a Danish poet showed any intelligent ap- 
 preciation of his national mythology and history were 
 the Rolf Krake and Balder's Dod of Johannes Ewald, 
 published respectively in 1770 and 1773. Gray, therefore, 
 takes the precedence not only of Sir Walter Scott, Mr. 
 Morris, and other British poets, but even of the countless 
 Danish, Swedish, and German writers who for a century- 
 past have celebrated the adventures of the archaic heroes 
 of their race. 
 
 In a century which was inclined to begin the history of 
 English poetry with the Life of Cowley, and which dis- 
 trusted all that was ancient, as being certainly rude and 
 probably worthless, Gray held the opinion, which he ex- 
 presses in a letter of the 17th of February, 1763, "that, 
 without any respect of climates, imagination reigns in all 
 nascent societies of men, where the necessaries of life force 
 every one to think and act much for himself." This crit- 
 ical temper attracted him to the Edda, made him indul- 
 
til] NORTON NICHOLS. 163 
 
 gent to Ossian, and led him to see more poetry in the 
 ancient songs of Wales than most non-Celtic readers can 
 discover there. In 1764 Evans published his Specimens 
 of Welsh Poetry, and in that bulky quarto Gray met with 
 a Latin prose translation of the chant, written about 1158 
 by Gwalchmai, in praise of his master, Owen Gwynedd. 
 The same Evans gave a variety of extracts from the Welsh 
 epic, the Gododin, and three of these fragments Gray 
 turned into English rhyme. One has something of the 
 concision of an epigram from the Greek mythology : 
 
 " Have ye seen the tusky boar, 
 Or the bull, with sullen roar, 
 On surrounding foes advance ? 
 So Caradoc bore his lance." 
 
 The others are not nearly equal in poetical merit to 
 the Scandinavian paraphrases. Gray does not seem to 
 have shown these romances to his friends with the same 
 
 ) readiness that he displayed on other occasions. From 
 critics like Hard and Warburton he could expect no ap- 
 proval of themes taken from an antique civilisation. Wal- 
 
 ) pole, who did not see these poems till they were printed, 
 asks: "Who can care through what horrors a Runic sav- 
 age arrived at all the joys and glories they could conceive 
 
 | — the supreme felicity of boozing ale out of the skull of 
 an enemy in Odin's Hall ?" This is quite a characteristic 
 expression of that wonderful eighteenth century through 
 which poor Gray wandered in a life-long exile. The au- 
 thor of the Vegtamskvida a " Runic savage !" No wonder 
 Gray kept his " Imitations " safely out of the sight of such 
 
 I critics. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE. ENGLISH TRAVELS. 
 
 The seven remaining years of Gray's life were even less 
 eventful than those which we have already examined. In 
 November, 1763, he began to find that a complaint which! 
 had long troubled him, the result of failing constitution, . 
 had become almost constant. For eight or nine months 
 he was an acute sufferer, until in July, 1764, he consented 
 to undergo the operation without which he could not have 
 continued to live. Dr. Wharton volunteered to come up. 
 from Durham, and, if not to perform the act, to support 
 his friend in "the perilous hour." But Gray preferred^ 
 that the Cambridge surgeon should attend him, and the* 
 operation was not only performed successfully, but the 
 poet was able to sustain the much-dreaded suffering with* 
 fortitude. As he was beginning to get about again the< 
 gout came in one foot, "but so tame you might have 
 stroked it, such a minikin you might have played with it;- 
 in three or four days it had disappeared." This gout,- 
 which troubled him so constantly, and was fatal to him 
 at last, was hereditary, and not caused by any excess id- 
 eating or drinking ; Gray was, in fact, singularly abstemi-^ 
 ous, and it was one of the accusations of his enemies that 1 
 he affected to be so dainty that he could touch nothing 
 less delicate than apricot marmalade. 
 
chap, viii.] LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE. 165 
 
 Whilst Gray was lying ill Lord Chancellor Hardwicke 
 died, at the age of seventy - four, on the 16th of May, 
 1764. The office of Seneschal of the University was thus 
 vacated, and there ensued a very violent contest, and the 
 result of which was that Philip Hardwicke succeeded to 
 his father's honours by a majority of one, and the other 
 candidate, the notorious John, Earl of Sandwich, though 
 supported by the aged Dr. Roger Long and other clerical 
 magnates, was rejected. Gray, to whom the tarnished 
 reputation of Lord Sandwich was in the highest degree 
 abhorrent, swelled the storm of electioneering by a lam- 
 poon, The Candidate, beginning : 
 
 " When sly Jemmy Twitcher had smugged up his face, 
 With a lick of court white-wash and pious grimace, 
 A-wooing he went, where three sisters of old 
 In harmless society guttle and scold." 
 
 Lord Sandwich found that this squib was not without 
 its instant and practical effect, and he attempted to wiu 
 so dangerous an opponent to his side. What means he 
 adopted cannot be conjectured, but they were unsuccessful. 
 Lord Sandwich said to Cradock, " I have my private rea- 
 ! sons for knowing Gray's absolute inveteracy." The Can- 
 didate found its way into print long after Gray's death, 
 but only in a fragmentary form ,* and the same has hith- 
 erto been true of Tophet, of which I am able to give, for 
 the first time, a complete text from the Pembroke MSS. 
 One of Gray's particular friends, " placid Mr. Tyson of 
 Bene't College," made a drawing of the Rev. Henry 
 Etough, a converted Jew, a man of slanderous and vio- 
 lent temper, who had climbed into high preferment in 
 the Church of England. Underneath this very rude and 
 hideous caricature Gray wrote these lines : . . 
 
166 GRAY. [chap, 
 
 "Thus Tophet look'd : so grinn'd the brawling fiend, 
 Whilst frighted prelates bow'd and call'd him friend ; 
 I saw them bow, and, while they wish'd him dead, 
 With servile simper nod the mitred head. 
 Our mother-church, with half -averted sight, 
 Blush'd as she bless'd her grisly proselyte ; 
 Hosannas rang through hell's tremendous borders, 
 And Satan's self had thoughts of taking orders." 
 
 These two pieces, however, are very far from being the 
 only effusions of the kind which Gray wrote. Mason 
 appears to have made a collection of Gray's Cambridge 
 squibs, which he did not venture to print. A Satire upon 
 Heads ; or, Never a Barrel the Better Herring, a comic 
 piece in which Gray attacked the prominent heads of 
 houses, was in existence as late as 1854, but has never 
 been printed, and has evaded my careful search. These 
 squibs are said to have been widely circulated in Cam- 
 bridge — so widely as to frighten the timid poet, and to 
 have been retained as part of the tradition of Pembroke 
 common-room . until long after Gray's death. I am told 
 that Mason's set of copies of these poems, of which I have 
 seen a list, turned up, during the present century, in the 
 library of a cathedral in the North of England. This may 
 give some clue to their ultimate discovery. They might 
 prove to be coarse and slight; they could not fail to be 
 biographically interesting. 
 
 In October, 1764, Gray set out upon what he called his 
 " Lilliputian travels " in the South of England. He went 
 down by Winchester to Southampton, stayed there some 
 weeks, and then returned to London by Salisbury, Wilton, 
 Amesbury, and Stonehenge. " I proceed to tell you," he 
 says to Norton Nichols, "that my health is much im- 
 proved by the sea ; not that I drank it, or bathed in it, as 
 
tiil] ENGLISH TRAVELS. 167 
 
 the common people do. No ! I only walked by it and 
 looked upon it." His description of Netley Abbey, in a 
 letter to Dr. Brown, is very delicate : " It stands in a little 
 quiet valley, which gradually rises behind the ruins into a 
 half-circle, crowned with thick wood. Before it, on a de- 
 scent, is a thicket of oaks, that serves to veil it from the 
 broad day, and from profane eyes, only leaving a peep on 
 both sides, where the sea appears glittering through the 
 shade, and vessels, with their white sails, glide across and 
 are lost again. ... I should tell you that the ferryman 
 who rowed me, a lusty young fellow, told me that he 
 would not, for all the world, pass a night at the Abbey, 
 there were such things seen near it." Still more pictu- 
 resque — indeed, showing an eye for nature which was 
 then without a precedent in modern literature — is this 
 passage from a letter of this time to Norton Nichols : 
 
 "I must not close my letter without giving you one principal 
 event of my history ; which was, that (in the course of my late tour) 
 I set out one morning before five o'clock, the moon shining through 
 a dark and misty autumnal air, and got to the sea-coast time enough 
 to be at the sun's levee. I saw the clouds and dark vapours open 
 gradually to right and left, rolling over one another in great smoky 
 wreaths, and the tide (as it flowed gently in upon the sands) first 
 whitening, then slightly tinged with gold and blue ; and all at once 
 a little line of insufferable brightness that (before I can write these 
 few words) was grown to half an orb, and now to a whole one, too 
 glorious to be distinctly seen. It is very odd it makes no figure on 
 paper ; yet I shall remember it as long as the sun, or at least as long 
 as I endure. I wonder whether anybody ever saw it before? I 
 hardly believe it." 
 
 In November Gray was laid up again with illness, 
 
 being threatened this time with blindness, a calamity 
 
 which passed off favourably. He celebrated the death of 
 
 Churchill, which occurred at this time, by writing what 
 
 M 8* 
 

 168 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 he calls " The Temple of Tragedy." We do not know 
 what this may have been, but it would not be inspired 
 by love of Churchill, who, in the course of his brief rush 
 through literature in the guise of a " rogue " elephant, 
 had annoyed Gray, though he had never tossed him or 
 trampled on him. Gray bought all the pamphlet satires 
 of Churchill as they appeared, and enriched them with an- 
 notations. In his collection the Ghost alone is missing, 
 perhaps because of the allusions it contained to himself. 
 
 On the 24th of December, 1764, that Gothic romance, 
 the Castle of Otranto, was published anonymously. It 
 was almost universally attributed to Gray, to the surprise 
 and indignation of Horace Walpole, who said of his own 
 work, modestly enough, that people must be fools indeed 
 to think such a trifle worthy of a genius like Gray. The 
 reputation of the poet as an antiquarian and a lover of 
 romantic antiquity probably led to this mistake. At 
 Cambridge another error prevailed, as Gray announces to 
 Walpole within a week of the publication of the book: 
 "It engages our attention here, makes some of us cry a 
 little, and all in general afraid to go to bed o' nights. 
 We take it for a translation, and should believe it to be 
 a true story if it were not for St. Nicholas." This novel, 
 poor as it is, was a not inconsiderable link in the chain 
 of romantic revival started by Gray. 
 
 We have little record of the poet's life during the early 
 months of 1765. In June he was laid up with gout at 
 York, while paying a visit to Mason, and in July went on 
 to drink the waters and walk by the sea at Hartlepool. 
 From this place he sent to Mason some excellent stanzas 
 which have never found their way into his works; they 
 are supposed to be indited by William Shakspeare in per- 
 son, and to be a complaint of his sufferings at the hands of 
 

 tiil] ENGLISH TRAVELS. 169 
 
 his commentators. The poem is in the metre of the Elegy, 
 and is a very grave specimen of the mock-heroic style : 
 
 " Better to bottom tarts and cheesecakes nice, 
 Better the roast meat from the fire to save, 
 Better be twisted into caps for spice, 
 
 Than thus be patched and cobbled in one's grave." 
 
 What would Gray, and still more what would Shak- 
 speare say to the vapid confusion of opinions which have 
 been laid on the bard's memory during the century that 
 now intervenes between these verses and ourselves — a 
 heap of dirt and stones which he must laboriously shovel 
 away who would read the true inscription on the Proph- 
 et's tomb? For criticism of the type which has now be- 
 come so common, for the counting of syllables and weigh- 
 ing of commas, Gray, with all his punctilio and his minute 
 scholarship, had nothing but contempt : 
 
 " Much I have borne from cankered critic's spite, 
 
 From fumbling baronets, and poets small, 
 
 Pert barristers, and parsons nothing bright — 
 
 But what awaits me now is worst of all." 
 
 Mason at last, at the age of forty, had fallen in love 
 with a lady of small fortune and less personal appearance, 
 but very sweet manners ; and whilst Gray was still lin- 
 gering in the North his friend married. Meantime Gray 
 passed on to Old Park, and spent the month of August 
 with the Whartons. From this place he went to stay 
 with Lord Strath more at Hetton, in Durham, and towards 
 the beginning of September set out, with his host and 
 Major Lyon, his brother, for Scotland. The first night 
 was passed at Tweedmouth, and the second at Edinburgh 
 ( u that most picturesque at a distance, and nastiest when 
 near, of all capital cities "). Gray was instantly received 
 
170 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 with honour by the Scotch literati. On the evening of 
 his arrival he supped with Dr. W. Robertson and other 
 leading men of letters. Next day the party crossed the 
 Forth in Lord Strath more's yawl, and reached Perth, and 
 by dinner-time on the fourth day arrived at Glamis. Here 
 Gray was extremely happy for some bright weeks, charmed 
 with the beauty of the scenery and the novelty of the life, 
 soothed and delighted by the refined hospitality of the 
 Lyons, three of whom, including Lord Strathmore, he had 
 known as undergraduates at Cambridge, and enchanted to 
 hear spoken and sung on all sides of him the magical 
 language of Ossian. On the 11th of September Lord 
 Strathmore took him for a tour of five days in the High- 
 lands, showed him Dunkeld, Tay month, and the falls of 
 Tummell, the Pass of Killiekrankie, Blair-Athol, and the 
 peaks of the Grampians. " In short," he says, " since I 
 saw the Alps, I have seen nothing sublime till now." 
 
 Immediately on his arrival at Glamis he had received 
 an exceedingly polite letter from the poet Beattie,who was 
 a professor at Aberdeen, pressing him to visit that city, 
 and requesting that, if this was impossible, he himself 
 might be allowed to travel southward to Glamis, to pre- 
 sent his compliments to Gray. At the same time the 
 University of Aberdeen offered him the degree of doctor 
 of laws. Gray declined both the invitation and the hon- 
 our, but said that Lord. Strathmore would be very glad 
 to see Beattie at Glamis. The younger poet accordingly 
 posted to lay his enthusiasm at the feet of the elder, and 
 Gray received him with unwonted openness and a sort of 
 intimate candour rare with him. Beattie reports, amongst 
 other things, that Dryden was mentioned by him with 
 scant respect, upon which Gray remarked " that if there 
 was any excellence in his own numbers, he had learned it 
 
viil] ENGLISH TRAVELS 171 
 
 wholly from that great poet. And preyed him with great 
 earnestness to study him, as his choice of words and ver- 
 sification were singularly happy and harmonious." 
 
 Gray came back from the mountains with feelings far 
 other than those in which Dr. Johnson indulged when he 
 found himself safe once more in the latitude of Fleet 
 Street. " I am returned from Scotland," says the poet, 
 " charmed with my expedition ; it is of the Highlands I 
 speak; the Lowlands are worth seeing once, but the moun- 
 tains are ecstatic, and ought to be visited in pilgrimage 
 once a year. None but these monstrous children of God 
 know how to join so much beauty with so much horror. 
 A fig for your poets, painters, gardeners, and clergymen 
 that have not been amongst them ; their imagination can be 
 made up of nothing but bowling-greens, flowering shrubs, 
 horse-ponds, Fleet-ditches, shell grottoes, and Chinese rails. 
 Then I had so beautiful an autumn, Italy could hardly pro- 
 duce a nobler scene, and this so sweetly contrasted with 
 that perfection of nastiness, and total want of accommo- 
 dation, that Scotland can only supply." 
 
 Mason had married on the 25th of September, and 
 greatly desired that Gray, when passing southward to- 
 wards the end of October, should come and be the wit- 
 ness of his felicity at Aston, but Gray excused himself 
 on the ground that his funds were exhausted, and went 
 straight through to London. There he found his old 
 friend Harriet Speed, now Madame de la Peyriere, whose 
 husband was in the Italian diplomatic service. She was 
 exceedingly glad to receive him, and welcomed him with 
 two little dogs on her lap, a cockatoo on her shoulder, a 
 piping bullfinch at her elbow, and a strong suspicion of 
 rouge on her cheeks. For about six months after the 
 tour in Scotland Gray enjoyed very tolerable health, re- 
 
172 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 maining, however, entirely indolent as far as literature was 
 concerned. When Walpole told him he ought to write 
 more he replied, " What has one to do, when turned of 
 fifty, but really to think of finishing ? However, I will 
 be candid, for you seem to be so with me, and avow to 
 you that till fourscore and upwards, whenever the humour 
 takes me, I will write ; because I like it, and because I 
 like myself better when I do so. If I do not write much 
 it is because I cannot." 
 
 Henceforward the chief events in Gray's life were his 
 summer holidays. In May and June, 1766, he paid a 
 visit to the friend whom he called Reverend Billy, the 
 Rev. William Robinson, younger brother of the famous 
 Mrs. Montagu. This gentleman was rector of Denton, 
 in the county of Kent, a little quiet valley some eight 
 miles to the east of Canterbury and near the sea. Gray 
 took the opportunity of visiting Margate and Ramsgate, 
 which were just beginning to become resorts for holiday 
 folk. It is related that at the latter place the friends went 
 to inspect the new pier, then lately completed. Somebody 
 said, seeing it forlorn and empty, " What did they make 
 this pier for V whereupon Gray smartly replied, " For mc 
 to walk on," and proceeded to claim possession of it, by- 
 striding along it. He visited the whole coast of Kent, 
 as far as Hythe, in company with Mr. Robinson. The 
 county charmed him. He wrote to Norton Nichols: 
 
 " The country is all a garden, gay, rich, and fruitful, and from the 
 rainy season had preserved, till I left it, all that emerald verdure 
 which commonly one only sees for the first fortnight of the spring. 
 In the west part of it from, every eminence the eye catches some 
 long winding reach of the Thames or Medway, with all their navi- 
 gation ; in the east the sea breaks in upon you, and mixes its white 
 transient sails and glittering blue expanse with the deeper and 
 
viii.] ENGLISH TRAVELS. 173 
 
 brighter greens of the woods and the corn. This last sentence is 
 so fine, I am quite ashamed ; but, no matter ! you must translate 
 it into prose. Palgrave, if he heard it, would cover his face with 
 his pudding sleeve." 
 
 He read the New Bath Guide, which had just appeared, 
 and was tempted to indulge in satire of a different sort, 
 by the neighbourhood of the Forrnian villa built by the 
 late Lord Holland at Kingsgate. These powerful verses 
 were found in a drawer at Denton after Gray had left : 
 
 " Old, and abandoned by each venal friend, 
 Here Holland formed the pious resolution 
 To smuggle a few years and try to mend 
 A broken character and constitution. 
 
 " On this congenial spot he fixed his choice : 
 
 Earl Goodwin trembled for his neighbouring sand ; 
 Here sea-gulls scream, and cormorants rejoice, 
 And mariners, though shipwrecked, dread to land. 
 
 " Here reign the blustering North and blighting East, 
 No tree is heard to whisper, bird to sing ; 
 Yet Nature could not furnish out the feast, 
 Art he invokes new horrors still to bring. 
 
 " Here mouldering fanes and battlements arise, 
 Turrets and arches nodding to their fall ; 
 Unpeopled monasteries delude our eyes, 
 And mimic desolation covers all. 
 
 " 'Ah V said the sighing peer, ' had Bute been true, 
 Nor Mungo's, Rigby's, Bradshaw's friendship vain, 
 Far better scenes than these had blest our view, 
 And realized the beauties which we feign : 
 
 " ' Purged by the sword, and purified by fire, 
 
 Then had we seen proud London's hated walls; 
 Owls might have hooted in St. Peter's choir, 
 And foxes stunk and littered in St. Paul's.' " 
 
174 CRAY. [cha*. 
 
 In November, 1766, Mason came to visit Gray in his 
 lodgings in Jermyn Street, and brought his wife, u a pretty, 
 modest, innocent, interesting figure, looking like eighteen, 
 though she is near twenty -eight." She was far gone in 
 consumption, but preserved a muscular strength and con- 
 stitutional energy which deceived those who surrounded 
 her. The winter of 1766 tried her endurance very severely, 
 and she gradually sank. On the 27th of March, 1767, after 
 a married life of only eighteen months, she expired in Ma- 
 son's arms, at Bristol. Gray's correspondence through the 
 three months which preceded her end displays a constant 
 and lively concern, which reached its climax in the exqui- 
 site letter which he wrote to Mason the day after her death, 
 before the fatal news had reached him. In the whole cor- 
 respondence of a man whose unaffected sympathy was al- 
 ways at the service of his friends there is no expression of 
 it more touching than this: 
 
 "March 28, 1767. 
 " My dear Mason, — I break in upon you at a moment when we 
 least of all are permitted to disturb our friends, only to say that you 
 are daily and hourly present to my thoughts. If the worst be not 
 yet past, you will neglect and pardon me ; but if the last struggle be 
 over, if the poor object of your long anxieties be no longer sensible 
 to your kindness or to her own sufferings, allow me (at least in idea, 
 for what could I do were I present more than this ?) to sit by you in 
 silence, and pity from my heart, not her who is at rest, but you who 
 lose her. May He who made us, the Master of our pleasures and our 
 pains, preserve and support you. Adieu ! I have long understood 
 how little you had to hope." 
 
 About a month earlier than this, at the very early age 
 of thirty-six, an old acquaintance and quondam college 
 friend of Gray's, Frederic Hervey, was presented to the 
 diocese of Cloyne. This was a startling rise in life to a 
 ne'er-do-weel of good family, who had not. six years be- 
 
 
vni.] ENGLISH TRAVELS. 175 
 
 fore been begging Mason and Gray to help him, and who 
 soon after this became, not merely Bishop of Derry, but 
 Earl of Bristol. Gray saw a good deal of him during the 
 summer of 1767, and describes how they ate four raspberry 
 puffs together in that historical pastry-cook's at the corner 
 of Cranbourne Street, and how jolly Hervey was at finding 
 himself a bishop. Gray's summer holiday in 1767 was 
 again spent among the mountains. In June he went 
 down to Aston to console Mason, and with him visited 
 Dovedale and the wonders of the Peak. Early in July 
 Gray set out by. York to stay with Wharton at Old Park, 
 from which in August he sent back to Beattie the manu- 
 script of The Minstrel, which that poet had sent, request- 
 ing him to revise it. Gray gave a great deal of attention 
 to this rather worthless production, which has no merit 
 save some smoothness in the use of the Spenserian stanza, 
 and which owed all its character to a clever poem in the 
 same manner, published twenty years earlier, the Psyche 
 of Dr. Gloucester Ridley, a poet whose name, perhaps, 
 may yet one day find an apologist. Gray, however, never 
 grudged to expend his critical labour to the advantage of 
 a friend, and pruned the luxuriance of The Minstrel with 
 a serious assiduity. 
 
 Meanwhile Lord Strathmore was at hand, marrying 
 himself to a great Durham heiress; Gray made a trip to 
 Hartlepool in August, and coming back stayed with the 
 newly-wedded earl and countess at their castle of Gibside, 
 near Ravensworth. On the 29th of August he and Dr. 
 Wharton set out in a post-chaise by Newcastle and Hex- 
 ham for the Lakes. On their way to Carlisle they got 
 soaked in the rain, and Wharton was taken so ill with 
 asthma at Keswick that they returned home to Old Park 
 from Cockermouth, after hardly a glimpse of the moun- 
 
176 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 tains. In the church at Appleby the epitaph of Anne, 
 Countess of Dorset, amused Gray by its pomposity, and 
 he improvised the following pleasing variation on it: 
 
 "Now clean, now hideous, mellow now, now gruff, 
 She swept, she hiss'd, she ripen'd, and grew rough, 
 At Brougham, Pendragon, Appleby, and Brough." 
 
 Mason buried his wife in the Cathedral of Bristol, and 
 on the tablet which bears her name he inscribed a brief 
 elegy which has outlived all the rest of his works, and is 
 still frequently quoted with praise. It runs thus : 
 
 " Take, holy earth ! all that my soul holds dear : 
 
 Take that best gift which Heaven so lately gave. 
 To Bristol's fount I bore with trembling care 
 
 Her faded form : she bow'd to taste the wave, 
 And died. Does Youth, does Beauty read the line ? 
 
 Does sympathetic fear their breasts alarm ? 
 Speak, dead Maria ! breathe a strain divine : 
 
 E'en from the grave thou shalt have power to charm. 
 Bid them be chaste, be innocent like thee ; 
 
 Bid them in duty's sphere as meekly move ; 
 And if so fair, from vanity as free, 
 
 As firm in friendship, and as fond in love, 
 Tell them, though 'tis an awful thing to die 
 
 CTwas ev'n to thee), yet the dread path once trody 
 Heaven lifts its everlasting portals high, 
 
 And bids the pure in heart behold their God." 
 
 The last four lines have the ring of genuine poetry, and 
 surpass the rest of Mason's productions in verse as gold 
 surpasses dross. It is a very curious thing that he does, 
 in fact, owe his position as a poet to some lines which he] 
 did not write himself. As long as he lived, and for man) 
 years after his death, the secret was kept, but at last Nor- 
 ton Nichols confessed that the beautiful quatrain in italics 
 
vin.] ENGLISH TRAVELS. Ill 
 
 was entirely composed by Gray. Nichols was with the 
 elder poet at the time when the MS. arrived, and Gray 
 showed it to him, with Mason's last four lines erased. 
 Gray said, "That will never do for an ending; I have al- 
 tered it thus," and thereupon wrote in the stanza as we 
 now know it. Nichols says that Mason's finale was weak, 
 with a languid repetition of some preceding expressions; 
 and he took the occasion to criticise the whole of Mason's 
 poetry as feeble and tame. "No wonder," said Gray, 
 "for Mason never gives himself time to think. If his 
 epithets do not occur readily, he leaves spaces for them, 
 and puts them in afterwards. Mason has read too little 
 and written too much." It is well that we should have 
 this side of the question stated, for Mason loves to insinuate 
 that Gray thought him a poet of superlative merit. There 
 was no love lost between Mason and Nichols; and if the 
 younger carefully preserved Gray's verdict on the poetry 
 of the elder, Mason revenged himself by remarking that it 
 was a good thing for Nichols that Gray never discovered 
 that he drank like a fish. We are reminded of the wars 
 of Bozzy and Piozzi. 
 
 In the spring of 1767 Gray met Dodsley, son of the 
 great publisher and heir to his business, and was asked 
 by him to consent to the republication of his poems in 
 a cheap form. It was found that Bentley's designs were 
 worn out, and therefore it was determined to omit all 
 illustrations, and with them the Long Story, which Gray 
 thought would now be unintelligible. Whilst this trans- 
 action was loitering along, as Gray's business was apt to 
 loiter, Beattie wrote to him, in December, 1767, to say 
 that Foulis, an enterprising Glasgow publisher, w T as anxious 
 to produce the same collection. Dodsley made no objec- 
 tion, and so exactly the same matter was put through two 
 
178 GRAY. [char 
 
 presses at the same time. In neither book had Gray any 
 pecuniary interest. There had been no explanatory notes 
 in the Odes of 1757, but in reprinting these poems, eleven 
 years later, he added a few " out of spite, because the pub- 
 lic did not understand the two odes which I called Pin- 
 daric, though the first was not very dark, and the second 
 alluded to a few common facts to be found in any sixpenny 
 history of England, by way of question and answer, for the 
 use of children." He added to what had already appeared 
 in 1753 and 1757 the three short archaic romances, lest, as < 
 he said to Horace Walpole, "my works should be mistaken 
 for the works of a flea, or a pismire. . . . With all this I \ 
 shall be but a shrimp of an author." The book, as a mat- 
 ter of fact, had to be eked out with blank leaves and very 
 wide type to reach the sum of 120 nominal pages. Dods- 
 ley's edition was not a beautiful volume, but it was cheap ; 
 it appeared in July, 1768, and before October of the same 
 year two impressions, consisting of 2250 copies, had been 
 sold. Foulis came out with his far more handsome Glas- 
 gow edition in September, and this also, though a costly 
 book, of which a very large number of copies had been 
 struck off, was sold out by the summer of 1769, when 
 Foulis made Gray, who refused money, a very handsome 
 present of books. During the last years of his life, then, 
 Gray was not only beyond dispute the greatest living 
 English poet, but recognized as being such by the public 
 itself. 
 
 To the riotous living of his great enemy, Lord Sand- 
 wich, Gray owed the preferment which raised him above 
 all fear of poverty or even of temporary pressure of means 
 during the last three years of his life. On Sunday, the i 
 24th of July, 1768, Professor Lawrence Brockett, who had 
 been dining with the earl at Hinchinbroke, in Huntingdon- 
 
mi.] ENGLISH TKAVELS. 179 
 
 shire, whilst riding back to Cambridge, being very drunk, 
 fell off his horse and broke his neck. The chair of Mod- 
 ern Literature and Modern Languages, with its 400Z. a 
 year, was one of the most valuable sinecures in the Uni- 
 versity. Gray was up in London at the time, but his 
 cousin, Miss Dolly Antrobus, for whom he had obtained 
 the office of post-mistress at Cambridge, instantly wrote 
 up to town to tell him. He did not stir in the matter. 
 With an admirable briskness five obscure dons immediate- 
 ly put themselves forward as candidates, and so little did 
 Gray expect to receive the place, that he used his influence 
 for the only man amongst them who had any literature in 
 him, Michael Lort, the Hellenist. Gray was not, however, 
 to be overlooked any longer, and on the 27th he received 
 a letter from that elegant and enlightened statesman, 
 Augustus, Duke of Grafton, offering the professorship in 
 terms that were delicately calculated to please and soothe 
 his pride. He was told that he owed his nomination to 
 the whole cabinet council, and his success to the King's 
 particular admiration of his genius ; the Duke would not 
 presume to think that the post could be of advantage to 
 Gray, but trusted that he might be induced to do so much 
 credit to the University. The poet accepted at once; on 
 the 28th his warrant was signed, and on the 29th he was 
 summoned to kiss the King's hand. These were days in 
 which George III. was still addicted to polite letters, and 
 Gray's friends were anxious to know the purport of several 
 very gracious speeches which the King was observed to 
 make to him ; but Gray was coy, and would not tell ; when 
 he was pressed, he said, with great simplicity, that the 
 room was so hot and he himself so embarrassed, that he 
 really did not quite know what it was the King did say. 
 The charge has often been brought against Gray that he 
 
180 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 delivered no lectures from his chair at Cambridge. It is, 
 of course, very unfortunate that he did not, but it should 
 be remembered that there was nothing singular in this. 
 Not one of his predecessors, from the date of the institu- 
 tion of the professorship, had delivered a single lecture; 
 Gray, indeed, was succeeded by a man of great energy, 
 John Symonds, who introduced a variety of reforms at 
 Cambridge and amongst others reformed his own office 
 by lecturing. The terms of the patent recommended the 
 professor to find a deputy in one branch of his duty, 
 and Gray delegated the teaching of foreign languages to<( 
 a young Italian, Agostino Isola, of literary tastes, who sur- 
 vived long enough to teach Tuscan to Wordsworth. It is] 
 said that Gray took the opportunity of reading the Italian 
 poets again with Isola, who afterwards became an editor 
 of Tasso. The granddaughter of Gray's deputy was that 
 Emma Isola who became the adopted child of Charles and 
 Mary Lamb. One is glad to know that Gray behaved with 
 great liberality to Isola and also to the French teacher at 
 the University, Rene La Butte. It is pleasant to recor 
 that the opportunity to follow the natural dictates of his 
 heart in this and other instances, he owed to the loyalty*] 
 of his old school-fellow, Stonehewer, who was the secre- 1 
 tary of the Duke of Grafton, and who lost no time in sug-j 
 gesting Gray's name to his chief. 
 
 Poor Gray, for ever pursued by fears of conflagration 
 was actually in great danger of being burnt alive in Jan 
 uary, 1768, when a part of Pembroke Hall, including 
 son's chambers, was totally destroyed by fire. Two Met 
 odists, who had been attending a prayer-meeting in tt 
 town, happened to pass very late at night, and gave th 
 alarm. Gray was roused between two and three in tli 
 morning by the excellent Stephen Hempstead, with the 
 
viii.] ENGLISH TRAVELS. 181 
 
 mark, "Don't be frightened, sir, but the college is all of 
 a fire !" No great harm was done, but Mason had to be 
 lodged a little lower down the street, opposite Peterhouse. 
 After the event of the professorship, Gray found himself 
 unable to escape from many public shows in which he 
 had previously pleaded his obscurity with success. For in- 
 stance, in August, 1768, the University of Cambridge was 
 honoured by a visit from Christian VII., King of Den- 
 mark, who had married the sister of George III. To es- 
 cape from the festivities, Gray went off to Newmarket, 
 but there, as he says, "fell into the jaws of the King of 
 Denmark," was presented to him by the Vice-chancellor 
 and the Orator, and was brought back to Cambridge by 
 them, captive, in a chaise. 
 
 The Duke of Grafton succeeded the Duke of Newcastle 
 as Chancellor of the University of Cambridge in 1768, 
 and Gray, moved by gratitude, though never by expecta- 
 tion, made an offer through Stonehewer that he should 
 write an ode to be performed at the ceremony of installa- 
 tion. He seems to have made the proposal in the last 
 months of the year. In April, 1769, he says: "I do not 
 guess what intelligence Stonehewer gave you about my 
 employments, but the worst employment I have had has 
 been to write something for music against the Duke of 
 Grafton comes to Cambridge. I must comfort myself 
 with the intention, for I know it will bring abuse enough 
 on me : however, it is done, and given to the Vice-chancel- 
 lor, and there is an end." Norton Nichols records that 
 Gray considered the composition of this Installation Ode 
 a sort of task, and set about it with great reluctance. " It 
 was long after he first mentioned it to me before he could 
 prevail with himself to begin the composition. One 
 morning, when I went to him as usual after breakfast, I 
 
182 
 
 GRAY. 
 
 [CHAP, i 
 
 knocked at his door, which he threw open, and exclaimed, 
 with a loud voice, 
 
 ' Hence, avaunt ! 'tis holy ground !' 
 
 I was so astonished that I almost feared he was out of 
 his senses ; but this was the beginning of the ode which 
 he had just composed." For three months before the 
 event the music professor, J. Randall, of King's, waited 
 on. Gray regularly to set the Installation Ode to music. 
 It was Gray's desire to make this latter as much as pos- 
 sible like the refined compositions of the Italian masters 
 that he loved, and Randall did his best to comply with 
 this. Gray took great pains over the score, though in 
 his private letters he spoke with scorn of Randall's music ; 
 but when he came to the chorus Gray remarked, " I have 
 now done : make as much noise as you please !" Dr. 
 Burney, it afterwards turned out, was very much disap- 
 pointed because he was not asked to set Gray's composi- 
 tion. The Installation Ode was performed before a brill- 
 iant assembly on July 1, 1769, Gray all the while sigh- 
 ing to be far away upon the misty top of Skiddaw. In 
 the midst of all the turmoil and circumstance of the in- 
 stallation he wrote in this way to Norton Nichols, who 
 had consulted him about the arrangement of his gardens : 
 
 "And so you have a garden of your own, and you plant and trans- 
 plant, and are dirty and amused ! Are you not ashamed of your- 
 self? Why, I have no such thing, you monster, nor ever shall be 
 either dirty or amused as long as I live. My gardens are in the 
 window, like those of a lodger up three pairs of stairs in Petticoat 
 Lane or Camomile Street, and they go to bed regularly under the 
 same roof that I do. Dear, how charming it must be to walk out in 
 one's own gar ding, and sit on a bench in the open air, with a foun- 
 tain, and a leaden statue, and a rolling stone, and an arbour : have a 
 care of sore throats, though, and the agoe." 
 
mi.] ENGLISH TRAVELS. 183 
 
 It cannot be said that the Installation Ode, though it 
 contains some beautiful passages, is in Gray's healthiest 
 - vein. In it he returns, with excess, to that allegorical 
 style of his youth from which he had almost escaped, and 
 we are told a great deal too much about " painted Flat- 
 tery " and " creeping Gain," and visionary gentlefolks of 
 that kind. Where he gets free from all this, and espe- 
 cially in that strophe when, after a silence of more than 
 a century, we hear once more the music of Milton's Na- 
 tivity Ode, we find him as charming as ever: 
 
 "Ye brown, o'er-arching groves, 
 That contemplation loves, 
 Where willowy Camus lingers with delight ! . 
 Oft at the blush of dawn 
 I trod your level lawn, 
 
 Oft woo'd the gleam of Cynthia silver-bright 
 In cloisters dim, far from the haunts of Folly, 
 With Freedom by my side, and sofkeyed Melancholy. " 
 
 The procession of Cambridge worthies, which Hallam has 
 praised so highly, is drawn with great dignity, and the 
 compliment conveyed in the sixth strophe, where the ven- 
 erable Margaret Beaufort bends from heaven to salute 
 her descendant, is very finely turned; but we cannot help 
 feeling that the spirit of languor has not completely been 
 excluded from the poem, and that if Gray was not ex- 
 hausted when he wrote it he was at least greatly fatigued. 
 The eulogy of the "star of Brunswick" at the close of 
 the ode is perhaps the only absurd passage in the entire 
 works of Gray. After this he wrote nothing that has 
 been preserved ; his faculty seems to have left him en- 
 tirely, and if we deplore his death within two years of 
 the performance of the Installation Ode, it is not with- 
 N 9 
 
184 GRAY. [chaJ 
 
 out a suspicion that the days of his poetic life were 
 already numbered. 
 
 In 1769 Gray sold part of his estate, consisting of 
 houses on the west side of Hand Alley, in the City, for 
 one thousand guineas, and an annuity of eighty pounds 
 for Mrs. Oliffe, who had a share in the estate. " I have 
 also won a twenty-pound prize in the lottery, and Lord 
 knows what arrears I have in the Treasury, and I am a 
 rich fellow enough, go to" — so he writes on the 2d of 
 January of that year to Norton Nichols — "and a fellow 
 that hath had losses, and one that hath two gow T ns, and 
 everything handsome about him ; and in a few days I 
 shall have curtains, are you advised of that? ay, and a 
 mattress to lie upon." 
 
 One more work remained for Gray to do, and that a 
 considerable one. He w r as yet to discover and to describe 
 the beauties of the Cumbrian Lakes. In his youth he 
 was the man who first looked on the sublimities of Al- 
 pine scenery with pleasure, and in old age he was to be 
 the pioneer of Wordsworth in opening the eyes of Eng- 
 lishmen to the exquisite landscape of Cumberland. The 
 journal of Gray's Tour in the Lakes has been preserved 
 in full, and was printed by Mason, who withheld his 
 other itineraries. He started from York, where he had 
 been staying with Mason, in July, 1769, and spent the 
 next two months at Old Park. On the 30th of Septem- 
 ber Gray found himself on the winding road looking 
 westward, and with Appleby and the long reaches of the 
 Eden at his feet. He made no stay, but passed on to 
 Penrith for the night, and in the afternoon walked up 
 the Beacon Hill, and saw "through an opening in the 
 bosom of that cluster of mountains the lake of Ulles- 
 water, with the craggy tops of a hundred nameless hills." 
 
viii.] ENGLISH TRAVELS. 185 
 
 Next day he ascended the brawling bed of the Eainont, 
 with the towers of Helvellyn before him, until he reach- 
 ed Dunmallert. Gray's description of his first sight of 
 Ulleswater, since sanctified to all lovers of poetry by 
 Wordsworth's Daffodils, is worth quoting : 
 
 "Walked over a spongy meadow or two, and began to mount this 
 hill through a broad and straight green alley amongst the trees, and 
 with some toil gained the summit. From hence saw the lake open- 
 ing directly at my feet, majestic in its calmness, clear and smooth as 
 a blue mirror, with winding shores and low points of land covered 
 with green enclosures, white farm-houses looking out amongst the 
 trees, and cattle feeding. The water is almost everywhere bordered 
 with cultivated lands gently sloping upwards till they reach the feet 
 of the mountains, which rise very rude and awful with their broken 
 tops on either hand. Directly in front, at better than three miles' 
 distance, Place Fell, one of the bravest amongst them, pushes its 
 bold broad breast into the midst of the lake, and forces it to alter 
 its course, forming first a large bay to the left, and then bending to 
 the right." 
 
 It would seem that Wharton had been with his friend 
 during the first part of this excursion, but had been 
 forced, by a violent attack of asthma which came on at 
 Brough, to return home. It is to this circumstance alone 
 that we owe Gray's Journal, which was written piecemeal, 
 and sent by post to Wharton, that he might share in 
 what his friend was doing. On the 1st of October Gray 
 slept again at Penrith, and set out early next morning for 
 Keswick. He passed at noon under the gleaming crags 
 of Saddleback, the topmost point of which " appeared of 
 a sad purple, from the shadow of the clouds as they 
 sailed slowly by it." Passing by the mystery where 
 Skiddaw shrouded " his double front amongst Atlantic 
 clouds," Gray proceeded into Keswick, watching the sun- 
 
186 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 light reflected from the lake on every facet of its moun-tl 
 tain-cup. 
 
 It seems that Gray walked about everywhere with that 
 pretty toy, the Claude-Lorraine glass, in his hand, making 
 the beautiful forms of the landscape compose in its lus- 
 trous chiaroscuro. Arranging his glass, in the afternoon 
 of the 2d of October, he got a bad fall backwards in a 
 Keswick lane, but happily broke nothing but his knuckles. 
 Next day, in company with the landlord of the Queen's 
 Head, he explored the wonders of Borrowdale, the scene 
 of Wordsworth's wild poem of Yew-trees. Just before 
 entering the valley he pauses to make a little vignette of 
 the scene for Wharton's benefit : 
 
 " Our path here tends to the left, and the ground gently rising 
 and covered with a glade of scattering trees and bushes on the very 
 margin of the water, opens both ways the most delicious view that 
 my eyes ever beheld. Behind you are the magnificent heights of 
 Walla Crag; opposite lie the thick hanging woods of Lord Egre- 
 mont, and Newland Valley, with green and smiling fields embosomed 
 in the dark cliffs ; to the left the jaws of Borrowdale, with that tur- 
 bulent chaos of mountain behind mountain rolled in confusion ; be- 
 neath you, and stretching far away to the right, the shining purity of, 
 the lake, just ruffled with the breeze, enough to show it is alive, re- 
 flecting rocks, woods, fields, and inverted tops of mountains, with the 
 white buildings of Keswick, Crossthwaite church, and Skiddaw for a 
 background at a distance. Oh, Doctor, I never wished more for you." 
 
 All this is much superior in graphic power to what the 
 Paul Sandbys and Richard Wilsons could at that time at- 
 tain to in the art of painting. Their best landscapes, with 
 their sobriety and conscious artificiality, their fine tone and 
 studious repression of reality, are more allied to those ele- 
 gant and conventional descriptions of the picturesque by 
 which William Gilpin made himself so popular twenty 
 
Tin.] ENGLISH TRAVELS. 187 
 
 years later. Even Smith of Derby, whose engravings of 
 Cumberland scenes had attracted notice, was tamely topo- 
 graphical in his treatment of them. Gray gives us some- 
 thing more modern, yet no less exact, and reminds us more 
 of the early landscapes of Turner, with their unaffected ren- 
 dering of nature. Southey's early letters from the Lakes, 
 written nearly a generation later than Gray's, though more 
 developed in romantic expression, are not one whit truer 
 or more graphic. 
 
 Lodore seems to have been even in those days a sight 
 to which visitors were taken; Gray gives a striking ac- 
 
 • count of it, but confesses that the crags of Gowder were, 
 to his mind, far more impressive than this slender cascade. 
 The piles of shattered rock that hung above the pass of 
 Gowder gave him a sense of danger as well as of sublimi- 
 ty, and reminded him of the Alps. He glanced at the bal- 
 anced crags and hurried on, whispering to himself, "Non 
 ragionam di lor, ma guarda, e passa!" The weather was 
 most propitious ; if anything, too brilliantly hot. It had 
 suggested itself to Gray that in such clear weather and un- 
 der such a radiant sky he ought to ascend Skiddaw, but his 
 laziness got the better of him, and he judged himself better 
 employed in sauntering along the shore of Derwentwater: 
 
 1 " In the evening walked alone down to the Lake by the side of 
 >: Crow Park after sunset, and saw the solemn colouring of light draw 
 on, the last gleam of sunshine fading away on the hill-tops, the deep 
 serene of the waters, and the long shadows of the mountains thrown 
 across them, till they nearly touched the hithermost shore. At dis- 
 
 • tance heard the murmur of many water-falls, not audible in the day- 
 time. Wished for the Moon, but she was dark to me and silent, hid 
 
 • in her vacant interlunar cave." 
 
 Mr. Matthew Arnold has noticed that Gray has the ac- 
 ' cent of Obermann in such passages as these ; it is the full 
 
188 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 tone of the romantic solitary without any of the hysterical 
 over-gorgeousness which has rained modern description 
 of landscape. The 4th of October was a day of rest; the 
 traveller contented himself with watching a procession of 
 red clouds come marching up the eastern hills, and with 
 gazing across the water-fall into the gorge of Borrowdale. 
 On the 5th he walked down the Derwent to Bassenthwaite 
 Water, and skirmished a little around the flanks of Skid- 
 daw ; on the 6th he drove along the eastern shore of Bas- 
 senthwaite towards Cockermouth, but did not reach that 
 town, and returned to Keswick. The next day, the weath- 
 er having suddenly become chilly and autumnal, Gray made 
 no excursions, but botanized along the borders of Derwent- 
 water, with the perfume of the wild myrtle in his nostrils. 
 A little touch in writing to Wharton of the weather shows 
 us the neat and fastidious side of Gray's character. " The 
 soil is so thin and light," he says of the neighbourhood of 
 Keswick, "that no day has passed in which I could not 
 walk out with ease, and you know I am no lover of dirt." 
 On the 8th he drove out of Keswick along the Ambleside 
 road; the wind was easterly and the sky gray; but just as 
 they left the valley, the sun broke out, and bathed the 
 lakes and mountain-sides with such a wonderful morning 
 glory that Gray almost made up his mind to go back 
 again. He was particularly fascinated with the " clear 
 obscure " of Thirlmere, shaded by the spurs of Helvellyn ; 
 and entering Westmoreland, descended into what Words- 
 worth was to make classic ground thirty years later, Gras- 
 
 inere — 
 
 " Its crags, its woody steeps, its lakes, 
 Its one green island, and its winding shores, 
 The multitude of little rocky hills, 
 Its church, and cottages of mountain stone, 
 Clustered like stars." 
 
viii.] ENGLISH TRAVELS. 189 
 
 This fragment of Wordsworth may be confronted by 
 Gray's description of the same scene : 
 
 " Just beyond Helen Crag opens one of the sweetest landscapes 
 that art ever attempted to imitate. The bosom of the mountains, 
 spreading here into a broad basin, discovers in the midst Grasmere 
 Water ; its margin is hollowed into small bays with bold eminences, 
 some of them rocks, some of soft turf that half conceal and vary the 
 figure of the little lake they command. From the shore a low prom- 
 'ontory pushes itself far into the water, and on it stands a white vil- 
 lage, with the parish church rising in the midst of it ; hanging en- 
 closures, corn-fields, and meadows green as an emerald, with their 
 trees, hedges, and cattle, fill up the whole space from the edge of the 
 water. Just opposite to you is a large farm-house at the bottom of 
 a steep smooth lawn embosomed in old woods, which climb half-way 
 up the mountain -side, and discover above them a broken line of 
 crags, that crown the scene. Not a single red tile, no flaring gentle- 
 man's house, or garden-walls, break in upon the repose of this little 
 unsuspected paradise ; but all is peace, rusticity, and happy poverty 
 in its neatest and most becoming attire." 
 
 Passing from Grasmere, he drove through Rydal, not 
 without a reference to the " large, old-fashioned fabric, 
 now a farm-house," which Wordsworth was to buy in 
 1813, and was to immortalize with his memory. I have 
 not been able to find any word in the writings of the 
 younger poet to show his consciousness of the fact that 
 Gray's eye was attracted to the situation of Rydal Mount 
 exactly six months before he himself saw the light at 
 Cockermouth. At Ambleside, then quite unprepared for 
 the accommodation of strangers, Gray could find no de- 
 cent bed, and so went on to Kendal, for the first few miles 
 skirting the broad waters of Windermere, magnificent in 
 the soft light of afternoon. He spent two nights at Ken- 
 dal, drove round Morecambe Bay, and slept at Lancaster 
 on the 10th; reached Settle, under the "long black cloud 
 
190 
 
 GRAY. 
 
 [CHAP. Till. 
 
 of Ingleborough," on the 12th; and we find him still wan- 
 dering amongst the wild western moors of Yorkshire when 
 the journal abruptly closes on the 15th of October. On 
 the 18th he was once more at Aston with Mason, and he 
 returned to Cambridge on the 2 2d, after a holiday of 
 rather more than three months. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 BONSTETTEN. DEATH. 
 
 Gray became, in the last years of his life, an object of 
 some curiosity at Cambridge. He was difficult of access 
 except to his personal friends. It was the general habit 
 to dine in college at noon, so that the students might 
 flock, without danger of indigestion, to the philosophical 
 disputations at two o'clock. The Fellows dined together 
 in the Parlour, or the " Combination," as the common- 
 room came to be called ; and even when they dined in 
 hall they were accustomed to meet, in the course of the 
 morning, over a seed-cake and a bottle of sherry-sack. 
 But Gray kept aloof from these convivialities, at which, 
 indeed, as not being a Fellow, he was not obliged to be 
 present; and his dinner was served to him, by his man, 
 in his own rooms. In the same way, when he was in 
 town, at his lodgings in Jermyn Street, his meals were 
 brought in to him from an eating-house round the corner. 
 Almost the only time at which strangers could be sure of 
 seeing him was when he went to the Rainbow coffee- 
 house, at Cambridge, to order his books from the circu- 
 lating library. The registers were kept by the woman at 
 the bar, and no book was bought unless the requisition for 
 it was signed by four subscribers. Towards the end of 
 Gray's life literary tuft-hunters used to contend for the 
 9* . 
 
192 GRAY. fcHAP. 
 
 honour of supporting Gray's requests for books. There 
 was in particular a Mr. Pigott who desired to be thought 
 the friend of the poet, and who went so far as to erase the 
 next subscriber's name, and place his own underneath the 
 neat " T. Gray." It happened that Gray objected very 
 much to this particular gentleman, and he remarked one 
 day to his friend Mr. Sparrow, " That man's name wher- 
 ever I go, piget, he Pigotfs me!" It is said that wh<m 
 Gray emerged from his chambers, graduates would hastily 
 leave their dinners to look at him, but we may doubt, 
 with Mr. Leslie Stephen, whether this is within the bounds 
 of probability; Mathias, however, who would certainly have 
 left his dinner, was a whole year at Cambridge without 
 being able to set eyes on Gray once. Lord St. Helen's 
 told Rogers that when he was at St. John's, in 1770, he 
 called on Gray with a letter of introduction, and that 
 Gray returned the call, which was thought so extraordi- 
 nary, that a considerable number of college men assembled 
 in the quadrangle to see him pass, and all removed their 
 caps when he went by. He brought three young dons 
 with him, and the procession walked in Indian file ; his 
 companions seem to have attended in silence, and to have 
 expressed dismay on their countenances when Lord St. 
 Helen's frankly asked the poet what he thought of Gar- 
 rick's Jubilee Ode — which was just published. Gray 
 replied that he was easily pleased. 
 
 Unaffected to the extreme with his particular friends, 
 Gray seems to have adopted with strangers whom he did 
 not like a supercilious air, and a tone of great languor 
 and hauteur. Cole, who did not appreciate him, speaks, 
 in an unpublished note, of his "disgusting effeminacy," 
 by which he means what we call affectation. Mason 
 savs that he used this manner as a means of offence and 
 
ix.] BONSTETTEN. 198 
 
 defence towards persons whom he disliked. Here is 
 a picture of him the year before he died : " Mr. Gray's 
 singular niceness in the choice of his acquaintance makes 
 him appear fastidious in a great degree to all who are 
 not acquainted with his manner. He is of a fastidious 
 and recluse distance of carriage, rather averse to all so- 
 ciability, but of the graver turn, nice and elegant in his 
 person, dress, and behaviour, even to a degree of finicality 
 and effeminacy." This conception of him as an affected 
 and effeminate little personage was widely current during 
 his own lifetime. Mr. Penneck, the Superintendent of 
 the Museum Reading Room, had a friend who travelled 
 one day in the Windsor stage with a small gentleman 
 to whom, on passing Kensington Church-yard, he began 
 to quote with great fervour some stanzas of the Elegy ; 
 adding how extraordinary it was that a poet of such 
 genius and manly vigour of mind should be a delicate, 
 timid, effeminate character — " in fact, sir," he continued, 
 "that Mr. Gray, who wrote those noble verses, should be 
 a*puny insect shivering at a breeze." The other gentle- 
 man assented, and they passed to general topics, on which 
 he proved himself to be so well-informed, entertaining, 
 and vivacious, that Penneek's friend was enchanted. On 
 leaving the coach he fell into an enthusiastic description 
 of his fellow-traveller to the friend who met him, and 
 wound up by saying, " Ah ! here he is, returning to the 
 coach ! Who can he be ?" " Oh, that is Mr. Gray, the 
 poet!" 
 
 Gray could be talkative enough in general society, if he 
 found the company sympathetic. Walpole says that he 
 resembled Hume as a talker, but was much better com- 
 pany. On one of his visits to Norton Nichols at Blundes- 
 ton he found two old relatives of his host, people of the 
 
194 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 most commonplace type, already installed, and at first he 
 seemed to consider it impossible to reconcile himself, to 
 their presence. But noticing that Nichols was grieved at 
 this, he immediately changed his manner, and made him- 
 self so agreeable to them both that the old people talked 
 of him with pleasure as long as they lived. He would 
 always interest himself in any reference to farming, or to 
 the condition of the crops, which bore upon his botanical 
 pursuits; one of his daily occupations, in his healthier 
 years, being the construction of a botanical calendar. One 
 of his finest sayings was: " To be employed is to be hap- 
 py;'' and his great personal aim in life seems to have been 
 to be constantly employed, without fatigue, so as to be 
 able to stem the tide of constitutional low spirits. The 
 presence of his most intimate friends, such as Wharton 
 and Nichols, had so magnetic an influence upon him, that 
 their memory of him was almost uniformly bright and 
 vivid. Those whom he loved less, knew how dejected 
 and silent he could be for hours and hours. Gibbon re- 
 gretted the pertinacity with which Gray plunged into 
 merely acquisitive and scholastic study; the truth prob- 
 ably is, that he had not the courage to indulge in reverie, 
 nor the physical health to be at rest. 
 
 The person, however, who has preserved the most exact 
 account of Gray's manner of life during the last months 
 of his career is Bonstetten. In November, 1769, Norton 
 Nichols, being at Bath, met in the Pump Room there, 
 amongst the mob of fashionable people, a handsome young 
 Swiss gentleman of four-and-twenty, named Charles Victor 
 de Bonstetten. He was the only son of the Treasurer of 
 Berne, and belonged to one of the six leading families of 
 the country. He lived at Nyon, had been educated at 
 Lausanne, and was now in England, desiring to study our 
 
rx.] BONSTETTEN. 195 
 
 language and literature, but having hitherto fallen more 
 amongst fashionable people than people of taste. He was 
 very enthusiastic, romantic, and good-looking, very sweet 
 and winning in manner, full of wit and spirit, and, when 
 he chose to exert himself, quite irresistible. He had 
 brought an introduction to Pitt, but, after receiving some 
 courtesies, had slipped away into the country, and Nich- 
 ols found him turning the heads of all the young ladies 
 at Bath. Bonstetten attached himself very warmly to 
 Nichols, and was persuaded by the latter to go to Cam- 
 bridge to attend lectures. That Nichols thoroughly ad- 
 mired him is certain from the very earnest letter of in- 
 troduction which he sent with him to Gray on the 27th 
 of November, 1769. 
 
 The ebullient young Swiss conquered the shy and soli- 
 tary poet at sight. "My gaiety, my love for English 
 poetry, appeared to have subdued him" — the word Bon- 
 stetten uses is "subjugue" — " and the difference in age 
 between us seemed to disappear at once." Gray found 
 him a lodging close to Pembroke Hall, at a coffee-house, 
 and at once set himself to plan out for Bonstetten a course 
 of studies. On the 6th of January, 1770, Bonstetten wrote 
 to Norton Nichols: "I am in a hurry from morning till 
 night. At eight o'clock I am roused by a young square- 
 cap, with whom I follow Satan through chaos and night. 
 . . . We finish our travels in a copious breakfast of muf- 
 fins and tea. Then appear Shakspeare and old Linnaeus, 
 struggling together as two ghosts would do for a damned 
 soul. Sometimes the one gets the better, sometimes the 
 other. Mr. Gray, whose acquaintance is my greatest debt 
 to you, is so good as to show me Macbeth, and all witches, 
 beldames, ghosts, and spirits, whose language I never could 
 have understood without his interpretation, I am now 
 
196 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 endeavouring to dress all these people in a French dress, 
 which is a very hard labour." In enclosing this letter to 
 Nichols Gray adds as a postscript : 
 
 " I never saw such a boy ; our breed is not made on this model. 
 He is busy from morning to night, has no other amusement than 
 that of changing one study for another, likes nobody that he sees 
 here, and yet wishes to stay longer, though he has passed a whole 
 fortnight with us already. His letter has had no correction what- 
 ever, and is prettier by half than English." 
 
 For more than ten weeks after the date of this letter 
 Bonstetten remained in his lodgings at Cambridge, in 
 daily and unbroken intercourse with Gray. The reminis- 
 cences of the young Swiss gentleman are extremely in- 
 teresting, though doubtless they require to be accepted 
 with a certain reservation. There is, however, the stamp 
 of truth about his statement that the poetical genius of 
 Gray was by this time so completely extinguished that 
 the very mention of his poems was distasteful to him. 
 He would not permit Bonstetten to talk to him about 
 them, and when the young man quoted some of his lines 
 Gray preserved an obstinate silence like a sullen child. 
 Sometimes Bonstetten said, "Will you not answer me?" 
 But no word would proceed from the shut lips. Yet this 
 was during the time when, on all subjects but himself, 
 Gray was conversing with Bonstetten on terms of the 
 most affectionate intimacy. For three months the young 
 Swiss, despising all other society to be found at Cam- 
 bridge, spent every evening with Gray, arriving at five 
 o'clock, and lingering till midnight. They read together 
 Shakspeare, Milton, Dryden, and the other great English 
 classics, until their study would slip into sympathetic con- 
 versation, in which the last word was never spoken. Bon- 
 
ix.] BONSTETTEN. 197 
 
 stetten poured out his confidences to the old poet — all his 
 life, all his hopes, all the aspirations and enthusiasms of 
 his youth — and Gray received it all with profound interest 
 and sympathy, but never with the least reciprocity. To 
 the last his own life's history was a closed book to Bon- 
 stetten. Never once did he speak of himself. Between 
 the present and past there seemed to be a great gulf fixed, 
 and when the warm-hearted young man approached the 
 subject he was always baffled. He remarks that there 
 was a complete discord between Gray's humorous intellect 
 and ardent imagination on the one side, and what he calls 
 a " misere de cceur " on the other. Bonstetten thought 
 that this was owing to a suppressed sensibility, to the fact 
 
 that Gray never 
 
 " Anywhere in the sun or rain 
 Had loved or been beloved again," 
 
 and that he felt his heart to be frozen at last under what 
 Bonstetten calls the Arctic Pole of Cambridge. 
 
 This final friendship of his life troubled the poet strange- 
 ly. He could not get over the wonder of Bonstetten's ar- 
 dour and vitality — " our breed is not made on this model." 
 His letters to Norton Nichols are like the letters of an 
 anxious parent. " He gives me," he says, on the 20th of 
 March, 1770, a too much pleasure, and at least an equal 
 share of inquietude. You do not understand him as well 
 as I do, but I leave my meaning imperfect, till we meet. 
 I have never met with so extraordinary a person. God 
 bless him ! I am unable to talk to you about anything 
 else, I think." Late in the month of March, Bonstetten 
 tore himself away from Cambridge ; his father had long 
 been insisting that he must return to Nyon. Gray went 
 up to London with him, showed him some of the sights, 
 amongst others Dr. Samuel Johnson, who came puffing down 
 
198 GRAY. [chap. ' 
 
 the Strand, unconscious of the two strangers who paused 
 on their way to observe him. " Look, look, Bonstetten !" 
 said Gray, "the Great Bear! There goes Ursa Major!" 
 On the 23d of March Gray lent him 20/. and packed his 
 friend into the Dover machine at four o'clock in the 
 morning, returning very sadly to Cambridge, whence he 
 wrote to Nichols: "Here am I again to pass my solitary 
 evenings, which hung much lighter on my hands before I 
 knew him. This is your fault ! Pray let the next you 
 send me be halt and blind, dull, unapprehensive, and wrong- 
 headed. For this — as Lady Constance says — was ever such 
 a gracious creature born ! and yet — but no matter ! . . . 
 This place never appeared so horrible to me as it does 
 now. Could you not come for a week or a fortnight? 
 It would be sunshine to me in a dark night." 
 
 Bonstetten had departed with every vow and circum- 
 stance of friendship, and had obliged Gray to promise that 
 he would visit him the next summer in Switzerland. He 
 wrote to Gray from Abbeville, and then there fell upon his 
 correspondence one of those silences so easy to the volatile 
 and youthful. Gray in the mean while was possessed by a 
 weak restlessness of mind that made him almost ill, and 
 early in April, since Nichols could not come to Cam- 
 bridge, he himself hastened to Blundeston, spending a few 
 days with Palgrave (" Old Pa ") on the way. He made 
 one excuse after another for avoiding Cambridge, to which 
 he did not return, except for a week or two, until the end 
 of the year. He agreed with Norton Nichols that they 
 should go together to Switzerland in the summer of 1771, 
 but entreated him not to vex him by referring to this in 
 any way till the time came for starting. By-and-by let- 
 ters came from Bonstetten, with " bad excuses for not 
 writing oftener," and in May Gray was happier, travelling 
 

 ix.] BONSTETTEN. 199 
 
 to Aston to be with Mason, driving along the roads, with 
 trees blooming and nightingales singing all around him. 
 
 His only literary exercise during this year 1770 seems to 
 have been filling an interleaved copy of the works of Lin- 
 naeus with notes. For the last eight or nine years natural 
 history had been his favourite study ; he said that it was 
 a singular felicity to him to be engaged in this pursuit, 
 and it often took him out into the fields when nothing 
 else would. He interleaved a copy of Hudson's Flora 
 Anglica, and filled it with notes; and was on a level with 
 all that had been done up to his time in zoology and 
 botany. Some of his notes and observations were after- 
 wards made use of by Pennant, with warm acknowledg- 
 ment. He returned from Aston towards the end of June, 
 and prepared at once to start with Norton Nichols for a 
 summer tour. He so hated Cambridge that he would not 
 start thence, but directed Nichols to meet him at the sign 
 of the Wheat Sheaf, five miles beyond Huntingdon, about 
 the 3d of July. Unfortunately, there exists no journal to 
 commemorate this, the last of Gray's tours, which seems to 
 have occupied more than two months. The friends drove 
 across the midland counties into Worcestershire, descended 
 the Severn to Gloucester, and then made their way to 
 Malvern Wells, where they stayed a week, because Nichols 
 found some of his acquaintance there. Gray must have 
 been particularly well, for he ascended the Herefordshire 
 Beacon, and enjoyed the unrivalled view from its summit. 
 He was much vexed, however, with the fashionable society 
 at the long table of the inn, and maintained silence at 
 dinner. When Nichols gently rallied him on this he said 
 that long retirement in the University had destroyed 
 the versatility ot his mind. At Malvern he received a 
 copy of Goldsmith's Deserted Village, w r hich had just 
 
200 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 been published; he asked Norton Nichols to read it aloud 
 to him, listened to it with fixed attention, and exclaimed 
 before they had proceeded far, " This man is a poet." 
 From Malvern they went on to Ross, in Monmouthshire, 
 and descended the Wye to Chepstow, a distance of forty 
 miles, in a boat, " surrounded," says Gray, u with ever-new 
 delights." From this point they went to Abergavenny 
 and South Wales, returning by Oxford, where they spent 
 two agreeable days. During this tour Gray turned aside 
 to visit Leasowes, where Shenstone had lived and died in 
 1763. Gray had never admired Shenstone's artificial 
 grace, and had been vexed by some allusions in his post- 
 humously published letters, and it was probably more to 
 see the famous "Arcadian greens rural" than to do hom- 
 age to a poetic memory that he loitered at Halesowen. 
 He returned in a very fair state of health, as was custom- 
 ary after his summer holidays ; but the good effects, un- 
 fortunately, passed away unusually soon. He had a fever- 
 ish attack in September, but cured it with sage-tea, his 
 favourite nostrum. Nichols came up to town to see him, 
 and travelled with him as far as Cambridge ; but Gray's 
 now invincible dislike to this place seems to have made 
 him really ill, and for the next two months he only went 
 outside the walls of the college once. His aunt, Mrs. Oliffe, 
 now ninety years of age, had come up to Cambridge, and 
 appears to have lodged close to Gray, inside Pembroke 
 Hall, where he was now allowed to do whatever he chose. 
 She was helplessly bedridden, but as intractable a daugh- 
 ter of the Dragon of Wantley as ever. The other Pem- 
 broke nonogenanan, Dr. Roger Long, died on the 16th of 
 December, 1770, and Gray's friend, James Brown, succeed- 
 ed him in the Mastership without any contention. 
 
 Early in 1771 Mrs. Oliffe died, leaving her entire fort- 
 
ix.] BONSTETTEN. 201 
 
 une, such as it was, to Gray, and none of it to her nieces, 
 the Antrobuses, who had nursed her in her illness. These 
 women had been brought to Cambridge by Gray, and had 
 been so comfortably settled by him in situations, that in 
 one of his letters he playfully dreads that all his friends 
 will shudder at the name of Antrobus. All through this 
 spring Gray seems to have been gradually sinking in 
 strength and spirits, though none of his friends appear 
 to have been alarmed about it. To Norton Nichols's en- 
 treaties that he w T ould go to visit Bonstetten with him, as 
 to the young Swiss gentleman's own invitations, he an- 
 swered with a sad intimation that his health was not 
 equal to so much exertion. 
 
 Nichols came up to town to say farewell to him in the 
 middle of June, having at last been persuaded that it w 7 as 
 useless to wait for Gray. The poet was in his old rooms 
 in Jermyn Street, and there they parted for the last time. 
 Before Nichols took leave of him Gray said, very ear- 
 nestly, "I have one thing to beg of you, which* you must 
 not refuse." Nichols replied, "You know you have only 
 to command ; what is it?" " Do not go to visit Voltaire; 
 no one knows the mischief that man will do." Nichols 
 said, " Certainly, I will not; but what could a visit from 
 me signify ?" " Every tribute to such a man signifies." 
 A little before this Gray had rejected polite overtures 
 from Voltaire, who was a great admirer of the Elegy ; but 
 it was not that he was dead to the charms of the great 
 Frenchman. He paid a full tribute of admiration to his 
 genius, delighted in his wit, enjoyed his histories, and re- 
 garded his tragedies as next in rank to those of Shak- 
 speare ; but he hated him, as he hated Hume, because, as 
 he said, he thought him an enemy to religion. He tried 
 to persuade himself that Beattie had mastered Voltaire in 
 
202 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 argument. Gray had a similar dislike to Shaftesbury, and 
 was, throughout his career, though in a very unassuming 
 way, a sincere believer in Christianity. We find him ex- 
 horting Dr. Wharton not to omit the use of family prayer,! 
 and this although he had a horror of anything like " Meth-I 
 odism " or religious display. 
 
 Gray's last letter to Bonstetten may be given as an ex-J 
 ample of his correspondence with that gentleman, as long! 
 after preserved and published by Miss Plumptre : 
 
 "I am returned, my dear Bonstetten, from the little journey If 
 made into Suffolk, without answering the end proposed. The thought! 
 that you might have been with me there has embittered all myl 
 hours. Your letter has made me happy, as happy as so gloomy, sol 
 solitary a being as I am, is capable of being made. I know, and! 
 have too often felt, the disadvantages I lay myself under ; howl 
 much I hurt the little interest I have in you by this air of sadness! 
 so contrary to your nature and present enjoyments : but sure you 
 will forgive, though you cannot sympathise with me. It is impossi- 
 ble with me to dissemble with you ; such as I am I expose myl 
 heart to your view, nor wish to conceal a single thought from you™ 
 penetrating eyes. 4-U that you s^y to me, especially on the subject I 
 of Switzerland, is infinitely acceptable. It feels too pleasing ever toj 
 be fulfilled, and as often as I read over your truly kind letter, writ! 
 ten long since from London, I stop at these words : 4 La mort qui! 
 peut glacer nos bras avaiit qu'ils soient entrelaces.' " 
 
 He made a struggle to release himself from this atra- 
 bilious mood. He reflected on the business which he had! 
 so long neglected, and determined to try again to find en-J 
 ergy to lecture. He drew up three schemes for regulating! 
 the studies of private pupils, and laid them before thJ 
 Duke of Grafton. But these plans, as was usual wit™ 
 Gray, never came to execution, and when he was at Astoul 
 in 1770 he told Mason that he had come to the conclusion 
 that it was his duty to resign the professorship, since ill 
 
ix.] DEATH. 203 
 
 was out of his power to do any real service in it. Mason 
 strongly dissuaded him from such a step^ and encouraged 
 him to think that even yet he would be able to make a 
 beginning of his lectures. The exordium of his proposed 
 inauguration speech was all that was found at his death to 
 account for so many efforts and intentions. 
 
 In the latter part of May, 1771, Gray went up to Lon- 
 don, to his lodgings in Jermyn Street, where, as has been 
 already mentioned, he received the farewell visit from 
 Nichols. He was profoundly wretched ; writing to Whar- 
 ton, he said : " Till this year I hardly knew what mechan- 
 ical low spirits were ; but now I even tremble at an east 
 wind." His cough was incurable, the neuralgic pains in 
 his head were chronic. William Robinson, in describing 
 his last'interview with him, said that Gray talked of his 
 own career as a poet, lamented that he had done so little^ 
 and began at last, in a repining tone, to complain that he 
 had lost his health just when he had become easy in his 
 circumstances ; but on that he checked himself, saying 
 that it was wrong to rail against Providence, As he grew 
 worse and worse, he placed himself under a physician^ 
 Dr. Gisborne, who ordered him to leave Bloomsbury, and 
 try a clearer air at Kensington. Probably the last call he 
 ever paid was on Walpole ; for hearing that his old friend 
 was about to set out for Paris, Gray visited him. "He 
 complained of being ill," says Walpole, " and talked of 
 the gout in his stomach, but I expected his death no more 
 than my own." During the month of June he received 
 the MS. of Gilpin's Tour down the Wye, and enriched 
 this work, which was not published until 1782, with his 
 notes, being reminiscences of his journey of the preceding 
 year. 
 
 On the 2 2d of July, finding himself alone in London, 
 
204 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 and overwhelmed with dejection and the shadow of death, 
 lie came back to Cambridge. It was his intention to rest 
 there a day or two, and then to proceed to Old Park, 
 where the Whartons were ready to receive him. He put 
 himself under the treatment of his physician, Dr. Robert 
 Glynn, who had been the author of a successful Seaton- 
 ian poem, and who dabbled in literature. This Dr. Glynn 
 was conspicuous for his gold-headed cane, scarlet coat, 
 three-cornered hat, and resounding pattens for thirty years 
 after Gray's death, and retains a niche in local history as 
 the last functionary of the University who was buried by 
 torch-light. Dr. Glynn was not at all anxious about Gray's 
 condition, but on Wednesday, the 24th, the poet was so 
 languid that his friend James Brown wrote for him to Dr. 
 AYharton, to warn him that, though Gray did n<3t give 
 over the hopes of taking his journey to Old Park, he was 
 very low and feverish, and could hardly start immediately. 
 That very night, whilst at dinner in the College Hall at 
 Pembroke, Gray felt a sudden nausea, which obliged him 
 to go hurriedly to his own room. He lay down, but he 
 became so violently and constantly sick, that he sent his 
 servant to fetch in Dr. Glynn, who was puzzled at the 
 symptoms, but believed that there was no cause for alarm. 
 Gray grew worse, however, for the gout had reached the 
 stomach ; Dr. Glynn became alarmed, and sent for Russell 
 Plumptre, the Regius Professor of Physic. The old doctor 
 was in bed, and refused to get up, for which he was after- 
 wards severely blamed. No skill, however, could have 
 saved Gray. He got through the 25th pretty well, and 
 slept tolerably that night, but after taking some asses'- 
 milk, on the morning of the 26th, the spasms in the 
 stomach returned again. Dr. Brown scarcely left him 
 after the first attack, and wrote to all his principal friends 
 
 
ix. ] DEATH. 209 
 
 from the side of his bed. On this day, Thursday, the 
 Master could still hope " that we shall see him well again 
 in a short time." On Sunday, the 29th, Gray was taken 
 with a strong convulsive fit, and these recurred until he 
 died. He retained his senses almost to the last. Stone- 
 hewer and Dr. Gisborne arrived from London on the 30th 
 and took leave of their dying friend. His language be- 
 came less and less coherent, and he was not clearly able 
 to explain to Brown, without a great effort, where his will 
 would be found. He seemed perfectly sensible of his 
 condition, but expressed no concern at the thought of 
 leaving the world. Towards the end he did not suffer at 
 all, but lay in a sort of torpor, out of which he woke to 
 call for his niece, Miss Mary Antrobus. She took his 
 hand, and he said to her in a clear voice, " Molly, I shall 
 die !" He lay quietly after this, without attempting to, 
 speak, and ceased to breathe about eleven o'clock, an 
 hour before midnight, on the 30th of July, 1771, aged 
 fifty-four years, seven months, and four days. 
 
 James Brown found, in the spot which Gray had indi- 
 cated, his will. It was dated July 2, 1770, and must there- 
 fore have been drawn up just before he started on his tour 
 through the Western Counties. Mason and Brown were 
 named his executors. He left his property divided amongst 
 a great number of relations and friends, reserving the 
 largest portions for his niece, Miss Mary Antrobus, and 
 her sister, Mrs. Dorothy Comyns, both of whom were resi- 
 dents at Cambridge, and who had probably looked to his 
 comfort of late years as he had considered their prospects 
 in earlier life. The faithful Stephen Hempstead was not 
 forgotten, whilst Mason and Brown were left residuary 
 legatees. On Brown fell the whole burden of attending 
 to the funeral, for Mason could not be found ; he had 
 
206 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 taken a holiday, and knew nothing of the whole matter 
 until his letters reached him, in a cluster, at Bridlington 
 Qua} T , about the 7th of August. 
 
 By this time Gray was buried. Brown took the body, 
 in a coffin of seasoned oak, to London, and thence to Stoke, 
 where, on the 6th of August, it was deposited in the vault 
 which contained that of Gray's mother. The mourners 
 were Miss Antrobus, her sister's husband, Mr. Comyns, a 
 shopkeeper at Cambridge, " a young gentleman of Christ's 
 College, with whom Mr. Gray was very intimate," and 
 Brown himself; these persons followed the hearse in a 
 mourning coach. The sum of ten pounds was, at the 
 poet's express wish, distributed among certain " honest 
 and industrious poor persons in the parish" of Stoke- 
 Pogis. As soon as Mason heard the news he crossed the 
 Humber, and reached Cambridge the next day. Brown 
 was a very cautious and punctilious man, and no sooner 
 had he returned to Cambridge than he insisted that Mason 
 should go up to town with him and prove the will. Mason, 
 who throughout showed a characteristic callousness, grum- 
 bled, but agreed, and on the 12th of August the will was 
 proved in London. 
 
 The executors returned immediately to Cambridge, de- 
 livered up the plate, jewellery, linen, and furniture to the 
 Antrobuses, and then Mason packed up the books and 
 papers to be removed to his rooms at York. Once set- 
 tled there, on the 18th, he began to enjoy the luxury of 
 a literary bereavement. " Come," he says to Dr. Whar- 
 ton — " come, I beseech you, and condole with me on our 
 mutual, our irreparable loss. The great charge which his 
 dear friendship has laid upon me I feel myself unable to 
 execute, without the advice and assistance of his best 
 friends ; you are amongst the first of these." It will hardly 
 

 ix.] DEATH. 207 
 
 be believed that the "great charge" so pompously refer- 
 red to here is contained in these exceedingly simple words 
 of Gray : " I give to the Reverend William Mason, Pre- 
 centor of York, all my books, manuscripts, coins, music, 
 printed or written, and papers of all kinds, to preserve or 
 destroy at his own discretion." There is no shadow of 
 doubt that the ambitious and worldly Mason saw here an 
 opportunity of achieving a great literary success, and that 
 he lost no time in posing as Gray's representative and 
 confidant. A few people resisted his pretensions, such 
 as Robinson and Nichols, but they were not writers, and 
 Mason revenged himself by ignoring them. Nor did he 
 take the slightest notice of Bonstetten. 
 
 James Brown, le petit bon homme with the warm heart, 
 was kinder and less ambitious. He wrote thoughtful let- 
 ters to every one, and particularly to the three friends in 
 exile, to Horace Walpole, Nichols, and Bonstetten. Wal- 
 pole was struck cold in the midst of his frivolities, as if 
 he had suffered in his own person a touch of paralysis; in 
 his letters he seems to whimper and shiver, as much with 
 apprehension as with sorrow. Norton Nichols gave a cry 
 of grief, and very characteristically wrote instantly to his 
 mother, lest she, knowing his love for Gray, should fear 
 that the shock would make him ill. From this exquisite 
 letter we must cite some lines : 
 
 " I only write now lest you should be apprehensive on my account 
 since the death of my dear friend. Yesterday's post brought me the 
 fatal news, in a letter from Mr. Brown, that Mr. Gray (all that was 
 most dear to me in this world except yourself) died in the night, 
 about eleven o'clock, between the 30th and 31st of July. . . . You 
 need not be alarmed for me ; I am well, and not subject to emotions 
 violent enough to endanger my health, and besides with good, kind 
 people who pity me and can feel themselves. Afflicted you may be 
 sure I am ! You who know I considered Mr. Gray as a second par- 
 10 
 
208 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 ent, that I thought only of him, built all my happiness on him, talked 
 of him forever, wished him with me whenever I partook of any pleas- 
 ure, and flew to him for refuge whenever I felt any uneasiness ; to 
 whom now shall I talk of all I have seen here ? Who will teach me 
 to read, to think, to feel ? I protest to you, that whatever I did or 
 thought had a reference to him — ' Mr. Gray will be pleased with this 
 when I tell him. I must ask Mr. Gray what he thinks of such a 
 person or thing. He would like such a person or dislike such anoth- 
 er.' If I met with any chagrins, I comforted myself that I had a 
 treasure at home; if all the world had despised and hated me, I 
 should have thought myself perfectly recompensed in his friendship. 
 Now remains only one loss more ; if I lose you, I am left alone in 
 the world. At present I feel I have lost half of myself. Let me 
 hear that you are well." 
 
 Thirty -four years afterwards the hand which penned 
 these unaffected lines wrote down those reminiscences — 
 alas ! too brief — which constitute the most valuable im- 
 pressions of Gray that we possess. It is impossible not to 
 regret that this sincere and tender friend did not under- 
 take that labour of biography which fell into more skilled, 
 but coarser, hands than his. Yet it is no little matter to 
 possess this first outflow of grief and affection. It assures 
 us that, with all his melancholy and self-torture, the great 
 spirit of Gray was not without its lively consolations, and 
 that he gained of Heaven the boon for which he had 
 prayed, a friend of friends. Nichols, Bonstetten, Robin- 
 son, Wharton, Stonehewer, and Brown were undistinguish- 
 ed names of unheroic men who are interesting to posterity 
 only because, with that unselfish care which only a great 
 character and sweetness of soul have power to rouse, they 
 loved, honoured, cherished this silent and melancholy anch- 
 orite. Dearer friends, better and more devoted companions 
 through a slow and unexhilarating career, no man famous 
 in literature has possessed, and we feel that not to recog- 
 
ix.] DEATH. 209 
 
 nize this magnetic power of attracting good souls around 
 him would be to lose sight of Gray's peculiar and signal 
 charm. It is true that, like the moon, he was " dark to 
 them, and silent;" that he received, and lacked the power 
 to give ; they do not seem to have required from him the 
 impossible, they accepted his sympathy, and rejoiced in his 
 inexpressive affection ; and when he was taken from them 
 they regarded his memory as fanatics regard the sayings 
 and doings of the founder of their faith. Gray " never 
 spoke out," Brown said ; he lived, more even than the rest 
 of us, in an involuntary isolation, a pathetic type of the 
 solitude of the soul. 
 
 "Yes ! in the sea of life enisled, * 
 With echoing straits between us thrown, 
 Dotting the shoreless watery wild, 
 We mortal myriads live alone. 
 The islands feel the enclasping flow, 
 And then their endless bounds they know." 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 POSTHUMOUS. 
 
 The earliest tribute to the mind and character of Gray 
 was published in 1772 in the March number of a rather 
 dingy periodical, issued under Dr. Johnson's protection, 
 and entitled The London Magazine. This was written in 
 the form of a letter to Boswell by a man who had little 
 sympathy with Gray as a poet or as a wit, but was well 
 fitted to comprehend him as a scholar, the Reverend Wil- 
 liam J. Temple, Rector of St. Glavias. This gentleman, 
 who had been a Fellow of Trinity Hall during Gray's resi- 
 dence in Cambridge, and who is frequently mentioned in 
 the poet's later letters, was almost the only existing link 
 between the circles ruled respectively by Gray and Samuel 
 Johnson, Cole being perhaps the one other person known 
 to both these mutually repellent individuals. Temple's 
 contribution to the London Magazine is styled A Sketch 
 of the Character of the Celebrated Poet, Mr. Gray, and is 
 ushered in by the editor with some perfunctory compli- 
 ments to the poems. But Temple's own remarks are very 
 valuable, and may be reprinted here, especially as the care- 
 ful Mitford and every succeeding writer seem to have been 
 content to quote them from Johnson's inaccurate transcript: 
 
 "Perhaps Mr. Gray was the most learned man in Europe: he was 
 equally acquainted with the elegant and profound parts of science, 
 and not superficially, but thoroughly. He knew every branch of his- 
 
chap.x.] POSTHUMOUS. 211 
 
 tory, both natural and civil ; had read all the original historians of 
 England, France, and Italy ; and was a great antiquarian. Criticism, 
 metaphysics, morals, politics, made a principal part of his plan of 
 study. Voyages and travels of all sorts were his favourite amuse- 
 ment ; and he had a fine taste in painting, prints, architecture, and 
 gardening. With such a fund of knowledge, his conversation must 
 have been equally instructing and entertaining. But he was also a 
 good man, a well-bred man, a man of virtue and humanity. There is 
 no character without some speck, some imperfection ; and I think the 
 greatest defect in his was an affectation in delicacy, or rather effemi- 
 nacy, and a visible fastidiousness or contempt and disdain of his in- 
 feriors in science. He also had in some degree that weakness which 
 disgusted Voltaire so much in Mr. Congreve. Though he seemed to 
 value. others chiefly according to the progress they had made in 
 knowledge, yet he could not bear to be considered himself merely as 
 a man of letters ; and though without birth, or fortune, or station, his 
 desire was to be looked upon as a private gentleman, who read for 
 his amusement." 
 
 Against the charge of priggishness, which seems to be 
 contained in these last lines, we may place Norton Nich- 
 ols's anecdote, that having in the early part of their ac- 
 quaintance remarked that some person was M a clever 
 man," he was cut short by Gray, who said, " Tell me if he 
 is good for anything." Another saying of his, that genius 
 and the highest acquirements of science were as nothing 
 compared with "that exercise of right reason which Plato 
 called virtue," is equally distinct as evidence that he did 
 not place knowledge above conduct. But the earlier part 
 of Temple's article, which regards Gray's learning and ac- 
 quisitions of every sort, is of great value. Another of the 
 poet's contemporaries, Robert Potter, the translator of 
 ^Eschylus, and one of the foremost scholars of the time, 
 followed with a similar statement : " Mr. Gray was per- 
 haps the most learned man of the age, but his mind never 
 contracted the rust of pedantry. He bad too good an 
 
212 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 understanding to neglect that urbanity which renders so- 
 ciety pleasing : his conversation was instructing, elegant, 
 and agreeable. Superior knowledge, an exquisite taste in 
 the fine arts, and, above all, purity of morals, and an unaf- 
 fected reverence for religion, made this excellent person an 
 ornament to society, and an honour to human nature." 
 
 Mason lost no time in giving out that he was collecting 
 materials for a life of Gray. His first literary act was to 
 print for private circulation in 17*72 the opening book oi 
 his didactic poem The English Garden, which he had 
 written as early as 1767, but which Gray had never al- 
 lowed him to print, speaking freely of it as being non- 
 sense. But Mason loved the children of his brain, and 
 could not support the idea that one of them should be 
 withheld from the world. With great naivete he at- 
 tempted to argue the matter with the shade of his great 
 friend in a third book which he added in 1772 : 
 
 " Clos'd is that curious ear, by Death's cold hand, 
 That mark'd each error of my careless strain 
 With kind severity ; to whom my Muse 
 Still lov'd to whisper what she meant to sing 
 In louder accent ; to whose taste supreme 
 She first and last appealed." 
 
 But still the departed friend may be invoked by the Muse, 
 
 "And still, by Fancy soothM, 
 " Fain would she hope her Gray attends the call." 
 
 Mason then refers, in the flat, particular manner native to 
 eighteenth century elegy, to the urn and bust and sculpt- 
 ured lyre which he had placed to the memory of Gray in 
 a rustic alcove in the garden at Aston, and then he ap- 
 proaches the awkward circumstance that Gray considered 
 The English Garden trash : 
 
x.] POSTHUMOUS. 213 
 
 " Oft, ' smiling as in scorn,' oft would he cry, 
 'Why waste thy numbers on a trivial art 
 That ill can mimic even the humblest charms 
 Of all-majestic Nature?' At the word 
 His eye would glisten, and his accents glow 
 With all the poet's frenzy : ' Sovereign Queen ! 
 Behold, and tremble, while thou viewest her state 
 Thron'd on the heights of Skiddaw : trace her march 
 Amid the purple crags of Borrowdale. 
 
 . . . Will thy boldest song 
 E'er brace the sinews of enervate art 
 To such dread daring ? Will it even direct 
 Her hand to emulate those softer charms 
 That deck the banks of Dove, or call to birth 
 The bare romantic crags ?' " etc. 
 
 It seems highly probable that, stripped of the charms 
 of blank verse, this is precisely what Gray was constantly 
 saying to Mason, who greatly preferred artificial cascades 
 and myrtle grots to all the mountains in Christendom. 
 On the fly-leaf of this private edition of The English 
 Garden in 1772 appeared the first general announcement 
 of the coming biography. 
 
 The work progressed very slowly. From the family of 
 West, who had now been dead thirty years, Mason was 
 fortunate enough to secure a number of valuable letters, 
 but it was difficult to fill up the hiatus between the close 
 of this correspondence and the beginning of Mason's 
 personal acquaintance with Gray. Wharton and Horace 
 Walpole came very kindly to his aid, and he was able to 
 collect a considerable amount of material. It is distress- 
 ing to think of the mass of papers, letters, verses, and 
 other documents which Mason possessed, and of the com- 
 paratively small use which he made of them. He con- 
 ceived the happy notion, which does not seem to have 
 been thought of by any previous writer, of allowing Gray 
 
214 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 to tell his own story by means of his letters ; but he 
 vitiated the evidence so put before the world by tamper- 
 ing grossly with the correspondence. He confessed to 
 Norton Nichols, who was angry at this, that " much lib- 
 erty was taken in transposing parts of the letters," but 
 he did not go on to mention that he allowed himself to 
 interpolate and erase passages, to conceal proper names, 
 to mutilate the original MSS., and to alter dates and 
 opinions. He was very anxious that what he called his 
 " fidelity " should not " be impeached " to the public and 
 the critics, but declared that he had only acted for the 
 honour of Gray himself. It is probable that in his fool- 
 ish heart Mason really did consider that he was respect- 
 ing Gray in thus brushing his clothes and washing his 
 hands for him before allowing the world to see him. 
 He thought that a ruffled wig or a disordered shoe-tie 
 would destroy his hero's credit with the judicious, and 
 accordingly he removed all that was silly and natural 
 from the letters. This determination to improve Gray 
 has marred, also, the slender thread of biography by which 
 the letters are linked together, yet to a less degree than 
 might be supposed, and the student finds himself con- 
 stantly returning to Mason's meagre and slipshod narrative 
 for some fact which has been less exactly stated by the 
 far more careful and critical Mitford. Mason had too 
 much literary ability, and had known Gray too intimately 
 and too long, to make his book other than valuable. It 
 is faulty and unfinished, but it is a sketch from the life. 
 It appeared, in two quarto volumes, in June, 1775, and 
 was received with great warmth by the critics, the public, 
 and all but the intimate friends of Gray. Mason often 
 reprinted this book, which continued to be a sort of classic 
 until Mitford commenced his investigations. 
 
x.J POSTHUMOUS. 215 
 
 It has generally been acknowledged that Johnson's life 
 of Gray is the worst section in his delightful series. It 
 formed the last chapter but one in the fourth volume of 
 the Lives of the Poets, and was written when its author 
 was tired of his task, and longing to be at rest again. It 
 is barren and meagre of fact to the last degree. Cole, 
 the antiquary, gave into Johnson's charge a collection of 
 anecdotes and sayings of Gray which he had formed in 
 connexion with the poet's Cambridge friends, especially 
 Tyson and Sparrow, but the lexicographer was disinclined 
 to make any use of them, and they were dispersed and 
 lost. We have already seen that these two great men, 
 the leading men of letters of their age in England, were 
 radically wanting in sympathy. Gray disliked Johnson 
 personally, apparently preserving the memory of some 
 chance meeting in which the sage had been painfully 
 self-asserting and oppressive; he was himself a lover of 
 limpid and easy prose, and a master of the lighter parts 
 of writing, and therefore condemned the style of Dr. 
 Johnson hastily, as being wholly turgid and vicious. Yet 
 he respected his character, and has recorded the fact that 
 Johnson often went out in the streets of London with his 
 pockets full of silver, and had given it all away before 
 he returned home. 
 
 Johnson's portrait of Gray is somewhat more judicial 
 than this, but just as unsympathetic. Yet he made one 
 remark, after reading a few of Gray's letters, which seems 
 to me to surpass in acumen all the generalities of Mason, 
 namely, that though Gray was fastidious and hard to please, 
 he was a man likely to love much where he loved at all. 
 But for Gray's poems Johnson had little but bewilderment. 
 If they had not received the warm sanction of critics like 
 Warburton and Hurd, and the admiration of such friends 
 P 10* 
 
216 ' GRAY. [chap. 
 
 of his own as Boswell and Garrick, it seems likely that 
 Johnson would not have acknowledged in them any merit 
 whatever. Where he approves of them no praise could 
 be fainter ; where he objects he is even more trenchant 
 and contemptuous than usual. The Elegy in a Country 
 Church-yard and the Ode on Adversity are the only pieces 
 in the whole repertory of Gray to which he allows the 
 tempered eulogy that he is not willing to withhold from 
 Mallet or Shenstone. We shall probably acquit the sturdy 
 critic of any unfairness, even involuntary, when we per- 
 ceive that for the poetry of Collins, who was his friend 
 and the object of his benefactions, he has even less toler- 
 ation than for the poetry of Gray. 
 
 When we examine Johnson's strictures more exactly 
 still we find that the inconsistency which usually accom- 
 panied the expression of his literary opinions does not 
 forsake him here. Even when Johnson is on safe ground, 
 as when he is weighing in a very careful balance the Epi- 
 taphs of Pope, he is never a sure critic ; he brings his ex- 
 cellent common-sense to bear on the subject in hand, but 
 is always in too great haste to be closing not to omit some 
 essential observation. But w r hen discussing poetry so ro- 
 mantic in its nature as that of Gray, he deals blows even 
 more at random than usual. The Ode on Adversity meets 
 with his warmest approbation, and he suggests no objec- 
 tion to its allegorical machinery, to much of which no 
 little exception might now be taken. But the Eton Ode, 
 with strange want of caution, he declaims against in de- 
 tail, -blaming at one time what posterity is now content to 
 admire, and at the other what his own practice in verse 
 might have amply justified. " The Prospect of Eton Col- 
 lege suggests nothing to Gray which every beholder does 
 not equally think and feel ;" that is to say, which every 
 
x.] POSTHUMOUS. 217 
 
 susceptible and cultivated beholder does not feel in a cer- 
 tain vein of reflection ; but this, so far from being a fault, 
 is the touch of nature which makes the poem universally 
 interesting. " His supplication to Father Thames, to tell 
 him who drives the hoop or tosses the ball, is useless and 
 puerile. Father Thames has no better means of knowing 
 than himself." In this case Johnson was instantly re- 
 minded that Father Nile had been called upon for infor- 
 mation exactly analogous in the pages of Rasselas. " His 
 epithet buxom health is not elegant," but to us it seems 
 appropriate, which is better. Finally, Johnson finds that 
 " redolent of joy and youth" is an expression removed 
 beyond apprehension, and is an imitation of a phrase of 
 Dryden's misunderstood ; but here Gray proves himself 
 the better scholar. It may be conjectured that he found 
 this word redolent, of which he was particularly fond, 
 amongst the old Scots poets of the sixteenth century, 
 whom he was the first to unearth. Dunbar and Scot love 
 to talk of the " redolent rose." 
 
 The phrases above quoted constitute Johnson's entire 
 criticism of the Eton Ode, and it is of a kind which, how- 
 ever vigorously expressed, would not nowadays be consid- 
 ered competent before the least accredited of tribunals. 
 The examination of the two Pindaric odes is conducted 
 on more conscientious but not more sympathetic princi- 
 ples. To the experiments in metre, to the verbal and 
 quantitative felicities, Johnson is absolutely deaf. He does 
 not entirely deny merit to the poems, but he contrives, 
 most ingeniously, to hesitate contempt. " My process," he 
 says, " has now brought me to the wonderful wonder of 
 wonders, the two Sister Odes ; by which, though either 
 vulgar ignorance or common-sense at first universally re- 
 jected them, many have been since persuaded to think 
 
218 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 themselves delighted. I am one of those that are willing 
 to be pleased, and therefore would gladly find the mean- 
 ing of the first stanza of the Progress of Poetry." John- 
 son, it is obvious enough, is on the side of " common- 
 sense." The difficult) 7 which he was pleased to find in 
 the opening stanza of the ode is one which he would 
 have been the first to denounce as whimsical and paltry 
 if brought forward by some other critic. Gray describes 
 the formation of poetry under the symbol of a widening 
 river, calm and broad in its pastoral moments, loud, riot- 
 ous, and resonant when swollen by passion or anger. 
 Johnson, to whom the language of Greek poetry and the 
 temper of Greek thought were uncongenial, refused to 
 grasp this direct imagery, and said that if the poet was 
 speaking of music, the expression "tolling down the steep 
 amain " was nonsense, and if of water, nothing to the point. 
 So good a scholar should have known, and any biographer 
 should have noticed, that Gray had pointed out that, as 
 usual in Pindar, whom he is here closely paraphrasing, 
 the subject and simile are united. Johnson was careless 
 enough to blame Gray for inventing the compound adjec- 
 tive velvet-green, although Pope and Young, poets after 
 Johnson's own heart, had previously used it. The rest of 
 his criticism is equally faulty, and from the same causes — 
 haste, and want of sympathy. 
 
 Johnson's attack did nothing at first to injure Gray's 
 position as a poet. Yet there can be no doubt that, in 
 the process of time, the great popularity of the Lives of 
 the Poets, and the oblivion into which Mason's life has 
 fallen, have done something sensibly to injure Gray with 
 the unthinking. Even in point of history the life of Gray 
 is culpably full of errors, and might as well have been writ- 
 ten if Mason's laborious work had never been published. 
 
x.] POSTHUMOUS. 219 
 
 There is, however, one point on which Johnson did early 
 justice to Gray, and that is in commending the picturesque 
 grace of his descriptions of the country. Against the con- 
 demnation of Johnson there were placed, almost instantly, 
 the enthusiastic praises of Adam Smith, Gibbon, Hume, 
 Mackintosh, and others of no less authority, who were 
 unanimous in ranking his poetry only just below that of 
 Shakspeare and Milton. This view continued until the 
 splendours of the neo-romantic school, especially the rep- 
 utations of Wordsworth and Byron, reduced the luminary 
 and deprived it of its excess of light. The Lake School, 
 particularly Coleridge, professed that Gray had been un- 
 fairly overrated, and it was rather Byron and Shelley who 
 sustained his fame, as in some directions they continued 
 his tradition. 
 
 It would be to leave this little memoir imperfect if we 
 did not follow the destinies of that group of intimate 
 friends who survived the poet, and whose names are in- 
 dissolubly connected with his. The one who died first 
 was Lord Strath more, who passed away, prematurely, in 
 1776. James Brown continued to hold the Mastership 
 of Pembroke, and to enjoy the reputation of a gentle and 
 good-natured old man, until 1784, when he followed his 
 friend to the grave. Young men of letters, such as Sir 
 Egerton Brydges, considered it a privilege to be asked to 
 the Master's- Lodge, and to take tea with the man in whose 
 arms Gray breathed his last, although Brown had no great 
 power of reminiscence, and had not much to tell such 
 eager questioners. Of himself it was told that his ways 
 were so extremely punctilious as to amuse Gray, himself a 
 very regular man, and that once, when the friends were 
 going to start together at a certain hour, and the time had 
 just arrived, Brown rose and began to walk to and fro, 
 

 220 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 whereupon Gray exclaimed, " Look at Brown, he is going 
 to strike !" Dr. Thomas Wharton (who must never be con- 
 founded with Thomas Warton, the poet-laureate) continued 
 to live at his house at Old Park, Durham, where Gray had 
 so often spent delightful weeks. He died in 1794 at a 
 great age, and left his ample correspondence with Gray 
 to his second son, a man of some literary pretensions, of 
 whom Sir Egerton Brydges has given an interesting ac- 
 count. Mason and Walpole, whose careers are too well 
 known to be dwelt upon here, survived their celebrated 
 friend by more than a quarter of a century. Horace 
 Walpole died on March 2, and Mason on April 4, 1797. 
 
 At the close of the century several of Gray's early friends 
 still survived. The Rev. William Robinson, having reach- 
 ed the age of seventy-six, died in December, 1803. On his 
 tomb in the church of Monks' Horton, in Kent, it was 
 stated that he was "especially intimate with the poet 
 Gray," with whom he probably became acquainted through 
 the accident that his mother, after his father's death, made 
 Dr. Conyers Middleton her second husband. His sister 
 was the Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu who wrote the Essay on 
 Shakspeare, and who patronized Dr. Johnson. The kind 
 and faithful Stonehewer died at a very advanced age in 
 1809, bequeathing to Pembroke Hall those commonplace- 
 books of Gray's from which Mathias reaped his bulky vol- 
 umes, and yet left much for me to glean. Norton Nichols 
 died Rector of Lound and Bradwell, in Suffolk, on the 22d 
 of November, in the same year, 1809, having fortunately 
 placed on paper, four years before, his exquisite reminis- 
 cences of Gray. He also bears on his memorial tablet, in j 
 Richmond church, his claim to the regard of posterity : 
 " He was the friend of the illustrious Gray." 
 
 The most remarkable, certainly the most original, of 
 
 
X.] POSTHUMOUS. 221 
 
 Gray's friends, was also the most long-lived. Charles 
 Victor de Bonstetten had but just begun his busy and ec- 
 centric career when he crossed the orbit of Gray. He lived 
 not merely to converse with Byron but to survive him, and 
 to see a new age of literature inaugurated. He was a co- 
 pious writer, and his works enjoyed a certain vogue. His 
 well-known description of Gray occurs in a book of studies 
 published in 1831, the year before he died, Les Souvenirs 
 du Chevalier de Bonstetten. In the most chatty of his 
 books, V Homme du Midi et Vhomme du Nord, he says 
 that he found in England that friendship of the most in- 
 timate kind could subsist between persons who were satis- 
 fied to remain absolutely silent in f one another's presence. 
 There may be a touch of the reserve of Gray in this vague 
 allusion. 
 
 In Bonstetten the romantic seed which Gray may be 
 supposed to have sown burst into extravagant blossom. 
 His conduct in private life seems, from what can be gath- 
 ered, to have been founded on a perusal of La Nouvelle 
 Heloise, and though he was a pleasant little fat man, with 
 rosy cheeks, his conduct was hardly up to the standard 
 which Gray would have approved of. Bonstetten may, 
 perhaps, be described as a smaller Benjamin Constant; 
 like him, he was Swiss by birth, first roused to intellectual 
 interest in England, and finally sentimentalized in Ger- 
 many ; but he was not quite capable of writing Adolphe. 
 Bonstetten followed Gray in studying the Scandinavian 
 tongues ; he acquainted himself with Icelandic, and wrote 
 copiously, though not very wisely, on the Eddas. He 
 brought out a German edition of his works at Copen- 
 hagen, where he spent some time, and whither he pur- 
 sued his eccentric friend Matthison. Bonstetten died at 
 Genoa in February, 1832, at the age of eighty-seven. The 
 
222 GRAY. [chap. 
 
 last survivor amongst people whom Gray knew was prob- 
 ably the Earl of Burlington, " little brother George," who 
 died in 1834. Perhaps the last person who was certainly 
 in Gray's presence was Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges, who 
 was present, at the age of three, at a wedding at which 
 Gray assisted, and who died in 1837. 
 
 Gray was rather short , in stature, of graceful build in 
 early life, but too plump in later years. He walked in a 
 wavering and gingerly manner, the result, probably, of 
 weakness. Besides the portraits already described in the 
 body of this memoir, there is a painting at Pembroke 
 Hall by Benjamin Wilson, F.R.S., a versatile artist, whose 
 work was at one time considered equal to that of Ho- 
 garth. This portrait is in profile; it was evidently paint- 1 
 ed towards the close of the poet's life ; the cheeks are 
 puffed, and the lips have fallen inwards through lack of 
 teeth. Gray is also stated to have sat to one of the Van- 
 derguchts, but this portrait seems to have disappeared. 
 In 1778 Mason commissioned the famous sculptor John 
 Bacon, who was just then executing various works in 
 Westminster Abbey, to carve the medallion now existing 
 in Poets' Corner ; as Bacon had never seen Gray, Mason 
 lent him a profile drawing by himself, the original of 
 which, a hideous little work, is now preserved at Pem- 
 broke. A bust of Gray, by Behnes, founded on the full- 
 face portrait by Eckhardt, stands, with those of other fa- 
 mous scholars, in Upper School, at Eton. 
 
 No monument of any kind perpetuates the memory of 
 Gray in the university town where he resided so long, and 
 of which he is one of the most illustrious ornaments. In 
 1776, according to a College Order which Mr. J. W. 
 Clark has kindly copied for me : " James Brown, Master, 
 and William Mason, Fellow, each gave fifty pounds to . 
 
x] POSTHUMOUS. • 223 
 
 establish a building fund in memory of Thomas Gray 
 the Poet, who had long resided in the College." The 
 fund so started gradually accumulated until it amounted 
 to a very large sum. Certain alterations were made, but 
 nothing serious was attempted until about thirty years' 
 ago, Mr. Cory, a Fellow of the college, took down the 
 Christopher Wren doorway to the hall, and attempted to 
 harmonize the whole structure to Gothic. Still the Gray 
 Building Fund was accumulating, and the college was be- 
 coming less and less able to accommodate its inhabitants. 
 It was determined at last to carry out the scheme pro- 
 posed nearly a century before by Brown and Mason. In 
 March, 1870, the work was put into the hands of Mr. 
 Alfred Waterhouse. He was at work on the college until 
 1879, and in his hands, if it is no longer picturesque, it is 
 thoroughly comfortable and habitable. 
 
 It is unfortunate that, in all this vast expenditure of 
 money, not one penny was spent in commemoration of 
 the man in whose name it was collected. Not a medal- 
 lion, not a tablet within Pembroke College bears witness 
 to any respect for the memory of Gray on the part of the 
 society amongst whom he lived for so many years. In- 
 deed, if strangers did not periodically inquire for his 
 room, it is probable that the name of Gray would be 
 as completely forgotten at Pembroke as at Peterhouse, 
 where also no monument of any kind preserves the record 
 of his presence. When we reflect how differently the 
 fame of a great man is honoured in France or Germany 
 or Italy, we have little on which to congratulate our 
 national self-satisfaction. 
 
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