grayt.ead.0001-mss.0009Thomas Gray Manuscripts:An Inventory at the Thomas Gray Archive.Alexander HuberThomas Gray Archive2006Catalogued in EAD 2002 by Alexander Huber,
Editor, Thomas Gray Archive, 2005-Englishgrayt.ead.0001-mss.0009#did0001mss.poemsPoems[ca.
1725]-1771poems.aleg[The Alliance of Education and Government.
A Fragment]As sickly plants betray a niggard earth,1775Starr/Hendrickson (eds.), Complete Poems (1966), 93-97Lonsdale (ed.), Poems (1969), 85-100
Written in 1748-49 and probably abandoned by March 1749. Gray sent ll. 1-57 of the
fragment in a letter,
dated 19 August 1748, to Thomas Wharton.
First published, entitled
Essay
I, in Mason'sMemoirs (1775), 193-200.
mss.0009poems.alegAn Essay on Education and
Government[17??][?]transcript in the hand of James Beattie250 mm x 200 mmMS 30/44 (Copies of the poems of Thomas Gray)
Historic Collections Special Libraries and Archives, King's
College UABDSmith (ed.), Index (1989), 79Sutton (ed.), Location Register (1995), 414Ellner, June, "Re: MS 30/44, James Beattie
papers". E-mail to the editor, 20 December 2006
Transcript in the hand of James
Beattie, entitled
An
Essay on Education and Government and annotated in his hand
"This beginning of an ethical play is finished in the Author's
highest manner. He began it in the year 1748,
as appears from a letter
to one on his friends inclosing a part of it. In that letter, he
entitles it, An Essay on Education and
Government, or rather, on the
necessary alliance of them to produce the external happiness of
mankind. He relinquished the prosecution of this work on the
publication of M. de Montesquieu's Esprit des Loix: a book which he
highly admired; and which he said had forestalled the principal things
he meant to advance upon the subject. And yet we see, from what he has
here left, that he differed from the Baron in one material point, viz,
the influence of soil or climate on national manners."