grayt.ead.0001-mss.0012Thomas 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.0012#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.0012poems.alegEssay 1st[1749?]2autograph
GBR/1058/GRA/1, Commonplace Book, Vol. II,
619-620 College Library PBCC
Microfilm copy available in Poetic Commonplace Books and Manuscripts of Thomas Gray, 1716-1771, from Pembroke College, Cambridge (1999),
reel one
Smith (ed.), Index (1989), item GrT 9, 79Poetic C.
B., Pembroke College (1999), 27Martin, Chronologie (1931), 144
Autograph, headed
Essay
1st, with numbered lines (5, 10, etc.), followed by a
quotation in Greek from Theocritus in Gray's
Commonplace Book, vol. II,
619-620.