Thomas Gray was the fifth child of Philip Gray, a scrivener or broker in London. His mother was a Miss Dorothy Antrobus, who, at the time of her marriage, kept a milliner's shop in partnership with her sister Mary, in Cornhill; and here Thomas was born on the 26th December, 1716.

He was one of twelve children, but all the others died in their infancy or childhood. "I have been told," says Mason, "that he narrowly escaped suffocation (owing to too great a fulness of blood, which destroyed the rest), and would certainly have been cut off as early, had not his mother, with a courage remarkable for one of her sex, and withal so very tender a parent, ventured to open a vein with her own hand, which instantly removed the paroxysm." In addition to this instance of his mother's love and courage, it was by her that he was supported, both as a child and at school and college, as his father, being unsuccessful and indolent, lived at his wife's place of business and on her earnings.

Further, the poetry of Gray and all we have of him we owe to his mother's side of the house. She herself belonged to Buckinghamshire; her brothers, Robert and William Antrobus, were assistant masters at Eton, therefore Gray was sent to Eton and educated under the direction of his uncle Robert. A sister of hers was married to Jonathan Rogers, a lawyer residing at Burnham, and subsequently at Stoke-Poges, The Christian names of Gray's uncles have hitherto not been given at all or given incorrectly. His first biographer, Mason, merely states he was "educated at Eton, under the care of Mr. Antrobus, his mother's brother, who was at that time, one of the Assistant Masters, and also a Fellow of St. Peter's College, Cambridge." Subsequent biographers speak only of his "uncle Mr. Antrobus," some adding "Fellow of Pembroke College." The mistakes and ambiguity originated in the fact that his mother was, as Walpole puts it, "sister to two Antrobus's who were ushers of Eton School." From the Provost of Eton I learn that they were Robert, who entered Eton College as a pupil in 1692, and William, admitted Feb. 15, 1705. According to Graduati Cantabrigienses Robert Antrobus graduated at Peterhouse in 1701, and William Antrobus at King's in 1713. In the Alumni Etonenses the entry in 1709 opposite William Antrobus is "A.B. 1713, A.M. 1717, was for many years an Assistant of Eton School, where he was [p. xxv] tutor to the Poet Gray, to whom he was uncle. He became Rector of Everdon in Northamptonshire, and died in 1742." In Baker's "Northamptonshire" I find that he was "instituted as Rector of Everdon on 21 Dec. 1726," and that he "died May 22, 1742." Robert died in January 1729, and a tablet was erected to his memory in Burnham Church by his brother-in-law, Jonathan Rogers. It was for his uncle Robert, therefore, that Gray was in mourning when Bryant went to Eton, "at the latter end of the year 1729." Mr. Gosse in his "Gray" ("English Men of Letters") speaks of Robert and Thomas Antrobus, and seems to have assumed that 'Thomas' was the Christian name, from the draft of an unfinished letter to Gray from his tutor at Cambridge, in which he says he would do any service for his "uncle Antrobus;" after this there is a word which looks like Thos, but may be Tho'—the beginning of a new and unfinished sentence. Mr. Gosse's quotation from the letter is otherwise incorrect, and even if the word were Thos, it is merely a slip on the part of the tutor. or Stoke, not far from Windsor, and now famous the world over for the church-yard of the "Elegy"; and from his house at Burnham Gray described the celebrated beeches, and at it met Southern, the author of "Oroonoko," in September 1737.

At Eton, which Gray entered in 1727, he formed a friendship with two school-fellows, Horace Walpole, son of the Prime Minister, and Richard West, son of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and grandson of the famous Bishop Burnet. Associated with the names of West and Walpole are several of Gray's poetical compositions and many of his most interesting letters. Other school friends or contemporaries, with whom his subsequent career was connected, were Thomas Ashton, George Montagu, Stonhewer, Clarke, William Cole, and Jacob Bryant.

"He was educated," says Horace Walpole, "chiefly under the direction of one of his uncles, who took prodigious pains with him, which answered exceedingly. He particularly instructed him in the virtues of simples. He had a great genius for music and poetry." Bryant, who was in the fourth form with Gray and Walpole,—"the former," he says, "being about four or five boys below, and Walpole as many above me,"—thus describes Gray: "He was in mourning for his uncle, Mr. Antrobus, who had been an Assistant Master at Eton, and after his resignation lived and died there. I remember he made an elegant little figure in his sable dress, for he had a very good complexion, and fine hair, and appeared to much advantage among the boys who were near him in the school, and who were more rough and rude. Indeed, both Mr. Gray and his friend were looked upon as too delicate, upon which account they had few associates, and never engaged in any exercise, nor partook of any boyish amusement. In a memorandum prefixed to Mitford's "Correspondence of Gray and Mason." Hence they seldom were in the fields, at least they took only a distant view of those who pursued their different diversions. Some, therefore, who were severe, treated them as feminine characters, on account of their too great delicacy, and sometimes a too fastidious behaviour. Mr. Walpole long afterwards used to say that Gray "was never a boy." This was allowed by many who remembered him, but in an acceptance very different from that which his noble friend intended. Mr. Gray was so averse to rough exercise that I am confident he was never on horseback."

Of West Bryant writes, "I also knew him well, and looked upon him as an extraordinary genius. He was superior to Gray in learning, and to everybody near him. He was, like his friend, quite faultless in respect to morals and behaviour, and, like many great geniuses, often very eccentric and absent."

In 1734 Gray entered Pembroke Hall, Cambridge; and on the 3rd of July of that year was admitted to Peterhouse, the college of which his uncle Robert had been a Fellow. Walpole entered King's College, Cambridge, in March, 1735; and about the same time West matriculated in Christ Church, Oxford. The intimacy of the four friends, Gray, West, Walpole, and Ashton, continued at the Universities, and they formed what they called the "Quadruple Alliance." At Cambridge Gray was studious and retiring; but his compositions that have come down to us are few,—some Latin verse, (the longest pieces being a Hymeneal on the marriage of the Prince of Wales in 1736, and "Luna Habitabilis," a College exercise set in 1737, and printed in "Musae Etonenses"), and a translation in English verse of about one hundred lines of the "Thebaid" of Statius, which he sent to West in May, 1736, and another of a passage of Tasso, in December, 1738. The latter was first published in Mathias' edition in 1814; the last lines are famous, but having been incorrectly printed by Mathias they have always been incorrectly quoted. They are:— Here the soft emerald smiles of verdant hue, And rubies flame, with sapphires heavenly blue, The diamond there attracts the wond'ring sight, Proud of its thousand dies, and luxury of light.

Gray's life at Cambridge and the studies prescribed by the University were most distasteful to him; mathematics were not his forte, and his fellow-students were not congenial. Writing to West in December, 1736, he tells him that he had endured lectures daily and hourly, supported by the hopes of being able to give himself up to his friends and classical companions. "It is very possible," he writes, "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. The people I behold all around me, it seems, know all this and more, and yet I do not know one of them who inspires me with any ambition of being like him." In his other letters while an undergraduate we see the melancholy—the melancholy of "Il Penseroso"—so characteristic of his poetry; the humour, as when he writes to West "you need not doubt of having a first row in the front box of my little heart," which reappears in the "Long Story," and some satirical pieces, and is everywhere conspicuous in his correspondence; and the love and admiration of Nature,—his letter from Burnham being aptly described as the "first expression of the modern feeling of the picturesque,"—so fully developed in his after life, which led Sir James Mackintosh to observe, "I am struck by the recollection of a sort of merit in Gray, which is not generally observed, that he was the first discoverer of the beauties of Nature in England, and has marked out the course of every picturesque journey that can be made in it."

In September, 1738, Gray left Cambridge without taking his degree. Shortly after, Horace Walpole invited him to accompany him on a tour on the Continent, Walpole bearing the expenses of both. This being agreed to, the two friends started from Dover on the 29th March, 1739. Gray remained abroad for over two years, and visited the chief places of interest in France and Italy; his having made this continental tour forming one of many points of resemblance between him and Milton, who, just a hundred years previously, had seen many of the spots and sights now visited by Gray.

Gray and Walpole spent two months at Paris, the summer at Rheims, and thence proceeded to Dijon and Lyons, and, travelling through Savoy, visited the Grande Chartreuse on their way to Geneva. In November they arrived at Turin, and after short halts at Genoa, Parma, and Bologna, they reached Florence, where they were the guests of Horace Mann, and this was their headquarters for the next fifteen months. The April and May of 1740 were spent at Rome; June at Naples; and the winter of 1740-41 at Florence. In the end of April, 1741, at Reggio, the friends had a difference which ended in their parting company. Gray went on to Venice, where he spent two months, and, returning home through the north of Italy, arrived in London from Lyons on the 1st September, 1741.

In a letter to Mason, in March, 1773, Horace Walpole takes to himself the blame for his quarrel with Gray:—"I am conscious," he says, "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 indulgence, 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. . . . I often disregarded his wishes of seeing places which I would not quit other amusements to visit. . . . 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." In another letter he says: "We had not got to Calais before Gray was dissatisfied, for I was a boy, and he, though infinitely more a man, was not enough so to make allowances."

During this tour on the Continent the only poetry that Gray wrote was some Latin verse—short pieces in letters to West, an unfinished didactic poem, "De Principiis Cogitandi," and an ode written in the visitors' album at the Grande Chartreuse on his second visit in August, 1741, remarkable not only for its Latinity, but as containing similar expressions regarding himself to those in the "Progress of Poesy." As yet Gray had written nothing in English poetry, but the Letters which he wrote to his friends, describing the various places he visited, deserve the encomium passed on him as a letter-writer by Cowper, himself one of our best letter-writers:—"I have been reading Gray's Works, and think him the only poet since Shakespeare entitled to the character of sublime. . . . I once thought Swift's Letters the best that could be written, but I like Gray's better. His humour, or his wit, or whatever it may be called, is never ill-natured or offensive, and yet I think equally poignant with the Dean's." Of the letters from the Continent that have come down to us, thirteen are to his mother, eleven to West, and five to his father.

Two months after Gray's return to England his father died, on the 6th November, 1741. The winter he spent in London, and the summer of 1742 at Stoke; to this place his mother and aunt retired, joining their sister there on the death of Mr. Rogers, in October 1742; and there they resided till their death, Gray frequently paying them long visits.

In December, 1741, Gray commenced his first original composition in English poetry— "Agrippina," a tragedy in blank verse; but of this he wrote only a single scene, consisting of a long speech by Agrippina; this he sent to West for his opinion in March, 1742, and partly because he condemned the style as too antiquated, Gray put it aside and never resumed it.

The year 1742 is an era in Gray's life as a poet; in the summer of that year he wrote at Stoke-Poges his "Ode on the Spring," "On a Distant Prospect of Eton College," "Sonnet on the Death of West," and the "Hymn to Adversity," and in the autumn he commenced the "Elegy." His "Ode on the Spring" he sent early in June to West, but it was returned, as he had died on the first of that month. His death, immediately following that of his uncle William Antrobus, greatly affected Gray; he lamented West in a sonnet—the first of any value that had been written since those of Milton, and in the "Ode on Eton," written in the same month, his recent losses caused him to take too gloomy a view of the 'fields' of his boyhood, now considered to have been 'beloved in vain,' and of the future of the 'sprightly race' in whom he sees only 'the little victims of Misfortune and Sorrow.' But the 'Quadruple Alliance' was broken not by death only, it had ceased to exist, Gray having fallen out with Ashton as well as with Walpole. "The late unhappy disagreement and separation," says Bryant, "were at that time uppermost in his mind, and when he contemplated this scene of concord and boyish happiness he could not help, in his melancholy mood, forming a contrast. He was led to consider the feuds and quarrels which were likely one day to ensue, when all that harmony and happiness was to cease and enmity and bitterness were to succeed. It is a gloomy picture, but finely executed, and whoever reads the description with this clue, will find that it was formed from a scene before his eyes. The poet saw and experimentally felt what he so masterly describes. I lived at that time almost upon the very spot which gave birth to these noble ideas, and in consequence of it saw the author very often." Standing alone then, owing to the death of one friend and his difference with the others, he can only 'look homeward' and see his own case in the future of all,—Despair, Unkindness, and Remorse. It is a distorted view and a one-sided picture, with no bright side; as was well observed by the Earl of Carlisle, "how many germs of future excellence, how much budding promise of yet undeveloped genius and unexercised virtue he might have discovered; . . . . of the last six Prime Ministers four have been Eton men, and not very long after the Poet had cast his desponding glance upon that boyish group, among those who disported on the 'margent green' was Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington."

None of these poems, however, was published for several years; the first that appeared in print being the "Ode on Eton College," which was published anonymously in pamphlet form by itself in 1747. Next year, the "Ode on Eton College," the "Ode on the Spring," and "Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat" were published in Dodsley's "Collection of Poems," but without Gray's name.

In the winter of 1742 Gray returned to Cambridge, and went into residence at Peterhouse. Lecture on the Writings of Gray, delivered at the Sheffield Mechanics' Institute, Dec. 14, 1852. He graduated as LL.B. in 1744, and for the rest of his life made Cambridge his home, with occasional visits to Stoke, to London, and to friends in the country. The next four or five years he devoted to reading, his chief study being the literature and history of ancient Greece. In Dec. 1746, he writes, "We are in the midst of Diog. Laertius and his philosophers, as a prooemium to the series of their works, and those of all the poets and orators that lived before Philip of Macedon's death, and we have made a great Chronological Table with our own hands, the wonder and amazement of Mr. Brown; not so much for public events, but rather, in a literary way, to compare the times of all great men, their writings and transactions." In March 1747, he writes:—"I have read Pausanias and Athenaeus all through, and Æschylus again. I am now in Pindar and Lysias, for I take verse and prose together like bread and cheese. The Chronology is growing daily." He also wrote notes and long commentaries on Plato and Aristophanes, a learned description of India and Persia, in which he cites over ninety ancient and modern authors whose works he had compared in this study. This and the Notes on Plato and Aristophanes were first published by Mathias, the former two from Gray's "Common So in Graduati Cantabrigienses. Mason and subsequent editors say 1742. Place Books" at Pembroke College, which contain besides many learned and interesting historical and literary notes still unpublished.

An event of importance to us as well as to Gray was his reconciliation, in November, 1745, with Horace Walpole, as the latter not only induced Gray to let his poems appear in print, but actually published the first collected edition of them at his own press at Strawberry Hill. Another interesting incident was an interview between Gray and Pope, which took place probably not long before the death of the latter (May 30, 1744). In 1747 he made the acquaintance of one who for the rest of his life was one of his most intimate friends, and destined to be his executor and biographer— William Mason, then a young scholar of St. John's College, and already a minor poet. Gray himself was still unknown as a poet or an author; it was without his name that his three Odes were published in Dodsley's "Collection" in 1748, and at this time he was over thirty years of age.

During the first half of his life at Cambridge Gray's most intimate friends besides Mason, (appointed Rector of Aston in Yorkshire in 1754, and Precentor of York in 1761), were the Rev. James Brown, Fellow and afterwards Master of Pembroke, and Thomas Wharton, See "Gray and his Friends," p. 7. M.D., an ex-Fellow, residing at Old Park near Durham. His correspondence was mainly with these three; the two former he appointed his executors, and he frequently went on visits to Mason at York, and to Wharton in Durham.

The death of his aunt Mary at Stoke in November, 1749, seems to have led Gray to take up again the unfinished "Elegy" which he had commenced just seven years previously; he kept touching it up for some months longer, and when at last finished he sent a copy of it to Horace Walpole on the 12th June, 1750. Walpole having handed the verses about, it got into the hands of the editors of the "Magazine of Magazines," who wrote to Gray informing him of their intention to print it. To anticipate them Gray requested Walpole to have it published at once, and thus this famous poem appeared, in a quarto pamphlet, on the 16th February, 1751, entitled "An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church-Yard," price sixpence.

The poem became popular at once, and the name of the author was soon known, he was the 'celebrated Mr. Gray,' and it, in Dr. Johnson's words, 'the far-famed Elegy.' It went through four editions in two months, and soon reached the eleventh; and not only did it appear in almost every magazine and in all Collections of Poems, but it was translated into Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, and into almost every language of Modern Europe, and polyglot editions of it published. To no other modern poem had such homage been paid and so abundantly. Nor should the story of the tribute paid to the "Elegy" on an historical occasion a few years later be omitted. On the 13th of September, 1759, the night before the battle on the Plains of Abraham, General Wolfe was descending the St. Lawrence with a part of his troops. "Swiftly but silently," writes Lord Mahon, "did the boats fall down with the tide, unobserved by the enemy's sentinels at their posts along the shore. Of the soldiers on board, how eagerly must every heart have throbbed at the coming conflict! how intently must every eye have contemplated the dark outline, as it lay pencilled upon the midnight sky, and as every moment it grew closer and clearer, of the hostile heights! Not a word was spoken—not a sound heard beyond the rippling of the stream. Wolfe alone—thus tradition has told us—repeated in a low tone to the other officers in his boat those beautiful stanzas with which a country churchyard inspired the muse of Gray. One noble line—'The paths of glory lead but to the grave,' must have seemed at such a moment fraught with mournful meaning. At the close of the recitation Wolfe added, 'Now, gentlemen, I would rather be the author of that poem than take Quebec.'"

To the lover of Gray, however, more pleasing than such distinctions as these is the thought that his mother—that careful tender mother—lived to read the words that now every one knows, and to hear of the fame of the son who had so fully requited her love.

In the autumn of 1750 Gray wrote the humorous verses entitled a "Long Story,"— a mock-heroic or burlesque account of his introduction to Lady Cobham and Miss Speed at the Manor House at Stoke-Poges.

The year 1753 is remarkable in Gray's literary life for the publication of a handsome edition of his poems with illustrations by Richard Bentley. The work was in reality planned by Horace Walpole, who persuaded Gray to allow the poems to be printed, paid Bentley for his drawings, and supervised the work generally. In Walpole's brief sketch of Gray he thus describes the work: "In March, 1753, was published a fine edition of his poems, with frontispieces, head and tail pieces and initial letters, engraved by Grignion and Muller, after drawings of Richard Bentley, Esq." So modest was Gray as to his contribution to the work that instead of its being called "Poems with Designs," he caused it to be named "Designs by Mr. R. Bentley for Six Poems by Mr. T. Gray." The Six Poems were the "Ode on the Spring," "Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat," "Ode on Eton College," "A Long Story," "Hymn to Adversity," and the "Elegy."

In March, 1753, Gray's mother died at Stoke, and was buried in the same grave as that in which her sister had been laid a few years previously. The inscription on the tombstone is the composition of Gray, and is a witness at once to his own faith and to his love for the mother to whom he owed so much. It runs: "In the vault beneath are deposited, in hope of a joyful resurrection, the remains of Mary Antrobus. She died unmarried, Nov. 5, 1749, aged 66. In the same pious confidence, beside her friend and sister, here sleep the remains of Dorothy Gray, widow, the careful tender Mother of many children, one of whom alone had the misfortune to survive her. She died March 11, 1753, aged 67."

In the July of 1753 Gray made a leisurely journey from Cambridge to Durham, where he spent two months with Dr. Wharton. In the autumn he was again at Stoke, tending on his aunt, who "had a stroke of the palsy," referring to which he writes: "Stoke has revived in me the memory of many a melancholy hour that I have passed in it, and, though I have no longer the same cause for anxiety, I do not find myself at all the happier for thinking that I have lost it, as my thoughts do not signify anything to any one but myself. I shall wish to change the scene as soon as ever I can."

In the autumn of 1754 he visited Stowe, Woburn, Wroxton and Warwick, and wrote a long description of the latter to Wharton, About the same time he wrote his learned Essay on Norman Architecture; it is written from a classical standpoint, but his accuracy of observation, considering the time at which he wrote, is very remarkable. To 1754 also belongs his unfinished "Ode on the Pleasure arising from Vicissitude;" had he completed this it would have ranked with the greatest of his poems. One verse will bear quoting again, the thoughts as well as some of the words are those of Wordsworth:— "See the Wretch, that long has tost On the thorny bed of pain, At length repair his vigour lost, And breathe and walk again; The meanest flowret of the vale, The simplest note that swells the gale, The common sun, the air, the skies, To him are opening paradise."

In December, 1754, Gray completed and sent to Dr. Wharton an 'Ode in the Greek manner,' requesting him "by no means to suffer it to be copied, nor even to show it unless to very few." This Ode was what was subsequently known as "The Progress of Poesy;" it and the companion Ode, "The Bard," are the most original of his productions, and at the same time show his art at its highest.

In July, 1755, Gray paid a visit to Mr. Chute at the Vyne in Hampshire; after which he visited Portsmouth, where he saw the fleet, and from Portsdown had a "magnificent and varied prospect of Hampshire, Berkshire, and the Isle of Wight."

"In the winter of 1755," says Walpole, "George Hervey, Earl of Bristol, who was soon afterwards sent Envoy to Turin, was designed for Minister to Lisbon; he offered to carry Gray as his secretary, but he declined it."

In March, 1756, Gray removed from Peterhouse to Pembroke, an event which he says "may be looked upon as a sort of era in a life so barren of events as mine." The cause of this move was the annoyance he received from some noisy students who occupied part of the same building; it is said that a practical joke was played on him, but in writing to Wharton he says: "I left my lodgings because the rooms were noisy and the people dirty; this is all I would choose to have said about it."

"The Bard" was commenced early in 1755, and laid aside, nothing apparently being done at it in 1756; but in May, 1757, in a fit of enthusiasm roused by some concerts given at Cambridge by John Parry, the famous blind harper, Gray at length finished it. He thus describes the incident in a letter to Mason:— "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, whenever he shall appear. Parry, you must know, put my Ode in motion again, and has brought it at last to a conclusion."

In August, 1757, the two Pindaric Odes, with the simple title of "Odes by Mr. Gray," were printed at a private printing press that Horace Walpole had set up at Strawberry Hill, "being," as he tells us, "the first production of that printing-house." The motto Gray adopted, from Pindar, was Φωνᾶντα συνετοῖσι—'vocal to the intelligent.' His reputation as a poet was made at once, but it was evident that he had judged rightly in assuming that all his readers and critics could not be included among the 'intelligent.' In a letter to Dr. Wharton a couple of months after the publication of the Odes, Gray wrote:—"Dr. Warburton is come to town, and I am told likes them extremely; he says the world never passed so just an opinion upon anything as upon them; for that in other things they have affected to like or to dislike, whereas here they own they do not understand, which he looks on to be very true; but yet thinks they understand them as well as Milton or Shakespeare, whom they are obliged by fashion to admire. Mr. Garrick's complimentary verses to me you have seen; I am told they were printed in the 'Chronicle' of last Appeared anonymously in the "London Chronicle," October 1, 1757. Saturday. The 'Critical Review' is in raptures, but mistakes the Æolian lyre for the harp of Æolus, and on this pleasant error founds both a compliment and a criticism." Oliver Goldsmith reviewed the Odes in the "London Monthly Review" for September, and observes of them;—"They will give as much pleasure to those who relish this species of composition as anything that has hitherto appeared in our language, the odes of Dryden himself not excepted." David Garrick's stanzas were six in number, of which the following two may be quoted as a specimen of the great actor's verse and of his mode of treating the subject:— Repine not, Gray, that our weak dazzled eyes Thy daring heights and brightness shun; How few can trace the eagle to the skies, Or, like him, gaze upon the sun! . . . Yet droop not, Gray, nor quit thy heaven-born art; Again thy wondrous powers reveal: Wake slumbering Virtue in the Briton's heart, And rouse us to reflect and feel!

Small as the amount of Gray's poetical work had been he was recognized as the greatest living poet, and in December, 1757, on the death of Colley Cibber, he was offered the post of Poet-Laureate. This Gray declined, observing, in a letter to Mason, "I rather wish somebody may accept it that will retrieve the credit of the thing, if it be retrievable or ever had any credit. . . . 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 possessor 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 setting him at war with the little fry of his own profession, for there are poets little enough to envy even a poet-laureate."

In 1759 Gray lived mostly in London, lodging in Southampton Row to be near the British Museum, which had been opened to the public in the January of that year; and here he read for several hours almost daily, and copied MSS. of Wyatt and Lydgate. He continued at this and similar work in the winter of 1760-61, copying out Gawin Douglas' "Palace of Honour," and composing his "Observations on English Metre," and other notes for a History of English Poetry he was then planning, which he refers to in the advertisement to his "Fatal Sisters."

In 1760 Lady Cobham died and left Gray twenty guineas. In his pocket-book for that year opposite April 15, I have noted the following, "Lady Cobham's legacy, £21," and on the same day "borrowed of Dr. Clarke, £15," and paid for a "pair of velvet breeches, £2 2s." In September he paid "M. Antrobus for linen and ruffles, six shirts and making, £5 9s."; and on "14 Nov. bought a lottery ticket, £5 8s. 6d.; it came out a blank on the 18th."

In the autumn of 1762 Gray made a tour in Yorkshire and Derby, visiting Richmond, Ripon, Sheffield, and Chatsworth, and other places of interest. On his return to Cambridge he found that the Professorship of Modern History was vacant, and, being "spirited up by some friends," Gray got his name suggested to Lord Bute; he also wrote to Mr. Chute asking him to find "an opportunity to mention it to Mr. W.", observing, "I certainly might ask it with as much or more propriety than anyone in this place; if anything more were done, it should be as private as possible, for if the people who have any sway here could prevent it, I think they would most zealously." Gray soon got his answer from Bute—"great professions of his desire to serve me on any future occasion, and many more fine words,"—and the place was given to Lawrence Brockett, tutor to Sir James Lowther, Bute's son-in-law. This must have been very galling to the sensitive nature of Gray; he had never asked for anything before; and when in 1759 it was thought that Dr. Turner, the Professor, was going to die, in a letter to Dr. Brown Gray says he had been Letter in "Gray and his Friends," p. 184. See an allusion to this in Macaulay's Essay on Chatham. sounded as to whether he would take it, but he "would not ask for it, not choosing to be refused."

In August, 1764, he made an excursion to Scotland; from Cumberland he visited Dumfries, the Falls of the Clyde, Glasgow (where he met Foulis, the publisher), Loch Lomond, Stirling, Hawthornden, Melrose, Edinburgh, and places near it. In October he made a short tour in the south of England, visiting Winchester, Southampton, Netley Abbey, Salisbury, Wilton, and Stonehenge. His descriptions of the places he visits are as usual most charming reading, especially where he writes on the spot "after the finest walk in the finest day that ever shone to Netley Abbey."

In the autumn of 1765 Gray paid a second visit to Scotland, stopping for a while at Edinburgh, where he "supped with Dr. Robertson and other literati." From Glamis he wrote a long letter to Dr. Wharton, describing the castle and the surrounding country. Thence he passed westward, still as Lord Strathmore's guest, to Dunkeld, and, by a road winding with the Tay, to the falls of the Tummell and the Pass of Killiecrankie, close by which "rises a hill covered with oak, with grotesque masses of rock staring from among their trunks, like the sullen countenances of Author of "History of Scotland," 1759; "History of the Reign of Charles the Fifth," 1769, etc. Fingal and all his family frowning on the little mortals of modern days." He returned from the Highlands, 'charmed with his expedition;' "the mountains," he says, "are ecstatic, and ought to be visited in pilgrimage once a year; none but those monstrous creatures of God know how to join so much beauty with so much horror. . . . Italy could hardly produce a nobler scene, and this so sweetly contrasted with that perfection of nastiness and total want of accommodation that Scotland only can supply."

While he was stopping at Glamis Castle, the Marischal College of Aberdeen offered to confer on Gray the degree of Doctor of Laws; this proposal was made through Dr. James Beattie, Professor of Moral Philosophy and author of the "Minstrel." Gray declined the honour, on the ground that he had not finished his course for the doctor's degree at Cambridge, and therefore, he says, "I certainly would avoid giving any offence to a set of men, among whom I have passed so many happy hours of my life; yet shall ever retain in my memory the obligations you have laid me under, and be proud of my connection with the University of Aberdeen."

In 1766 he passed the end of May and all June in Kent, visiting "Margate (one would think it was Bartholomew Fair that had flown down from Smithfield in the London machine), Ramsgate, Sandwich, Deal, and Dover, and Folkestone, and Hythe, all along the coast very delightful." Here again his descriptions of the scenery are poetry in prose, "showing an eye for nature then without a precedent in modern literature":—"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 navigation; in the east the sea breaks in upon you, and mixes its white transient sails [and] glittering blue expanse with the deeper and brighter greens of the woods and corn."

In 1768, Dodsley having asked Gray to allow him to republish his poems, there appeared the first complete edition of the poems he wished to make public. These numbered only ten,— five of the six that were published in the edition of 1753 (the "Long Story" being now omitted), his two Pindaric Odes and three Odes from the Norse. In this edition he supplied explanatory footnotes, for which he sarcastically apologizes in a prefatory note to the "Progress of Poesy" (see p. 189); but in one of his letters with less reserve he states that he added the notes "out of spite because the public did not understand the two Odes which I call Pindaric, though the first is 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." At the same time, on the suggestion of Beattie, another edition of the same poems was published in Glasgow by Foulis; this was a large and handsome book. In the advertisement to it the publishers state that "as an expression of their high esteem and gratitude, they have endeavoured to print it in the best manner;" and that it is "the first work in the Roman character which they have printed with so large a type."

On the 24th of July, 1768, the Professorship of Modern History again fell vacant, and it was at once offered, unsolicited, to Gray by the Duke of Grafton, then Prime Minister. In the same week, Gray attended the King's levee, and kissed hands on his appointment; in letters to his friends he says the King made him several gracious speeches, and told him that he owed his nomination to his "particular knowledge" of him. This professorship, which was worth £400 a year, had always been a sinecure, as the professor was not required to deliver any lectures. Gray, however, drew up a plan for an inaugural lecture; and in 1771 "Rules concerning the Lectures in Modern A copy may be seen in the Webb Collection, University Library. History" were issued, but the first lectures were by Dr. Symonds, Gray's successor.

The Duke of Grafton having been appointed Chancellor of the University, Gray undertook to write the customary Installation Ode. Dr. Burney was anxious to be the composer, but it was set to music by the Professor of Music, and performed at the Installation on the 1st July, 1769. This Ode is on a well-conceived plan, and contains several passages in Gray's best style, such as that beautiful stanza, in which, as Hallam says, "he has made the founders of Cambridge pass before our eyes like shadows over a magic glass."

In October, 1769, Gray made a tour in the Lake country, visiting Ulleswater, Borrowdale, Lodore, Ambleside, Grasmere, Rydal, and other places afterwards to be associated with the Lake poets, and celebrated by Wordsworth and Southey. He wrote a journal of this tour for the amusement of his friend, Dr. Wharton, which was published in Mason's "Memoirs" in 1775 among Gray's Letters to Wharton. This graphic and picturesque narrative, with its wonderful descriptions of the scenery of Ulleswater and Borrowdale, and of the Lodore waterfall, should be read in Mr. Gosse's edition, vol. i. pp. 249-281, and with them Wordsworth's "Daffodils," "Yew Trees," and the "Evening Walk." The similarity of language in the two poets in more than one passage is too striking to be merely accidental. Writing of a walk to Crow Park, Gray's note is:—"At distance heard the murmur of many waterfalls not audible in the day time." This re-appears in the "White Doe":— "A soft and lulling sound is heard Of streams inaudible by day."

In 1760 Gray took a fancy to an undergraduate, Norton Nicholls, and continued to keep up an interesting correspondence with him after he had left college and had become a country clergyman in Suffolk.

Through Nicholls Gray formed another friendship, which seemed serviceable to him in taking him out of himself; this was with a young Swiss gentleman named Bonstetten, who had come over to England to finish his education; Nicholls persuaded him to go to Cambridge, and gave him a letter of introduction to Gray. For the first three months of 1770 Bonstetten spent almost every evening with Gray, reading with him Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, and other English authors. On his way back to Switzerland, Bonstetten stopped in London, and was shown some of the sights by Gray, among others Dr. Johnson himself, whom Gray knew by sight, but disliked. Bonstetten told Sir Egerton Brydges, among other anecdotes of Gray, that, when he was walking one day with Gray in a crowded street of the city, "a large uncouth figure was rolling before them, upon seeing which Gray exclaimed with some bitterness, 'Look, look, Bonstetten, the great bear! There goes Ursa Major.'" In addition to interesting us as the companions and correspondents of Gray, Nicholls and Bonstetten have each written a sketch of Gray's character and mode of life. Nicholls' "Reminiscences of Gray" was written in 1805 and published in Mitford's edition in 1843, and in 1831 Bonstetten wrote "Souvenirs" of his own life, in which is a most interesting account of his intercourse with and impressions of "le celèbre poéte Gray,"—quoted in Mitford's "Correspondence of Gray and Mason," pp. 480-481.

An extract from a letter from the poet Beattie to Sir W. Forbes, dated 4th May, 1770, shows the opinion then held of Gray as a poet. He writes: "Of all the English poets of this age, Mr. Gray is most admired, and, I think, with justice. Yet there are, comparatively speaking, but a few who know anything of his but his 'Churchyard Elegy,' which is by no means the best of his works."

In the summer of 1770 Gray made a tour in company with Nicholls through Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Monmouthshire, Herefordshire, and Shropshire, "five of the most beautiful counties of the Kingdom"; he descended the Wye in a boat for forty miles, its banks he thought "a succession of nameless wonders"; he also saw Tintern Abbey, Monmouth, and Oxford. This was the last of his tours; he had looked forward to accompanying Nicholls to Switzerland on a visit to his friend Bonstetten in the summer of 1771, but as the time approached he wrote to Nicholls that he "had neither health nor spirits all the winter"; and, soon after, "I am but indifferently well; and the sense of my own duty (which I do not perform), my own low spirits, and, added to these, a bodily indisposition, make it necessary for me to deny myself that pleasure." This was in the end of May; on the 28th June he writes:— "I foresee a new complaint that may tie me down perhaps to my bed, and expose me to the operations of a surgeon. God knows what will be the end of it." On the 24th July, while at dinner in Pembroke College Hall he was taken suddenly ill; the next day the gout had reached his stomach, and he died before midnight on the 30th July, 1771.

In his will Gray desired that his body might be "deposited in the vault, made by my late dear mother in the churchyard of Stoke-Poges, near Slough in Buckinghamshire, by her remains." There he was buried on the 6th August, the grave, with its altar-shaped tombstone, being just outside the chancel window, and almost under the shadow of the ivy-mantled tower. The only inscription on the tombstone is that which he had put to the memory of his aunt and his mother; but a stone was placed by Mr. Penn in the wall of the church, with this inscription: "Opposite to this stone, in the same tomb upon which he has so feelingly recorded his grief at the loss of a beloved parent, are deposited the remains of Thomas Gray, the author of the Elegy written in a Country Churchyard, etc. He was buried August 6th, 1771."

In 1778, on the same day (6th August, the anniversary of his funeral), "monuments to the memory of Spenser and Gray were opened in Westminster Abbey." Gray's monument was erected by Mason; it is in Poets' Corner, just under the monument to Milton and next to that of Spenser; it consists of a medallion of Gray, and below the following inscription written by Mason:— "No more the Grecian Muse unrivalled reigns, To Britain let the nations homage pay; She felt a Homer's fire in Milton's strains, A Pindar's rapture in the lyre of Gray. He died July 30th, 1771. Aged 54."

One defect in these lines is that there is as much about Milton as there is about Gray.

In 1799, Mr. John Penn, the owner of Stoke Park, caused a large monumental cenotaph to be erected to Gray's memory in a field adjoining the churchyard at Stoke. On the four sides "Gentleman's Magazine," 1778. of the pedestal there are inscriptions; on the side facing the church there are the 27th and 28th stanzas of the "Elegy,"—the eight lines beginning "Hard by yon wood"; on the next side facing north are six lines from the "Ode on Eton College":— "Ye distant spires, ye antique towers, That crown the watry glade.           * * * * * Ah happy hills, ah pleasing shade, Ah fields beloved in vain, Where once my careless childhood strayed, A stranger yet to pain!" On the side that looks east are the 4th and 9th stanzas from the "Elegy," beginning— "Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade," and "The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power." On the fourth side there is the following inscription:—"This Monument, in honour of It is a curious fact that in Howitt's "Homes and Haunts of the British Poets" the quotations on these two sides are incorrectly given—sixteen continuous lines being given from the "Eton Ode," and the 4th and 5th stanzas of the "Elegy"; the inscription on the fourth side is also inaccurately quoted; and in Mr. Rolfe's American edition of Gray's "Poems," while he takes credit for correcting Howitt, he also, in his revised edition, gives the wrong verse from the "Elegy." Thomas Gray, was erected A.D. 1799, among the scenes celebrated by that great Lyric and Elegiac Poet. He died July 31, 1771, and lies unnoted, in the churchyard adjoining, under the tombstone on which he piously and pathetically recorded the interment of his Aunt and lamented Mother."

In Eton College a bust of Gray, by Behnes, presented by the seventh Earl of Carlisle, stands among the busts of famous Etonians in the upper school. And to further mark the poet's connection with Eton, the present Head-Master, Rev. E. Warre, D.D. (following the example of his predecessors, Dr. Balston and Dr. Hornby) presents a copy of Gray's Poems to each boy in the fifth and sixth forms who leaves Eton with a 'bene discessit,' and a handsomely-bound large edition to such as may have specially distinguished themselves.

It was not till just a century after his death that at Cambridge due honour was done to the memory of Gray. When the College Hall at Peterhouse was restored in 1870 a stained glass This wrong date is also given in several biographies of Gray, owing to Mason's wording in his "Memoirs"—"On the 30th the fit returned with increased violence, and on the next evening he expired." Dr. Goodford's "leaving book" was a "Terence," Dr. Hawtrey's a "Juvenal"; and in 1862 Dr. Balston adopted "Gray" as the presentation book. window, drawn by Mr. F. Madox Brown, was presented by Mr. Hunt; and at Pembroke College a marble bust by Thornycroft was unveiled by Lord Houghton on the 26th May, 1885, and speeches were delivered in honour of the poet by Sir Frederick Leighton and by Mr. Russell Lowell, the American Minister and himself a poet.

Gray's character is best painted by himself; writing to West from Florence, in April, 1741, he says: "As I am recommending myself to your love, methinks I ought to send you my picture. You must add then, to your former idea, two years of age, a reasonable quantity of dulness, a great deal of silence, and something that rather resembles, than is, thinking; a confused notion of many strange and fine things that have swam before my eyes for some time, a want of love for general society, indeed an inability to it. On the good side you may add a sensibility for what others feel, and indulgence for their faults and weaknesses, a love of truth and detestation of everything else. Then you are to deduct a little impertinence, a little laughter, a great deal of pride and some spirits."

'To be employed is to be happy,' was one of Gray's favourite maxims. Study and travel were the two kinds of employment in which he found most happiness. In a letter to Wharton (April, 1760) he writes "To find oneself business, I am persuaded, is the great art of life; and I am never so angry as when I hear my acquaintance wishing they had been bred to some poking profession, or employed in some office of drudgery, as if it were pleasanter to be at the command of others, than at one's own, and as if they could not go unless they were wound up. Yet I know and feel what they mean by this complaint; it proves that some spirit, something of genius (more than common) is required to teach a man how to employ himself."

Probably the trait in Gray's character most natural in the author of the "Elegy" is his sympathy for the sufferings of others, his 'sensibility,' as he calls it, to know and feel another's woe. Whenever there was sorrow, or sickness, or death, among his friends, his tenderness was shown in language no less touching than beautiful; his letters of condolence to Mason on the death of his wife, and to Nicholls on the loss of his mother are well known. To him sorrow had not come for no purpose; "methinks," he writes, "I can readily pardon sickness, and age, and vexation for all the depredations they make within and without, when I think they make us better friends and better men, which I am persuaded is often the case. I am very sure I have seen the best-tempered, generous, tenderest, young creatures in the world, that would have been very glad to be sorry for people they liked when under any pain, and could not, merely for the want of knowing rightly what it was themselves."

Unjust and disparaging as is Dr. Johnson's criticism of Gray's poetry, his estimate of his character is, for a contemporary, wonderfully true; "his mind," he says, "had a large grasp; his curiosity was unlimited, and his judgment cultivated; he was a man likely to love much where he loved at all, but he was fastidious and hard to please; his contempt, however, is often employed, where I hope it will be approved, on scepticism and infidelity."

"It is scarcely a paradox to say," writes Mr. Tovey, "that he has left much that is incomplete, but nothing that is unfinished. His handwriting represents his mind; I have seen and transcribed many and many a page of it, but I do not recollect a single carelessly written word, or even letter. The mere sight of it suggests refinement, order, and infinite pains. A mind searching in so many directions, sensitive to so many influences, yet seeking in the first place its own satisfaction in a manner uniformly careful and artistic, is almost foredoomed to give very little to the world. But what he has given is a little gold instead of much silver. . . . . In all that he has left, there is independence, sincerity, thoroughness; the highest exemplar of the critical spirit, a type of how good work of any kind should be done. He studied Greek when few studied it. . . . . His notes designed for his own use, have been frequently quoted by the late Master of Trinity. . . . . To History he brought the modern spirit of research . . . . His critical opinions are safe, because they are not controversial nor addressed to a public, but the outcome of impressions gathered at leisure by a mind at once comprehensive and exact. We are no losers by the circumstance that they were communicated only to his friends, for next in sincerity to the good criticism which may be found in some poetry is that which we can extract from private letters."

Gray was skilled in architecture, in botany, in zoology, and in music; he made a valuable collection of manuscript music while he was in Italy, and was a judge of both painting and sculpture. In relation to landscape Gray was a prophet and a precursor of all that we love and admire. Speaking as an artist Sir F. Leighton well said:—"Nature knew him for her lover and unsealed for him her inmost secrets. Her beauty revealed to him new and richer meanings, a fuller charm breathed for him out of the meadow, and out of the mere, and the mountains lost their antique gloom and let in a new day, their gloom was turned before his eyes to glory." One of the first things that strikes one with reference to the Poetry of Gray is the small quantity of it; as Dickens once said, no poet ever gained a place among the immortals with so small a volume under his arm. But Gray wrote only for himself or his friends, and it was merely when pressed by them or by the booksellers that he published anything; the "Elegy" was being circulated in manuscript for months, and it was only when it was about to be printed in an unauthorized manner that he caused it to be published, and even then without his name. What he says of his verses was true of himself— "To censure cold and negligent of fame." Nor did he write for money; "he could not bear," we are told, "to be thought a professed man of letters, but wished to be regarded as a private gentleman who read for his amusement."

The chief characteristics of Gray's Poetry are the musical sweetness of the versification and his felicity of expression, and besides these a 'philosophic pathos,' to use Coleridge's phrase in describing one of the excellences of the poetry of Wordsworth. "Extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical, is one of the grand beauties of lyric poetry. This," says Gray, "I have always aimed at and never could attain. The necessity of rhyming is one great obstacle to it." His chief merit as a poet, however, lies in his art. "Gray," writes Matthew Arnold, "holds his high rank as a poet, not merely by the beauty and grace of passages in his poems; not merely by a diction generally pure in an age of impure diction; he holds it, above all, by the power and skill with which the evolution of his poems is conducted. Here is his grand superiority to Collins, whose diction in his best poem—the "Ode to Evening"—is purer than Gray's; but then the "Ode to Evening" is like a river which loses itself in the sand, whereas Gray's best poems have an evolution sure and satisfying."

Dryden and Milton seem to be the poets from whom Gray chiefly formed his style; he cites Milton as the "best example of an exquisite ear that he can produce"; and he seems to me to have borrowed more of the language and phraseology of Milton than that of any other poet; and of Dryden he writes that "if there was any excellence in his own numbers he had learned it wholly from that great poet." Norton Nicholls writes: "Spenser was among his favourite poets, and he told me he never sat down to compose poetry without reading Spenser for a considerable time previously. He admired Dryden and could not patiently hear him criticized; "Absalom and Achitophel" Emerson. "Macmillan's Magazine," May, 1884. and "Theodore and Honoria" stood in the first rank of poems in his estimation. He placed Shakespeare high above all poets of all countries and all ages. . . . I asked him why he had not continued that beautiful fragment beginning "As sickly plants betray a niggard earth," he said 'because he could not'; when I expressed surprise at this, he explained himself as follows, that he had been used to write only lyric poetry, in which the poems being short, he had accustomed himself, and was able to polish every part; that this having become habit he could not write otherwise, and that the labour of this method in a long poem would be intolerable. . . . . He thought Goldsmith a genuine poet. I was with him at Malvern when he received the "Deserted Village," which he desired me to read to him; and he listened with fixed attention, and soon exclaimed, 'This man is a poet.'"

A point which I have nowhere seen noted in connection with Gray's style is the frequency with which he uses a word or phrase that seems to please him, several instances of which I have cited in the Notes. Another (to which I have referred in the note on line 63 of the "Elegy") is his reproducing in his printed poems words and thoughts from the verses that he set aside and never intended for publication. I have cited "Alliance of Education and Government." several such from "Agrippina," and there are others in his Translations,—that remarkable expression "luxury of light," in the "Stanzas to Bentley," he had already written in his Translation from Tasso so long previously as 1738; and his "Alliance of Education and Government" contains several words used in a connection almost peculiar to Gray, e.g., that most unpoetical word "circumscribed" (familiar from the "Elegy") occurs in a passage that may be quoted as a specimen of the poetry which he did not think worth publishing— "Unmanly thought! what seasons can control, What fancied zone can circumscribe the Soul, Who, conscious of the source from whence she springs, By reason's light on resolution's wings, Spite of her frail companion dauntless goes O'er Libya's deserts and through Zembla's snows? She bids each slumb'ring energy awake, Another touch, another temper take, Suspends th' inferior laws that rule our clay; The stubborn elements confess her sway, Their little wants, their low desires refine, And raise the mortal to a height divine."

Another peculiarity of Gray's is his use of compounds, not merely such as "many-twinkling" and "ivy-mantled," but "desert-beach," "vermeil-cheek," "iron-sleep," "iron-sleet," "virgin-grace," "tyrant-power," "velvet-green," and others in which the second part as well as the whole word is a substantive. The principal defects in Gray's poetry are an excess of allegory and rhetoric, and a too frequent recurrence of personification, sometimes so vague that, as Coleridge observes in his remarks on the well-known passage in the "Bard"—"Youth on the prow and Pleasure at the helm"—"it depends wholly in the compositor's putting or not putting a capital, both in this and many other passages, whether the words should be personifications or mere abstracts."

The charge of obscurity is less likely to be made in the present day than it was when his Pindaric Odes appeared, when notes were necessary "to tell the gentle reader," as Gray says, "that Edward I. was not Oliver Cromwell nor Queen Elizabeth the Witch of Endor"; but if such there be, his own motto to the "Odes" is his reply, "Vocal to the intelligent, for the many they need interpreters"; or, as Coleridge said to those who complained of bis poems being obscure, "If any man expect from my poems the same easiness of style which he admires in a drinking song, for him I have not written. Intelligibilia, non intellectum adfero."

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