Gray's Elegy is an early and influential example of the new concern for the laboring poor, a hitherto neglected group of the dead. The poem contrasts the church monuments of the elite and the humble churchyard tombstones of the poor: on the one hand, the church's "storied urn[s]" and "animated bust[s]" (l. 41) and, on the other, the "frail memorial[s]" (l. 78) placed among the "rugged elms" and "yew-tree's shade" (l. 13) and decked with "shapeless sculpture" (l. 79) and inscriptions by the "unlettered muse" (l. 81). Pope's "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady" may have suggested Gray's contrast between two kinds of commemoration, one associated with elite art and the other with "humble" nature. Both Pope's and Gray's poems explore society's differential treatment of the dead, and both embrace the cause of the outcast—Pope's condemned suicide, Gray's disdained poor—to attack the "proud" ("Elegy to the Memory," l. 43, Elegy, l. 37). While Pope affirms the dignity of a unique, fictional character, however, Gray affirms the moral worth of an entire social group.

Gray distinguishes between great and poor not only in terms of art I cite the text of Gray's Elegy in The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, and Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longmans, 1969), 117-140. F. W. Bateson suggests that Pope's "Elegy" was the major model for Gray's Elegy as an attack on the "proud" in "Gray's 'Elegy' Reconsidered," in his English Poetry: A Critical Introduction, rev. ed. (London: Longmans, 1966), 131-132. and nature but also in terms of silence and sound. The contrast is here paradoxical. The commemorative art of the elite, for all its noisy claims, cannot overcome the silence of death: Can storied urn[] or animated bust Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath? Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust, Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of Death?                       (ll. 41-44) By contrast, the churchyard monuments of the poor, who in life "kept the noiseless tenor of their way" (l. 76), make the poet hear the cries of the dead for recognition: Yet even these bones from insult to protect, Some frail memorial still erected nigh, With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture decked, Implores the passing tribute of a sigh. Their name, their years, spelt by the unlettered muse, The place of fame and elegy supply: And many a holy text around she strews, That teach the rustic moralist to die. For who to dumb Forgetfulness a prey, This pleasing anxious being e'er resigned, Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day, Nor cast one longing lingering look behind? On some fond breast the parting soul relies, Some pious drops the closing eye requires; Ev'n from the tomb the voice of nature cries, Ev'n in our ashes live their wonted fires.                       (ll. 77-92) Gray hears the humble churchyard monuments "implore" the sympathetic stranger's attention. He suggests that the desire for remembrance shared by rich and poor is best expressed by the latter because their artless monuments in the natural landscape most authentically articulate, for those willing to listen, the "voice of nature" in all its humble neediness. By being so near the silence of death, the poor's obscure lives of "noiseless tenor" reveal what the social elite attempt to forget, the closeness of all mortals to death. By their evident vulnerability to contempt or neglect, For other discussions of sound and silence in the Elegy, see Bateson, 133; Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 134-136; and George T. Wright, "Stillness and the Argument of Gray's Elegy," MP 74 (1977):381-389. the poor's "frail memorial[s]" similarly lay bare what the social elite's grand monuments attempt to hide, the weakness of all mortal attempts to escape oblivion. Those who are most silent in life are thus the most expressive in death.

Gray's meditation upon the universal desire for posthumous recognition may be contrasted with such a classical treatment of the same subject as Cicero's in the Tusculan Disputations:

Gray makes clear his revision of classical conceptions of immortality by suggesting a connection between the buried villagers and great men of the sort singled out by Cicero, those who consciously pursue immortality because they possess the "highest nature." Between his attack on proud church monuments and his sympathetic response to humble churchyard gravestones, he reflects on the unrealized potential for fame of those buried in the churchyard:

Like Pope's benevolent commemorations of the vulnerable dead, Gray's elegiac focus on the churchyard inhabitants contributes to the poet's memorializing portrait of himself as a man whose sentiments transcend the unfeeling norms of polite society. By imagining his own burial Gray certainly knew the Tusculan Disputations: he paraphrases a passage from the work (5.3) in a January 1747 letter to Walpole; see The Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1935), 1:262-263. In the earlier version of the poem preserved in the Eton manuscript, "Hampden" was "Cato," "Milton" was "Tully," and "Cromwell" was "Caesar" (see Gray, 127-128, notes 57, 59, and 60). Gray wished to give the poem a greater English flavor, but the earlier version's Roman references, including the reference to Cicero, make clear that Gray invokes classical values in order to reject classical elitism. and monument in the churchyard, Gray links himself in death to the poor whose worth he defends against the "proud." It is true that unlike the poor, he is commemorated not by name and the formulaic pieties of an "unlettered muse" but instead by an anonymous poetic epitaph that reveals his unique sensibility far better than could any name or formula. Nevertheless his churchyard epitaph, like theirs, authentically, expresses the vulnerability of mortal men through its self-conscious humility: the epitaph that declares the "frailties" of an "unknown youth" who humbly "lies upon the lap of earth" awaiting the sympathetic response of the "kindred spirit" is the poet's self-chosen analogue to the rustics' "frail" churchyard monuments and inscriptions.

By treating the buried poor as the truest representatives of all the vulnerable dead, Gray makes explicit the association often implicit among his contemporaries of the poor with the dead as groups all too frequently neglected by society. Such an association is evident in the work of the influential moral philosopher and economist Adam Smith. In both The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), one of the most popular expositions of "sentimental" morality, and his classic treatise on economics, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Smith argues that a free market economy, which relies on humanity's "natural selfishness and rapacity" rather than on its "benevolence," produces extreme economic inequality but increases the wealth of all. The Theory of Moral Sentiments qualifies the approval of "commercial society," however, by suggesting that such a society depends upon a disregard for the poor that renders their lot akin to death.

Smith's ethical treatise argues that "sympathy" or "fellow feeling" depends on imagining oneself in the situation of those with whom one sympathizes. Because human beings find it far easier to sympathize with others' joys than with others' sorrows, they sympathize more readily with the rich and powerful than with the poor and powerless. See Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie, corr. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 184-185; and Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner; textual ed. W. B. Todd, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 1:26-27. On the popularity and influence of Smith's ethical treatise, see Brissenden, 36-37. My discussion of Smith's ambivalent attitude toward "commercial society" is indebted to Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, "Needs and Justice in the 'Wealth of Nations': An Introductory Essay," in their anthology Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1-44. On Smith's concern for the conditions of the poor, see also Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (New York: Vintage, 1983), 42-63. Smith, Theory, 9. See Smith, Theory, 47. On Smith's concern with the limits of human sympathy, see also David Marshall, The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 167-192. People scramble for wealth and station in order to be "taken notice of with sympathy." Though moralists rightly urge the fortunate to show "fellow feeling" for the poor, the poor are normally despised or "overlooked."

The dead are also vulnerable to disregard. Though the opening chapter of the moral treatise argues that human beings "sympathize even with the dead," such sympathy largely depends, paradoxically, upon the living's neglect of the deceased:

Smith's descriptions of the neglected poor recall his opening description of the dead: the poor are deprived of the "daylight of honour and approbation," just as the dead are "deprived of the light of the sun"; the poor man is "out of the sight of mankind" and "in the midst of a crowd is in the same obscurity as if shut up in his own hovel," just as Smith, Theory, 50. Smith, Theory, 225-226. Smith, Theory, 50-51. Smith, Theory, 12-13. Smith, Theory, 220. Smith uses this phrase later in the work when arguing that "our sorrow at a funeral generally amounts to no more than an affected gravity" (Theory, 47). the dead are "shut out from life and conversation ... in the cold grave." Smith's other writings similarly describe the poor's lot as akin to death: his 1763 lectures on jurisprudence note that the poor man is "buried in obscurity" and "thrust down into the lowest part of the earth"; in one of its bleaker moments, The Wealth of Nations describes the urban poor "sunk in obscurity and darkness." Smith's ethical treatise notes, however, that the upper classes regard the poor's condition as even "worse than death," and their state is indeed worse in Smith's view, for the poor generally evoke no second-order sympathetic response from their fellow men. To sympathize with the deceased poor would therefore be, in Smith's scheme, to sympathize with those who are doubly forgotten in the general pursuit and admiration of wealth and power. With the widening gap between rich and poor beginning in the mid eighteenth century, however, members of the social elite increasingly reassert their bond with the poor by displaying precisely such sympathy.

Over the course of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, for example, the upper and middle classes increasingly chose churchyard burial, like Gray in the Elegy, as a sentimental assertion of their ultimate kinship to the churchyard poor. This new trend represented a major shift in conceptions of churchyard burial. During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, fears of mixing worship of the living God with worship of the dead resulted in a minority of the Protestant elite, especially those of the Puritan faction, cho[o]sing churchyard burial despite the prestige of church burial and commemoration. In the late seventeenth century the percentage of the social elite buried in the churchyard rose considerably. Though the crowding of churches with bodies and monuments was partially responsible for the increasing use of the Smith, Theory, 51. Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 341. Smith, Wealth, 2:795. Smith, Theory, 50. Philippe Ariès notes without adequately explaining the churchyard burials of members of the elite in England in The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Random, 1982), 90-92. For examples of Puritan ministers who chose churchyard burial in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, see Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 370-371; and R. C. Richardson, Puritanism in North-West England: A Regional Study of the Diocese of Chester to 1642 (Manchester: Manchester University Press; Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1972), 30. See Ariès, 338-339; and Clare Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 139-141 and 145-146. John Le Neve's anthology of epitaphs upon the elite, Monumenta Anglicana: Being Inscriptions on the Monuments of several Eminent Persons ... 1600-1715, 5 vols. (London, 1718-1719), reveals a rise in the percentage of churchyard inscriptions beginning in the second half of the seventeenth century: there are 10 churchyard inscriptions out of total of 454, around 2 percent, for the years 1600-1649; 20 such inscriptions out of 818, almost 2.5 percent, for the years [p. 360] 1650-1679; 30 out of 515, almost 6 percent, for the years 1680-1699; and 31 out of 347, almost 9 percent, for the years 1700-1715. churchyard, more men and women than ever before chose to be buried in the churchyard out of religious conviction that the dead should be separated from the living. Sir Matthew Hale, who died in 1676, expressed the views of many of his contemporaries when he claimed that "churches were for the living ... Churchyards for the dead." In addition to increasing the popularity of the plain wall tablet, the iconoclasm of the Civil Wars dissuaded some of the social elite from continuing burial practices that were at best divisive and at worst temptations to idolatry.

The religious scruples of the elite did not prevent them, however, from asserting social distinctions in death. Some families distinguished between the churchyard as the appropriate burial place and the church as the site of monuments expressing enduring social status: a family who in the 1690s buried a gentlewoman in the churchyard "by her own appointment" also erected a cenotaph to her memory in the church, thus affirming her status and their own. In the late seventeenth century those who chose churchyard burial also began erecting substantial churchyard monuments, in imitation of the church monuments they had forsaken.

Gray's contrast between church and churchyard in terms of social class and the distinction between art and nature both exemplifies and influences the new eighteenth-century sense of the distinction between indoor and outdoor commemoration. Increasingly, the upper and middle ranks chose simpler, outdoor memorials not out of specifically religious scruples but out of a desire to assert in death their links to "simple" nature and to the socially humble, who were deemed closest to nature. Both the private gardens of the social elite and the public churchyards reveal this new cult of natural simplicity. William Shenstone's garden at Leasowes, for example, had urns dedicated to friends absent or dead with inscriptions that honored the person's simplicity and love of nature. Quoted in Samuel Clarke, The Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons in this Later Age (London, 1683), 130. In 1692, an Oxfordshire gentleman, Griffith Higgs, "meekly" chose to be buried outside near the church door because he "fear'd" church burial; see F. N. Davis, ed., "Anthony à Wood's and Richard Rawlinson's Parochial Collections (Third Part)," Oxfordshire Record Society 11 (1929):275-276. Protestants of all religious persuasions increasingly rejected church burial: Gittings cites the similar sentiments of the Low Church bishop Hall and the High Church, non-juror archbishop Sancroft (p. 141). See the epitaph of Bridget Wilford, d. 1692, in Le Neve, 3:137. Thomas Parnell's "A Night-Piece on Death," published posthumously in 1722, describes the proudly ascending churchyard monuments that "Adorn the rich, or Praise the great" (l. 44); see The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 117. See The Poetical Works of William Shenstone, ed. Rev. George Gilfillan (1854; rpt., New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 274, 278-281; and the discussion of Shenstone's inscriptions [p. 361] in Richard A. Etlin, The Architecture of Death: The Transformation of the Cemetery in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), 176-184. Shenstone chose to be buried and commemorated in the local churchyard, and his 1771 epitaph by Richard Graves, cited earlier for its address to the reader, contrasted his "simple urn" with the "monumental bust, / Or sumptuous tomb" typical of the "great." Some echoed Gray's Elegy to suggest the significance of churchyard burial: an epitaph upon a middle-class woman who died in 1779 praises the "frail memorial" of the deceased, placed amid the "rude branches" and "green sod" of the churchyard, as superior to "all the monuments of proudest art"; in a 1791 composition entitled "Epitaph on and by Himself in a Country Church-yard," a poet imagines his "poor clay" buried in lowly "sod" rather than in a church's "proud tomb"; in an early nineteenth-century churchyard epitaph, a grieving sister contrasts the "simple stone" that she erected to her brother, an army officer, with the "storied urn" and "monumental bust" (cf. Elegy, l. 41) of the proud.

Some members of the eighteenth-century social elite made explicit their wish to be buried in the churchyard in order to assert, in death, their link to the poor. In 1740, for example, Lady Beatrice Webb chose, as her epitaph states, churchyard burial "in compassion for the poor." Goody Two-Shoes (1766) provides a fictional analogue for such a choice. In an early episode of the book, a local gentlewoman's elaborate church burial is described as an unwholesome "display [of] the Pride of the Living, or the Vanity of the Dead." Goody's monument stands at the end of the story in pointed contrast to such aristocratic pride, since the prosperous, benevolent heroine is commemorated in the churchyard where she was buried so that the poor can continue to "encounter" in their own milieu their middle-class friend.