SOURCE: Johnson, Samuel. “Gray.” In Lives of the English Poets, Vol. 3, edited by George Birkbeck Hill, 421-45. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1781, Johnson provides a brief overview of Gray's life and claims that there is more to be celebrated in the life that he lived than in the poetry he created, in which he finds very little originality.]

Thomas Gray, the son of Mr. Philip Gray, a scrivener¹ of London, was born in Cornhill², November 26, 1716³. His grammatical education he received at Eton under the care of Mr. Antrobus, his mother's brother, then assistant to Dr. George, and when he left school, in 1734, entered a pensioner at Peterhouse in Cambridge⁴.

The transition from the school to the college is, to most young scholars, the time from which they date their years of manhood, liberty, and happiness⁵; but Gray seems to have been very little delighted with academical gratifications: he liked at Cambridge neither the mode of life nor the fashion of study, and lived sullenly on to the time when his attendance on lectures was no longer required. As he intended to profess the Common Law he took no degree.⁶

When he had been at Cambridge about five years, Mr. Horace Walpole, whose friendship he had gained at Eton, invited him to travel with him as his companion⁷. They wandered through France into Italy, and Gray's letters contain a very pleasing account of many parts of their journey. But unequal friendships are easily dissolved: at Florence they quarrelled and parted⁸, and Mr. Walpole is now content to have it told that it was by his fault⁹. If we look, however, without prejudice on the world we shall find that men, whose consciousness of their own merit sets them above the compliances of servility, are apt enough in their association with superiors to watch their own dignity with troublesome and punctilious jealousy, and in the fervour of independance to exact that attention which they refuse to pay¹⁰. Part they did, whatever was the quarrel, and the rest of their travels was doubtless more unpleasant to them both. Gray continued his journey in a manner suitable to his own little fortune, with only an occasional servant¹¹.

He returned to England in September, 1741, and in about two months afterwards buried his father¹², who had, by an injudicious waste of money upon a new house¹³, so much lessened his fortune that Gray thought himself too poor to study the law. He therefore retired to Cambridge, where he soon after became Bachelor of Civil Law¹⁴, and where, without liking the place or its inhabitants, or professing¹⁵ to like them, he passed, except a short residence at London, the rest of his life¹⁶.

About this time he was deprived of Mr. West, the son of a chancellor of Ireland¹⁷, a friend on whom he appears to have set a high value, and who deserved his esteem by the powers which he shews in his letters, and in the Ode to May, which Mr. Mason has preserved¹⁸, as well as by the sincerity with which, when Gray sent him part of Agrippina¹⁹, a tragedy that he had just begun, he gave an opinion²⁰ which probably intercepted the progress of the work²¹, and which the judgement of every reader will confirm. It was certainly no loss to the English stage that Agrippina was never finished.

In this year (1742) Gray seems first to have applied himself seriously to poetry, for in this year were produced the Ode to Spring, his Prospect of Eton, and his Ode to Adversity²². He began likewise a Latin Poem, De Principiis Cogitandi²³.

It may be collected from the narrative of Mr. Mason²⁴, that his first ambition was to have excelled in Latin poetry²⁵: perhaps it were reasonable to wish that he had prosecuted his design; for though there is at present some embarrassment in his phrase, and some harshness in his Lyrick numbers, his copiousness of language is such as very few possess, and his lines, even when imperfect, discover a writer whom practice would quickly have made skilful²⁶.

He now lived on at Peterhouse, very little solicitous what others did or thought, and cultivated his mind and enlarged his views without any other purpose than of improving and amusing himself²⁷; when Mr. Mason, being elected fellow of Pembroke-hall²⁸, brought him a companion who was afterwards to be his editor, and whose fondness and fidelity has kindled in him a zeal of admiration, which cannot be reasonably expected from the neutrality of a stranger and the coldness of a critick²⁹.

In this retirement he wrote (1747) an ode on The Death of Mr. Walpole's Cat³⁰, and the year afterwards attempted a poem of more importance, on Government and Education, of which the fragments which remain have many excellent lines³¹.

His next production (1750) was his far-famed Elegy in the Church-yard³², which, finding its way into a Magazine, first, I believe, made him known to the publick.

An invitation from lady Cobham³³ about this time gave occasion to an odd composition called A Long Story, which adds little to Gray's character³⁴.

Several of his pieces were published (1753), with designs, by Mr. Bentley, and, that they might in some form or other make a book, only one side of each leaf was printed³⁵. I believe the poems and the plates recommended each other so well, that the whole impression was soon bought. This year he lost his mother³⁶.

Some time afterwards (1756) some young men of the college, whose chambers were near his, diverted themselves with disturbing him by frequent and troublesome noises, and, as is said, by pranks yet more offensive and contemptuous³⁷. This insolence, having endured it a while, he represented to the governors of the society, among whom perhaps he had no friends, and, finding his complaint little regarded, removed himself to Pembroke-hall³⁸.

In 1757 he published The Progress of Poetry and The Bard³⁹, two compositions at which the readers of poetry were at first content to gaze in mute amazement⁴⁰. Some that tried them confessed their inability to understand them, though Warburton said that they were understood as well as the works of Milton and Shakespeare, which it is the fashion to admire⁴¹. Garrick wrote a few lines in their praise⁴². Some hardy champions undertook to rescue them from neglect, and in a short time many were content to be shewn beauties which they could not see⁴³.

Gray's reputation was now so high that, after the death of Cibber, he had the honour of refusing the laurel, which was then bestowed on Mr. Whitehead⁴⁴.

His curiosity not long after drew him away from Cambridge to a lodging near the Museum, where he resided near three years, reading and transcribing⁴⁵; and, so far as can be discovered, very little affected by two odes on Oblivion and Obscurity, in which his Lyrick performances were ridiculed with much contempt and much ingenuity⁴⁶.

When the Professor of Modern History at Cambridge died he was, as he says, ‘cockered and spirited up,’ till he asked it of lord Bute, who sent him a civil refusal; and the place was given to Mr. Brocket, the tutor of Sir James Lowther⁴⁷.

His constitution was weak, and believing that his health was promoted by exercise and change of place he undertook (1765) a journey into Scotland, of which his account⁴⁸, so far as it extends, is very curious and elegant; for as his comprehension was ample his curiosity extended to all the works of art, all the appearances of nature, and all the monuments of past events⁴⁹. He naturally contracted a friendship with Dr. Beattie, whom he found a poet, a philosopher, and a good man⁵⁰. The Mareschal College at Aberdeen offered him the degree of Doctor of Laws, which, having omitted to take it at Cambridge, he thought it decent to refuse⁵¹.

What he had formerly solicited in vain was at last given him without solicitation. The Professorship of History became again vacant, and he received (1768) an offer of it from the duke of Grafton⁵². He accepted, and retained it to his death; always designing lectures, but never reading them; uneasy at his neglect of duty, and appeasing his uneasiness with designs of reformation, and with a resolution which he believed himself to have made of resigning the office, if he found himself unable to discharge it⁵³.

Ill health made another journey necessary⁵⁴, and he visited (1769) Westmoreland and Cumberland. He that reads his epistolary narration⁵⁵ wishes that to travel, and to tell his travels, had been more of his employment; but it is by studying at home that we must obtain the ability of travelling with intelligence and improvement⁵⁶.

His travels and his studies were now near their end. The gout, of which he had sustained many weak attacks, fell upon his stomach⁵⁷, and, yielding to no medicines, produced strong convulsions, which (July 30, 1771) terminated in death⁵⁸.

His character I am willing to adopt, as Mr. Mason has done, from a letter written to my friend Mr. Boswell, by the Rev. Mr. Temple, rector of St. Gluvias in Cornwall⁵⁹; and am as willing as his warmest well-wisher to believe it true.

‘Perhaps he was the most learned man in Europe⁶⁰. He was equally acquainted with the elegant and profound parts of science, and that not superficially but thoroughly. He knew every branch of history, both natural⁶¹ and civil; had read all the original historians of England, France, and Italy; and was a great antiquarian. Criticism, metaphysicks, morals, politicks made a principal part of his study; voyages and travels of all sorts were his favourite amusements; and he had a fine taste in painting, prints, architecture⁶², and gardening. With such a fund of knowledge, his conversation must have been equally instructing and entertaining⁶³; but he was also a good 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 delicacy⁶⁴, or rather effeminacy, and a visible fastidiousness, or contempt and disdain of his inferiors in science⁶⁵. He also had, in some degree, that weakness which disgusted Voltaire so much in Mr. Congreve⁶⁶: 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 independent gentleman, who read for his amusement⁶⁷. Perhaps it may be said, What signifies so much knowledge, when it produced so little? It is worth taking so much pains to leave no memorial but a few poems⁶⁸? But let it be considered that Mr. Gray was, to others, at least innocently employed; to himself, certainly beneficially⁶⁹. His time passed agreeably; he was every day making some new acquisition in science; his mind was enlarged, his heart softened, his virtue strengthened; the world and mankind were shewn to him without a mask; and he was taught to consider every thing as trifling, and unworthy of the attention of a wise man, except the pursuit of knowledge and practice of virtue, in that state wherein God hath placed us.’

To this character Mr. Mason has added a more particular account of Gray's skill in zoology⁷⁰. He has remarked that Gray's effeminacy was affected most ‘before those whom he did not wish to please⁷¹’; and that he is unjustly charged with making knowledge his sole reason of preference, as he paid his esteem to none whom he did not likewise believe to be good⁷².

What has occurred to me, from the slight inspection of his letters⁷³ in which my undertaking has engaged me, is that his mind had a large grasp; that his curiosity was unlimited, and his judgement cultivated; that he was a man likely to love much where he loved at all⁷⁴, but that he was fastidious and hard to please⁷⁵. His contempt, however, is often employed, where I hope it will be approved, upon scepticism and infidelity⁷⁶. His short account of Shaftesbury I will insert⁷⁷.

‘You say you cannot conceive how lord Shaftesbury came to be a philosopher in vogue; I will tell you: first, he was a lord; secondly, he was as vain as any of his readers; thirdly, men are very prone to believe what they do not understand; fourthly, they will believe any thing at all, provided they are under no obligation to believe it; fifthly, they love to take a new road, even when that road leads no where; sixthly, he was reckoned a fine writer, and seems [seemed] always to mean more than he said. Would you have any more reasons? An interval of above forty years has pretty well destroyed the charm. A dead lord ranks [but] with commoners⁷⁸: vanity is no longer interested in the matter; for a new road is [has] become an old one.’

Mr. Mason has added from his own knowledge that though Gray was poor, he was not eager of money, and that out of the little that he had, he was very willing to help the necessitous⁷⁹.

As a writer he had this peculiarity, that he did not write his pieces first rudely, and then correct them, but laboured every line as it arose in the train of composition⁸⁰, and he had a notion not very peculiar, that he could not write but at certain times, or at happy moments; a fantastick foppery⁸¹, to which my kindness for a man of learning and of virtue wishes him to have been superior⁸².

Gray's poetry is now to be considered, and I hope not to be looked on as an enemy to his name if I confess that I contemplate it with less pleasure than his life.

His Ode on Spring⁸³ has something poetical, both in the language and the thought; but the language is too luxuriant, and the thoughts have nothing new. There has of late arisen a practice of giving to adjectives, derived from substantives, the termination of participles, such as the cultured plain, the daisied bank; but I was sorry to see, in the lines of a scholar like Gray, ‘the honied Spring⁸⁴.’ The morality is natural, but too stale; the conclusion is pretty.

The poem on the Cat⁸⁵ was doubtless by its author considered as a trifle, but it is not a happy trifle. In the first stanza ‘the azure flowers that blow’ shew resolutely a rhyme is sometimes made when it cannot easily be found⁸⁶. Selima, the Cat, is called a nymph, with some violence both to language and sense; but there is good use made of it when it is done; for of the two lines,

‘What female heart can gold despise?
          What cat's averse to fish?’

the first relates merely to the nymph, and the second only to the cat. The sixth stanza contains a melancholy truth, that ‘a favourite⁸⁷ has no friend,’ but the last ends in a pointed sentence of no relation to the purpose; if what glistered had been ‘gold,’ the cat would not have gone into the water; and, if she had, would not less have been drowned.

The Prospect of Eton College suggests nothing to Gray which every beholder does not equally think and feel⁸⁸. His supplication to father Thames⁸⁹, to tell him who drives the hoop or tosses the ball, is useless and puerile. Father Thames has no better means of knowing than himself⁹⁰. His epithet ‘buxom health’ is not elegant; he seems not to understand the word⁹¹. Gray thought his language more poetical as it was more remote from common use⁹²: finding in Dryden ‘honey redolent of Spring⁹³,’ an expression that reaches the utmost limits of our language, Gray drove it a little more beyond common apprehension, by making ‘gales’ to be ‘redolent of joy and youth.’

Of the Ode on Adversity⁹⁴ the hint was at first taken from ‘O Diva, gratum quæ regis Antium⁹⁵’; but Gray has excelled his original by the variety of his sentiments and by their moral application. Of this piece, at once poetical and rational, I will not by slight objections violate the dignity.

My process has now brought me to the ‘Wonderful Wonder of Wonders⁹⁶,’ the two Sister Odes⁹⁷; by which, though either vulgar ignorance or common sense at first universally rejected them, many have been since persuaded to think themselves delighted⁹⁸. I am one of those that are willing to be pleased, and therefore would gladly find the meaning of the first stanza of The Progress of Poetry⁹⁹.

Gray seems in his rapture to confound the images of ‘spreading sound’ and ‘running water.’ A ‘stream of musick’ may be allowed¹⁰⁰; but where does Musick, however ‘smooth and strong,’ after having visited the ‘verdant vales,’ ‘rowl down the steep amain,’ so as that ‘rocks and nodding groves rebellow to the roar’? If this be said of Musick, it is nonsense; if it be said of Water, it is nothing to the purpose.

The second stanza, exhibiting Mars's car and Jove's eagle, is unworthy of further notice. Criticism disdains to chase a schoolboy to his common-places¹⁰¹.

To the third it may likewise be objected that it is drawn from Mythology, though such as may be more easily assimilated to real life. ‘Idalia's velvet-green¹⁰²’ has something of cant¹⁰³. An epithet or metaphor drawn from Nature ennobles Art; an epithet or metaphor drawn from Art degrades Nature. Gray is too fond of words arbitrarily compounded¹⁰⁴. ‘Many-twinkling’ was formerly censured as not analogical¹⁰⁵; we may say many-spotted, but scarcely many-spotting. This stanza, however, has something pleasing.

Of the second ternary of stanzas the first endeavours to tell something, and would have told it had it not been crossed by Hyperion; the second describes well enough the universal prevalence of poetry, but I am afraid that the conclusion will not rise from the premises. The caverns of the North and the plains of Chili are not the residences of ‘Glory’ and ‘generous Shame.’ But that Poetry and Virtue go always together is an opinion so pleasing that I can forgive him who resolves to think it true.

The third stanza sounds big with Delphi, and Egean, and Ilissus, and Meander, and ‘hallowed fountain’ and ‘solemn sound’; but in all Gray's odes there is a kind of cumbrous splendour which we wish away. His position is at last false: in the time of Dante and Petrarch, from whom he derives our first school of poetry¹⁰⁶, Italy was overrun by ‘tyrant power’ and ‘coward vice’; nor was our state much better when we first borrowed the Italian arts.

Of the third ternary the first gives a mythological birth of Shakespeare. What is said of that mighty genius is true; but it is not said happily: the real effects of this poetical power are put out of sight by the pomp of machinery¹⁰⁷. Where truth is sufficient to fill the mind, fiction is worse than useless; the counterfeit debases the genuine¹⁰⁸.

His account of Milton's blindness, if we suppose it caused by study in the formation of his poem, a supposition surely allowable, is poetically true, and happily imagined¹⁰⁹. But the ‘car’ of Dryden, with his ‘two coursers,’ has nothing in it peculiar¹¹⁰; it is a car in which any other rider may be placed.

The Bard¹¹¹ appears at the first view to be, as Algarotti¹¹² and others have remarked, an imitation of the prophecy of Nereus¹¹³. Algarotti thinks it superior to its original¹¹⁴, and, if preference depends only on the imagery and animation of the two poems, his judgement is right. There is in The Bard more force, more thought, and more variety. But to copy is less than to invent, and the copy has been unhappily produced at a wrong time. The fiction of Horace was to the Romans credible; but its revival disgusts us with apparent and unconquerable falsehood. ‘Incredulus odi¹¹⁵.’

To select a singular event, and swell it to a giant's bulk by fabulous appendages of spectres and predictions, has little difficulty, for he that forsakes the probable may always find the marvellous. And it has little use: we are affected only as we believe; we are improved only as we find something to be imitated or declined. I do not see that The Bard promotes any truth, moral or political¹¹⁶.

His stanzas are too long, especially his epodes; the ode is finished before the ear has learned its measures, and consequently before it can receive pleasure from their consonance and recurrence¹¹⁷.

Of the first stanza the abrupt beginning has been celebrated¹¹⁸; but technical beauties can give praise only to the inventor. It is in the power of any man to rush abruptly upon his subject, that has read the ballad of Johnny Armstrong,

‘Is there ever a man in all Scotland—(119)’

The initial resemblances, or alliterations, ‘ruin,’ ‘ruthless,’ ‘helm nor hauberk,’ are below the grandeur of a poem that endeavours at sublimity¹²⁰.

In the second stanza the Bard is well described; but in the third we have the puerilities of obsolete mythology¹²¹. When we are told that Cadwallo ‘hush'd the stormy main¹²²,’ and that Modred ‘made huge Plinlimmon bow his cloud-top'd head,’ attention recoils from the repetition of a tale that, even when it was first heard, was heard with scorn.

The ‘weaving’ of the ‘winding sheet’ he borrowed, as he owns, from the northern Bards¹²³; but their texture, however, was very properly the work of female powers, as the art of spinning the thread of life in another mythology. Theft is always dangerous; Gray has made weavers of his slaughtered bards by a fiction outrageous and incongruous. They are then called upon to ‘Weave the warp, and weave the woof,’ perhaps with no great propriety¹²⁴; for it is by crossing the woof with the warp that men weave the web or piece; and the first line was dearly bought by the admission of its wretched correspondent, ‘Give ample room and verge enough¹²⁵.’ He has, however, no other line as bad.

The third stanza of the second ternary is commended, I think, beyond its merit¹²⁶. The personification is indistinct. Thirst and Hunger are not alike¹²⁷, and their features, to make the imagery perfect, should have been discriminated. We are told, in the same stanza, how ‘towers’ are ‘fed.’ But I will no longer look for particular faults; yet let it be observed that the ode might have been concluded with an action of better example¹²⁸: but suicide is always to be had without expence of thought¹²⁹.

These odes are marked by glittering accumulations of ungraceful ornaments¹³⁰: they strike, rather than please; the images are magnified by affectation; the language is laboured into harshness. The mind of the writer seems to work with unnatural violence. ‘Double, double, toil and trouble¹³¹.’ He has a kind of strutting dignity, and is tall by walking on tiptoe¹³². His art and his struggle are too visible, and there is too little appearance of ease and nature¹³³.

To say that he has no beauties would be unjust: a man like him, of great learning and great industry, could not but produce something valuable. When he pleases least, it can only be said that a good design was ill directed.

His translations of Northern and Welsh Poetry deserve praise: the imagery is preserved, perhaps often improved; but the language is unlike the language of other poets¹³⁴.

In the character of his Elegy I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours¹³⁵. The Church-yard abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind¹³⁶, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo¹³⁷. The four stanzas beginning ‘Yet even these bones’ are to me original: I have never seen the notions in any other place; yet he that reads them here persuades himself that he has always felt them. Had Gray written often thus it had been vain to blame, and useless to praise him.

Notes

1. Ante, Milton, 4.

2. The house, with eighty more, was burnt down on March 25, 1748. Gent. Mag. 1748, pp. 138, 149, 392; Gray's Letters, ed. D. C. Tovey, i. 175. ‘It was on the south side of Cornhill, being the second house west of St. Michael's Alley.’ N. & Q. 6 S. x. 256.

3. On Dec. 26. On Dec. 27, 1746, he wrote to Wharton:—‘I was 30 years old yesterday. What is it o'clock by you?’ Gray's Letters, i. 154.

4. His father was a cruel brute. The son was almost entirely supported by his mother both at school and college. She and her sister ‘kept a kind of India warehouse on Cornhill, under the name of Gray and Antrobus.’ Gray's Works, with Life by Mason, 1807, i. 278; Gray's Works, ed. Mitford, 1835-43, i. Preface, p. 96.

5. It was not the case with Johnson's young scholar.

   ‘When first the College rolls receive his name

   The young enthusiast quits his ease for fame.’

   The Vanity of Human Wishes, l. 135.

6. He wrote in Dec. 1736:—‘You must know that I do not take degrees, and, after this term, shall have nothing more of College impertinences to undergo. … Surely it was of this place, now Cambridge, but formerly known by the name of Babylon, that the prophet spoke.’ He goes on to quote Isaiah xiii. 21, xxxii. 14, xxxiv. 14, 15. Letters, i. 3.

   In his Hymn to Ignorance, speaking of Cambridge, he writes:—‘Glad I revisit thy neglected reign.’

7. Walpole wrote of him on his death, as ‘one with whom I lived in friendship from thirteen years old.’ Walpole's Letters, v. 322. To Mason he wrote:—I can add nothing to your account of Gray's going abroad with me. It was my own thought and offer, and cheerfully accepted.’ Mitford, iv. 219. They started on March 10, 1739. Walpole's Letters, Preface, p. 62. ‘We rode over the Alps in the same chaise,’ wrote Walpole, ‘but Pegasus drew on his side, and a carthorse on mine.’ Ib. vi. 290.

8. It was at Reggio they parted, where they were in May, 1741. Ib. i. 67; Mitford, i. Preface, p. 9.

9. In a note to Mason's Gray, i. 178, ‘he charged himself with the chief blame in their quarrel.’ He wrote to Mason on March 2, 1773:—I treated him insolently; he loved me, and I did not think he did. … Forgive me if I say that his temper was not conciliating.’ Walpole's Letters, v. 441. See also ib. p. 481, vi. 16. See also Walpoliana, vol. i. p. 95, art. cx. The passage is given in N. & Q. 6 S. ii. 356.

10. Ante, Swift, 52, 134. Boswell recorded at Lord Errol's house:—‘I observed that Dr. Johnson, though he showed that respect to his lordship which, from principle, he always does to high rank, yet, when they came to argument, maintained that manliness which becomes the force and vigour of his understanding.’ Boswell's Johnson, v. 103.

11. He returned by Venice, Turin, and Lyons. ‘He travelled with only a “laquais de voyage.”’ He arrived in London about Sept. 1, 1741. Mason, i. 274, 277.

12. He died on Nov. 6, 1741. Ib. i. 277.

13. At Wanstead. Ib. i. 277.

14. In 1744. Gray's Letters, ed. Tovey, i. 113 n., 121. In 1768 he wrote:—‘I am so totally uninformed, indeed so helpless in matters of law, that there is no one perhaps in the kingdom you could apply to for advice with less effect than to me.’ Mitford, iv. 116.

15. In the first edition, ‘pretending.’

16. ‘He spent his summer vacations at Stoke, near Windsor, during the lives of his mother and aunts,’ whither they had removed soon after his father's death in 1741. Mason, i. 278, ii. 23.

17. The Chancellor was author of Hecuba, a tragedy ‘damned the first night.’ Prior's Malone, p. 451. His portrait is in the Parliament Chamber of the Inner Temple. N. & Q. 5 S. iv. 315. The son's name was Richard. His mother was Bishop Burnet's daughter. He died at Hatfield on June 1, 1742. Mitford, i. Preface, p. 16. Gray, who was at Stoke, first learnt of his loss on June 17 ‘by some verses in a newspaper.’ Mason, ii. 7; Gray's Letters, i. 111. Gray wrote on him a sonnet (Mitford, i. 90), beautiful in spite of imperfect rhymes, and of other faults pointed out by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Coleridge's Biog. Lit. 1847, ii. 68, 78.

18. Mason, i. 312; Mitford, ii. 161. For his poems see ib. i. Preface, p. 16.

19. Ib. i. 128.

20. Ib. ii. 148, 155.

21. Gray wrote of it in 1747:—‘Poor West put a stop to that tragic torrent he saw breaking in upon him.’ Ib. iii. 30.

22. The Ode to Spring (post, Gray, 28) was composed in 1742. ‘Written,’ wrote Gray, ‘at Stoke, the beginning of June, 1742, and sent to Mr. West, not knowing he was then dead.’ Mason, ii. 7. It was first published in Jan. 1747-8 in Dodsley's Coll. ii. 265. The Prospect of Eton (post, Gray, 30) was published separately by Dodsley in June, 1747, price 6d. Gent. Mag. 1747, p. 300. ‘Little notice was taken of it,’ writes Warton. Essay on Pope, ii. 292. The Hymn to Adversity appeared in 1755 in Dodsley's Coll. iv. 7. Mason changed the title to Ode to Adversity. Mason, i. 12. Gray, writing to Walpole about his ‘six Odes,’ continues:—‘for so you are pleased to call everything I write, though it be but a receipt to make apple-dumplings.’ Gray's Letters, i. 219.

23. He wrote of it to West from Florence on April 21, 1741:—‘I send you the beginning, not of an Epic Poem, but of a Metaphysic one. Poems and Metaphysics (say you, with your spectacles on) are inconsistent things. A metaphysical poem is a contradiction in terms. It is true; but I will go on. It is Latin too, to increase the absurdity.’ Gray's Letters, i. 88. He sent the first fifty-three lines. Mason, i. 273. See also ib. ii. 10.

24. In the first edition:—‘It seems to be the opinion of Mr. Mason.’

25. Mason, i. 136, ii. 9. ‘I have many scraps and letters of his that show how very early his genius was ripe.’ Walpole, Letters, v. 336. ‘Both Gray and West had abilities marvellously premature.’ Ib. vi. 15.

26. Walpole wrote in 1775:—‘Faults are found, I hear, at Eton with the Latin poems for false quantities—no matter—they are equal to the English—and can one say more?’ Ib. vi. 199.

27. Mason, ii. 25. He wrote in 1747:—‘I am now in Pindar and Lysias; for I take verse and prose together like bread and cheese.’ Gray's Letters, i. 162.

28. In 1747 Mason, ‘greatly owing to Gray,’ was nominated to the Fellowship. Through the opposition of the Master he was not elected till 1749. Mason, ii. 26.

29. See Appendix U.

30. Post, Gray, 29. First printed in Dodsley's Coll. 1748, ii. 267. See also Gray's Letters, i. 156.

31. ‘I mean to show,’ wrote Gray, ‘that Education and Government must necessarily concur to produce great and useful men.’ Ib. i. 192.

    ‘When I asked him,’ writes Nicholls, ‘why he had not continued that beautiful fragment, he said because he could not.’ Mitford, v. 35.

    Gibbon, quoting ll. 52-7, continues:—‘Instead of compiling tables of chronology and natural history, why did not Mr. Gray apply the powers of his genius to finish the philosophic poem of which he has left such an exquisite specimen?’ The Decline and Fall, iii. 332. (In l. 56 Gibbon changes ‘breathing’ into ‘opening.’) He again quotes it (ll. 100-end), ib. v. 457, and, referring to a description of the Nile by a French consul at Cairo, continues:—‘From a college at Cambridge the poetic eye of Gray had seen the same objects with a keener glance.’

32. See Appendix X.

33. For her father, Edmund Halsey, the brewer, see ante, Pope, 272 n. He had bought the Mansion House at Stoke Pogis. Mason, ii. 74; Gray's Letters, i. 218.

34. In the first edition, ‘which, though perhaps it adds little to Gray's character, I am not pleased to find wanting in this Collection. It will therefore be added to this Preface.’ To it was added also the Ode for Musick. Both poems are included in Eng. Poets, 1790.

    Of A Long Story Gray wrote:—‘It was never meant for the public.’ Mitford, iv. 91. On Dec. 18, 1751 he wrote:—‘The verses being shew'd about in Town are not liked there at all.’ Gray's Letters, i. 220.

35. See Appendix Y.

36. [Gray's epitaph on her tombstone in Stoke Pogis churchyard thus ends,—‘The careful tender mother of many children, one of whom alone had the misfortune to survive her.’ Mathias's Gray, i. 339.]

    She died on March 11, 1753. Mason, ii. 97. On Sept. 21 Gray wrote to Mason, who had lost his father:—‘I know what it is to lose a person that one's eyes and heart have long been used to, and I never desire to part with the remembrance of that loss, nor would wish you should.’ Gray's Letters, i. 236.

37. In the first edition the sentence ends at ‘noises.’

38. Johnson's authority is Mason, ii. 113. Gray wrote on March 25, 1756:—‘I have been taken up in quarrelling with Peter-house, and in removing myself from thence to Pembroke.’ Letters, i. 292. For the quarrel see ib. n. 3, and p. 291. An incredible account is given in R. Polwhele's Traditions, p. 212.

    ‘Pembroke Hall was Ridley's “own dear College,” … ; by Elizabeth apostrophized as “domus antiqua et religiosa.” Spenser and Pitt were there.’ Macleane's Pembroke College, Oxford, p. 211.

39. Post, Gray, 32. Walpole recorded:—‘Aug. 8, 1757. I published two Odes by Mr. Gray, the first production of my press.’ Walpole's Letters, Preface, p. 68. On July 12 he wrote:—‘I snatched them out of Dodsley's hands.’ Ib. iii. 89. The title-page is ‘Odes by Mr. Gray. Printed at Strawberry-Hill. For R. & J. Dodsley in Pall-Mall. 1757.’ ‘On June 29, 1757, Gray received forty guineas for his two Odes.’ Mitford, iii. 169. Of 2,000 copies printed ‘12 or 1300 were gone,’ Gray wrote that same year. Gray's Letters, i. 350. There is no mention of them in Gent. Mag. At the Fraser Library Sale ‘the Odes with MS. notes by the poet, extra illustrations, &c., sold for £370.’ The Athenaeum, May 4, 1901, p. 567.

40. ‘Aug. 17, 1757. I hear we are not at all popular; the great objection is obscurity.

    ‘Aug. 25. All people of condition are agreed not to admire, nor even to understand.’ Gray, Letters, i. 345-6.

    Walpole, on Aug. 4, described them as ‘two amazing Odes of Mr. Gray; they are Greek, they are Pindaric, they are sublime! consequently, I fear, a little obscure. … I could not persuade him to add more notes; he says whatever wants to be explained don't deserve to be.’ Walpole's Letters, iii. 94.

    ‘I would not have put another note,’ Gray writes, ‘to save the souls of all the owls in London.’ Letters, i. 348.

41. Ib. i. 366.

42. Gray wrote on Aug. 25:—‘I have heard of nobody but a player and a doctor of divinity that profess their esteem for them.’ Ib. p. 346. For Garrick's lines in The London Chronicle, Oct. 1, 1757, see ib. p. 366 n.

43. Post, Gray, 32. ‘Johnson. The obscurity in which Gray has involved himself will not persuade us that he is sublime.’ Boswell's Johnson, i. 402.

    Goldsmith wrote in 1770 of ‘the misguided innovators’ in poetry—Gray and his school:—‘They have adopted a language of their own, and call upon mankind for admiration. All those who do not understand them are silent, and those who make out their meaning are willing to praise to show they understand.’ Works, iv. 141.

44. See Appendix Z.

45. Mason, ii. 24. In July, 1759, he took lodgings in Southampton Row. ‘I am now settled in my new territories commanding … all the fields as far as Highgate and Hampstead. Here is air, and sunshine, and quiet.’ In the reading-room of the Museum they were, he said, five readers in all. Mitford, iii. 219. He visited Cambridge more than once. Ib. p. 253.

46. Colman's Prose on Several Occasions, &c., 1787, ii. 273. ‘These Odes,’ writes Colman, ‘were a piece of boys' play with my school-fellow Lloyd, with whom they were written in concert.’ Ib. Preface, p. 11. They are quoted in Gent. Mag. June, 1760, p. 291. According to Steevens Johnson said:—‘Colman never produced a luckier thing than his first Ode in ridicule of Gray. A considerable part of it may be numbered among those felicities which no man has twice attained.’ John. Misc. ii. 320. See also Boswell's Johnson, ii. 334.

    Gray wrote in June, 1760:—‘I believe Mr. Colman's Odes sell no more than mine did, for I saw a heap of them lie in a bookseller's window, who recommended them to me as a very pretty thing.’ Letters, ii. 147. See also ib. p. 161.

    ‘Gray is said to have been so much hurt by a foolish and impertinent parody of two of his finest odes, that he never afterwards attempted any considerable work.’ Adam Smith, Moral Sent. 1801, i. 255.

    Walpole, in 1796, says of Payne Knight:—‘He tells a silly falsehood of Gray being terrified from writing by Lloyd's and Colman's trash.’ Letters, ix. 462.

    ‘Dr. J. Warton says:—“Colman and Lloyd once said to me that they repented of the attempt.”’ Gray's Letters, ii. 140 n.

47. Mitford, iii. 301, letter of Dec. 4, 1762. Lowther, a year before, had married Bute's daughter. Burke's Peerage. Later on he was known as ‘the bad Lord Lonsdale,’ that ‘gloomy despot,’ among whose victims was Wordsworth's father. He treated Boswell also with brutality. Boswell's Johnson, ii. 179 n., v. 113. Walpole, speaking of the vast succession that fell to him in 1756, says ‘it makes him Croesus.’ Letters, iii. 5. Nevertheless he was mean enough to pension his tutor at the cost of the University.

48. In his letters. Mitford, iv. 51-65.

49. In 1758 he wrote:—‘The drift of my present studies is to know, wherever I am, what lies within reach that may be worth seeing.’ Ib. iii. 188. For his Naturalist's Calendar see ib. iii. 216, 224, 276, iv. 13; for his observations on architecture and painting see ib. iv. 70, 225, v. 325.

50. Mitford, iv. 62-5. ‘Johnson. We all love Beattie. Mrs. Thrale says, if ever she has another husband, she'll have Beattie.’ Boswell's Johnson, ii. 148.

51. In declining the honour he speaks of Cambridge in a tone different from his ordinary one—‘a set of men among whom I have passed so many easy, and, I may say, happy hours of my life.’ Mitford, iv. 63.

52. The Duke was Prime Minister. Gray wrote on Aug. 1, 1768, that ‘on Sunday se'nnight Brocket died by a fall from his horse, being (as I hear) drunk. On the Wednesday following I received a letter from the D. of Grafton saying he had the King's commands to offer me the vacant Professorship.’ Ib. iv. 123. On Oct. 31 he wrote:—‘It is the best thing the Crown has to bestow (on a layman) here; the salary is £400 per ann.’ Ib. p. 127. The drunken Brocket was in orders. Gent. Mag. 1768, p. 398. One of Gray's correspondents, Richard Stonehewer, was the Duke's Secretary. ‘He is a great favourite of the Duke, and the person that recommended Mr. Gray.’ Walpole, Letters, v. 117, 128. Gray, a year later, wrote an Ode for Music for the Installation of the Duke as Chancellor of the University. Mitford, iv. 137. Post, Gray, 48 n. 9.

53. This state of mind Johnson knew only too well. Ante, Mallet, 14 n.

    Gray wrote to Nicholls on March 20, 1770:—‘As to Wales, doubtless I should wish it this summer, but I can answer for nothing; my own employment so sticks in my stomach, and troubles my conscience.’ Mitford, v. 104. On May 20, 1771 (a few weeks before his death), he wrote:—‘The sense of my own duty, which I do not perform, my own low spirits (to which this consideration not a little contributes),’ &c. Ib. p. 141. Nicholls replied:—‘For God's sake how can you neglect a duty which never existed but in your own imagination? It never yet was performed, nor, I believe, expected.’ Ib. For University Professors see Gibbon's Memoirs, p. 53.

54. In his last published letter he wrote:—‘Travel I must or cease to exist.’ Mitford, iv. 200. See also ib. p. 188.

55. Ib. iv. 139-78; Mason, ii. 255-92.

56. ‘Johnson. As the Spanish proverb says, “He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.” So it is in travelling; a man must carry knowledge with him if he would bring home knowledge.’ Boswell's Johnson, iii. 302.

    ‘They every scene with so much wit did store
    That who brought any in went out with more.’

    Epil. to The Rehearsal, ed. Arber, p. 136.

57. In 1765 he wrote to Walpole, who was ill of the gout:—‘The pain in your feet I can bear; but I shudder at the sickness in your stomach. … I conjure you, as you love yourself, I conjure you by Strawberry [Walpole's house] not to trifle with these edge-tools.’ Mitford, iv. 68.

58. Ib. pp. 204-7, 213. Mason (ii. 318) wrongly gives July 31 as the day of his death, as also Ann. Reg. 1771, i. 179. In both Gent. Mag. (1771, p. 378) and Ann. Reg. he is called ‘Rev. Dr. Thomas Grey’—three errors in four words in describing one of the first poets of the time.

    Walpole wrote on Sept. 9:—‘One single paragraph is all that has been said on our friend; but when there are columns in every paper on Sir Francis Delaval [a wealthy baronet] ought we not to be glad?’ Letters, v. 336.

59. Mason, ii. 321; Mitford, v. 164.

    In the first edition the character is adopted ‘from a nameless writer.’ On Aug. 24, 1782, Johnson wrote to Boswell:—‘My Lives are reprinting, and I have forgotten the author of Gray's character; write immediately, and it may be perhaps yet inserted.’ Boswell's Johnson, iv. 153.

    Temple was Vicar of St. Gluvias; his grandson was Archbishop of Canterbury 1896-1903. Ib. i. 436 n. Some of Boswell's letters to him were published in 1857. In one of them (p. 185) Boswell recalls the time ‘when you and I sat up all night at Cambridge and read Gray with a noble enthusiasm.’ ‘Mr. Mason,’ he adds, ‘concludes his Life of Gray with a character of him, which he says he has taken from The London Magazine [1772, p. 140]. He mentions it as by an anonymous writer. What is it, think you, but a character of Gray written by you to me in a letter soon after his death, which I copied out for the Magazine, of which I am a proprietor?’ Ib. p. 184. See also ib. p. 206.

    For Gray's kindness to Temple see his correspondence with Nicholls. Mitford, v. 62, 69, 85, 110, 119, 133, 137.

60. For his learning see Mason, ii. 236; Mitford, i. Preface, p. 73. ‘When (writes Nicholls) I expressed my astonishment at the extent of his reading, he said:—“Why should you be surprised, for I do nothing else.” He said he knew from experience how much might be done by a person who did not fling away his time on middling or inferior authors, and read with method.’ Ib. v. 42.

    ‘Reading, he has often told me (writes Mason), was much more agreeable to him than writing.’ Mason, ii. 25.

61. Ib. ii. 243. ‘Gray said he learnt botany merely for the sake of sparing himself the trouble of thinking.’ Mitford, i. Preface, p. 119.

    ‘He often vexed me,’ wrote Walpole, ‘by finding him heaping notes on an interleaved Linnaeus instead of pranking on his lyre.’ Letters, ix. 343. Prank in this sense is not in Johnson's Dict.

62. Mason, ii. 239. In 1765 he attacked ‘the rage of repairing, beautifying, whitewashing, painting and gilding. … This well-meant fury has been, and will be, little less fatal to our ancient magnificent edifices than the Reformation and the Civil Wars.’ Mitford, iv. 73.

    Walpole, in Anecdotes of Painting, i. 195, speaking of architecture, says:—‘If some parts of this work are more accurate than my own ignorance or carelessness would have left them, the reader and I are obliged to Mr. Gray, who condescended to correct what he never could have descended to write.’

63. Walpole wrote in 1748:—‘Gray is the worst company in the world. From a melancholy turn, from living reclusely, and from a little too much dignity, he never converses easily; all his words are measured and chosen, and formed into sentences; his writings are admirable; he himself is not agreeable.’ Letters, ii. 128. See also Mitford, i. Preface, p. 64. Bonstetten said of him:—‘Il avait de la gaieté dans l'esprit, et de la mélancolie dans le caractère.’ Ib. v. 181.

64. ‘I wish I could say,’ writes Mr. Tovey, ‘that Gray's mirth was always free from coarseness; but even his extant letters are sometimes marked by the bad taste of his time.’ Mitford advised that some of his letters should be ‘strictly preserved from inspection.’ Letters of Gray, Preface, p. 22.

65. ‘I have no relish,’ he wrote, ‘for any other fame than what is conferred by the few real judges that are so thinly scattered over the face of the earth.’ Mitford, iv. 19.

    ‘Gray says (very justly) that learning never should be encouraged; it only draws out fools from their obscurity.’ Walpole, Letters, ii. 438.

66. Ante, Congreve, 31.

67. ‘A certain degree of pride led him to despise the idea of being thought an author professed.’ Mason, ii. 236.

    ‘I have no notion of poor Mr. Gray's delicacy. I would not sell my talents, as orators and senators do [his father had enriched him with sinecures. Boswell's Johnson, iii. 19 n.]; but I would keep a shop, and sell any of my own works that would gain me a livelihood, whether books or shoes, rather than be tempted to sell myself.’ H. Walpole, Letters, v. 339.

68. Sainte-Beuve, after quoting Bonstetten's explanation of Gray's melancholy by his living ‘enseveli dans une espèce de cloître,’ continues:—‘Je ne sais si le secret de la mélancolie de Gray était dans ce manque d'amour; je le chercherais plutôt dans la stérilité d'un talent poétique si distingué, si rare, mais si avare.’ Causeries, xiv. 430.

    ‘I fancy Gray would have written and published more had his ideas been more copious, and his expression more easy to him.’ E. Fitz-gerald, More Letters, p. 216.

69. ‘To find one's self business is the great art of life.’ Gray, Mitford, iii. 236. ‘To be employed is to be happy.’ Letters, i. 347.

70. Mason, ii. 321.

71. Wesley, after reading Mason's Memoirs of Gray, recorded on Dec. 4, 1776:—‘He does not appear, upon the whole, to have been an amiable man. His picture, I apprehend, expresses his character; sharp, sensible, ingenious, but at the same time proud, morose, envious, passionate and resentful.’ Journal, 1827, iv. 87.

    According to the Rev. William Cole, ‘in Gil Blas the print of Scipio in the arbour was so like the countenance of Mr. Gray that, if he sat for it, it could not be more so. It is in a 12mo edition printed at Amsterdam, 1735, vol. iv. p. 94.’ Mitford, i. Preface, p. 101. The edition in the Museum is of 1755; the vol. and page are the same.

72. Mason, ii. 323 n.

73. Ante, Gray, 8 n. 6. ‘I find more people like the grave letters than those of humour, and some think the latter a little affected, which is as wrong a judgment as they could make; for Gray never wrote anything easily but things of humour. Humour was his natural and original turn.’ Walpole, Letters, vi. 206.

    ‘I once thought Swift's letters the best that could be written; but I like Gray's better.’ Cowper, Works, xv. 38.

    ‘Were it not for Gray's Letters, which are full of warm exuberant power, we might almost doubt whether Gray was a man of genius; nay, was a living man at all.’ Carlyle, Goethe, Misc. (n. d.) i. 185.

    ‘Mark Pattison,’ writes Mr. Morley (Crit. Misc. 1886, iii. 162), ‘used to contend that in many respects the most admirable literary figure of the eighteenth century was the poet Gray. Gray, he would say, never thought that devotion to letters meant the making of books. He gave himself up for the most part to ceaseless observation and acquisition.’

    ‘Jamais, disait-il [Bonstetten], je n'ai vu personne qui donnât autant que Gray l'idée d'un gentleman accompli.’ Causeries du Lundi, xiv. 429.

74. See his letters to Bonstetten, Mitford, iv. 178, 185, 187.

75. ‘It was rather an affectation in delicacy and effeminacy than the things themselves, and he chose to put on this appearance chiefly before persons whom he did not wish to please.’ Mason, ii. 322 n.

76. Gray, in answer to a letter from Walpole, says of the French:—‘I rejoice at their dulness and their nastiness. … Their atheism is a little too much, too shocking to rejoice at. I have been long sick at it in their authors, and hated them for it; but I pity their poor innocent people of fashion. They were bad enough when they believed everything.’ Mitford, iv. 69. See also ib. p. 190.

    He shows a liberal spirit in criticizing one of Middleton's unpublished works. ‘The rest [of it],’ he writes, ‘is employed in exposing the folly and cruelty of stiffness and zealotism in religion.’ Ib. iii. 85.

77. Ib. iii. 196.

78. Ante, Halifax, 15; Sheffield, 22; Granville, 25. Pattison, after mentioning how ‘the inferior fry of Deistical writers’ were attacked, continues:—‘The only exception to this is the case of Shaftesbury, to whom, as well after his death as in his lifetime, his privileges as a peer seem to have secured immunity from hangman's usage. He is simply “a late noble author.”’ Essays, ii. 99.

79. Mason, ii. 235. On the death of his aunt and mother he was no longer poor; his professorship made him still easier. He left about £6,000. He had, it was said, purchased an annuity. Mitford, iv. 213. He would accept no money for a reprint of his poems. Ib. pp. 91, 104.

    ‘I always maintained,’ he wrote in 1753, ‘that nobody has occasion for pride but the poor; and that everywhere else it is a sign of folly.’ Ib. iii. 112. In 1769 he wrote:—‘Remember that “Honesta res est laeta paupertas.” [Seneca, Epis. ii. 5.] I see it with respect, and so will every one whose poverty is not seated in their mind. There is but one real evil in it, … that you have less the power of assisting others, who have not the same resources to support them.’ Mitford, iv. 132.

    He bought lottery tickets and won a £20 prize. Ib. iii. 194, iv. 134.

80. Ante, Pope, 299; Mason, ii. 103. ‘Mason, Gray said, never gave himself time to think, but imagined that he should do best by writing hastily in the first fervour of his imagination, and therefore never waited for epithets if they did not occur readily, but left spaces for them, and put them in afterwards. This, Mr. Gray said, enervated his poetry, “for nothing is done so well as at the first concoction.” He said, “We think in words.”’ Mitford, v. 39.

81. Johnson defines foppery as ‘affectation of show or importance; showy folly.’

82. Ante, Milton, 118.

    In Education and Government he mocks this weakness in a passage that begins (l. 72):—

    ‘Unmanly thought! what seasons can control,
    What fancied zone can circumscribe the soul?’

    ‘Sir Joshua used to work at all times, whether he was in the humour or not.’ Northcote's Conversations, p. 311. But then, as Johnson said of him:—‘Sir Joshua is the same all the year round.’ Boswell's Johnson, iii. 5.

    ‘Macaulay,’ wrote Prescott, ‘tells me he has his moods for writing. When not in the vein he does not press it. Johnson, you remember, ridiculed this in Gray.’ Ticknor's Prescott, 1864, p. 294.

    ‘Nothing,’ wrote Jowett, ‘seems to me more uncertain than composition. One month a good harvest is reaped, the next all barren. In these fits and starts, with much pain and melancholy I calculate that I accomplish somewhat less than half of what I always intend.’ Life, i. 284. See also Boswell's Johnson, i. 203, 332.

83. Ante, Gray, 6.

84. ‘The insect youth are on the wing, Eager to taste the honied spring.’

    On the Spring, l. 25.

    Shenstone has ‘our cultur'd vales,’ Elegies, xxv, and Goldsmith ‘cultur'd walks,’ Traveller, l. 236. Shakespeare has ‘the prettiest daisied plot,’ Cymbeline, iv. 2. 398, and Gay ‘entangled shades and daisy'd lawns,’ Dione, i. 4. 4. Shakespeare has ‘honied sentences,’ Henry V, i. 1. 50, and Milton ‘honied showers,’ Lycidas, l. 140.

    For Lord Grenville's criticism of Johnson's position see Mitford, i. Preface, p. 17.

    ‘I regret to see that vile and barbarous vocable talented stealing out of the newspapers into the leading reviews. Why not shillinged, farthinged, tenpenced, &c.? The formation of a participle passive from a noun is a licence that nothing but a very peculiar felicity can excuse.’ Coleridge, Table Talk, 1884, p. 167.

85. Ante, Gray, 9.

86. Coleridge, quoting (not quite correctly) The Bard, ll. 71-6, says:—‘The words “realm” and “sway” are rhymes dearly purchased.’ Biog. Lit. i. 19.

87. For Johnson's definition of favourite see Boswell's Johnson, i. 295 n.

88. ‘The view from the Terrace [of Windsor Castle] is the noblest I know of, taking it with all its associations together. Gray's Ode rises up into the mind as one looks around—does it not?—a sure proof that, however people may condemn certain conceits and expressions in the poem, the spirit of it is genuine.

    “Ye distant spires, ye antique towers”—

    very large and noble, like the air that breathes upon one as one looks down along the view.’ E. Fitzgerald, Letters, i. 63.

89. ‘Say, Father Thames,’ is found in Matthew Green's Grotto, privately printed in 1732. It was inserted in Dodsley's Coll. 1758, v. 159. Gray wrote of this poem to Walpole in 1748:—‘The thought on which my second Ode [Spring] turns is manifestly stolen from hence; not that I knew it at the time, but having seen this many years before, to be sure it imprinted itself on my memory, and, forgetting the author, I took it for my own.’ Gray's Letters, i. 188.

90. Johnson makes the Princess in Rasselas, ch. 25, supplicate the Nile. ‘Answer, great Father of Waters, thou that rollest thy floods through eighty nations. … Tell me if thou waterest, through all thy course, a single habitation from which thou dost not hear the murmurs of complaint.’ There is a dignity in Johnson's supplication that is wanting in Gray's.

91. Johnson defines buxom as ‘1. obedient, obsequious; 2. gay, lively, brisk; 3. wanton, jolly.’

92. ‘The language of the age,’ Gray wrote, ‘is never the language of poetry; except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose.’ Gray's Letters, i. 97. [See Appendix AA n. 1, p. 444.]

    ‘Gray was at the head of those who, by their reasonings, have attempted to widen the space of separation betwixt prose and metrical composition.’ Wordsworth, Works, vi. 331. See also Coleridge's Biog. Lit. 1847, i. 19.

93. ‘While kine to pails distended udders bring,
    And bees their honey, redolent of spring.’

    Dryden, Works, xii. 227.

    Gray refers to this passage in a note. Mason, i. 72. ‘Redolent of youth’ is found in one of Mrs. Manley's works (1716). Mitford, i. 11 n.

    Beattie records that Gray told him, ‘that if there was in his own numbers any thing that deserved approbation, he had learned it all from Dryden.’ Beattie's Essays, p. 17. In a postscript to a letter to Beattie Gray wrote:—‘Remember Dryden, and be blind to all his faults.’ Mitford, iv. 65.

    ‘He could not patiently hear him criticised,’ writes Nicholls. Ib. v. 35.

    ‘He congratulated himself on not having a good verbal memory; for without it, he said, he had imitated too much.’ Ib. p. 42.

94. Ante, Gray, 6.

95. Horace, Odes, i. 35. The motto is from Aeschylus, Agam. l. 181. See also Mitford, i. 17 n.

96. [This is clearly a familiar phrase: cf. Wright's Caricature History of the Georges, p. 595, in reference to ‘Mr. Bull's Menagerie’ (1803). Earlier instances might be quoted.]

97. Ante, Gray, 14.

98. Gray, in 1752, described The Progress of Poesy as ‘a high Pindaric upon stilts, which one must be a better scholar than Dodsley is to understand a line of, and the very best scholars will understand but a little matter here and there.’ Gray's Letters, i. 219.

    Soon after the publication of the two Odes Walpole wrote:—‘They [the age] have cast their eyes over them, found them obscure, and looked no further. … I do not think that they ever admired Mr. Gray except in his Churchyard.’ Walpole's Letters, iii. 96, 98.

99. The Progress of Poesy.

100. ‘Mrs. Montagu,’ said Johnson, ‘has a constant stream of conversation.’ Boswell's Johnson, iv. 275.

101. Ante, Prior, 59; Pope, 326. ‘The second strophe of the first Ode is inexcusable; … even when one does understand it, perhaps the last line is too turgid.’ Walpole, Letters, iii. 97.

     ‘To make Prince Eugene a favourite of Mars, or to carry on a correspondence between Bellona and the Marshal de Villars, would be down-right puerility, and unpardonable in a poet that is past sixteen.’ Addison, The Spectator, No. 523.

102. ‘She rears her flowers and spreads her velvet-green.’

     Young, Sat. v. 230.

103. For Johnson's definition of cant see Boswell's Johnson, iv. 221 n.

     Addison, in The Spectator, No. 421, speaking of the comparisons of different classes of writers, says:—‘Your men of business are for leading the reader from shop to shop, in the cant of particular trades and employments.’

104. Goldsmith says of ‘Gray, Akenside, and other modern writers’:—‘Their compounded epithets … seem evidently borrowed from Spenser.’ Works, iv. 203.

     ‘In the Comus and other early poems of Milton there is a superfluity of double epithets; while in the Paradise Lost we find very few, in the Paradise Regained scarce any. The same remark holds almost equally true of the Love's Labour's Lost, Romeo and Juliet, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, compared with the Lear, Macbeth, Othello and Hamlet of our great dramatist.’ Coleridge, Biog. Lit. i. 3. For Coleridge's coinage of myriad-minded see ib. ii. 16.

105. ‘To brisk notes in cadence beating,
     Glance their many-twinkling feet.’

     The Progress of Poesy, ll. 34, 35. Perhaps it had been censured when used by Thomson:—

     ‘The many-twinkling leaves Of aspen tall.’ Spring, l. 157.

     Lyttelton had objected to Gray's use of it. Walpole wrote to him:—‘In answer to your objection I will quote authority to which you will yield. As Greek as the expression is, it struck Mrs. Garrick; and she says that Mr. Gray is the only poet who ever understood dancing.’ Walpole's Letters, iii. 97. Walpole described her in her youth as ‘the finest dancer in the world.’ Ib. ii. 48.

106. Johnson refers to ll. 79-82.

107. Ante, Milton, 222.

108. ‘A lady of quality,’ wrote Gray, ‘who is a great reader, never suspected there was anything said about Shakespeare or Milton, till it was explained to her.’ Mitford, iii. 166; Gray's Letters, i. 346.

109. For Milton's blindness see ante, Milton, 68 n. 2.

110. Voltaire made Dryden drive ‘a coach and six stately horses.’ Boswell's Johnson, ii. 5.

111. For ‘a bit of the prophecy, very rough and unpolished,’ sent by Gray to Wharton on Aug. 21, 1755, see Gray's Letters, i. 272. See also ib. p. 339.

112. Ante, Milton, 230 n. 4; Mitford, iv. 6, 8, 98.

113. Horace, Odes, i. 15. Gray wrote on Oct. 7, 1757:—‘The Review I have read, and admire it, particularly that observation that The Bard is taken from Pastor quum traheret, and the advice to be more an original.’ Gray's Letters, i. 367.

114. Mason, i. 84. He does not say that Gray imitated Horace.

115. Horace, Ars Poet. l. 188. Boswell says of Johnson:—‘I never knew any person who, upon hearing an extraordinary circumstance told, discovered more of the incredulus odi.’ Boswell's Johnson, iii. 229.

116. Ante, Dryden, 380. ‘The tendency of The Bard,’ writes Mitford, ‘is to show the retributive justice that follows an act of tyranny and wickedness. … The vanquished has risen superior to his conqueror, and the reader closes the poem with feelings of content.’ Mitford, ii. Preface, p. 63.

117. Ante, Akenside, 23. Gray wrote to Wharton in 1755:—‘I am not quite of your opinion with regard to strophe and antistrophe; setting aside the difficulties, methinks it has little or no effect upon the ear, which scarce perceives the regular return of metres at so great a distance from one another. To make it succeed I am persuaded the stanzas must not consist of above nine lines each, at the most.’ Letters, i. 261. In The Bard the strophe and antistrophe (the first and second stanzas of every ternary) consist of fourteen lines, and the epode (the third stanza) of twenty.

     ‘Mr. Gray,’ writes Walpole, ‘had shackled himself with strophe, antistrophe, and epode (yet acquitting himself nobly).’ Letters, iii. 97.

118. Mason, i. 96.

119. Boswell's Johnson, i. 403.

120. Cowper wrote in 1777:—‘I have been reading Gray's Works, and think him the only poet since Shakespeare entitled to the character of sublime.’ Letters, xv. 38.

     Adam Smith described Gray as one ‘who joins to the sublimity of Milton the elegance and harmony of Pope, and to whom nothing is wanting to render him perhaps the first poet in the English language but to have written a little more.’ Moral Sentiments, 1801, i. 255.

121. Ante, Butler, 41.

122. ‘Cold is Cadwallo's tongue, That hush'd the stormy
               main.’

     The Bard, l. 29.

123. Mason, i. 40.

124. The same remark had been made in The Critical Review, iv. 167, quoted in Mitford, i. Preface, p. 38.

     Johnson, in his Dictionary, gives almost the same definition of each word—‘Warp. That order of thread in a thing woven that crosses the woof.’ ‘Woof. The set of threads that crosses the warp.’

     Landor, quoting ‘The thread is spun,’ continues:—‘The thread must have been spun before they began weaving.’ Imag. Conver. iii. 383.

125. Boswell's Johnson, ii. 327.

126. ‘The manner of Richard's death by Famine exhibits such beauties of personification as only the richest and most vivid imagination could supply.’ Mason, i. 99.

127. ‘Fell Thirst and Famine scowl A baleful smile upon their baffled guest.’ The Bard, l. 81.

     ‘Thirst and hunger mocking Richard II appear to me too ludicrously like the devils [‘the strange Shapes’] in The Tempest, that whisk away the banquet from the shipwrecked Dukes.’ Walpole, Letters, iii. 98.

128. ‘The last stanza has no beauties for me.’ Ib.

129. Ante, Young, 162.

130. ‘Gray,’ said Johnson, ‘was the very Torré of poetry. He played his coruscations so speciously that his steel-dust is mistaken by many for a shower of gold.’ Torré let off fireworks. John. Misc. ii. 321.

     ‘Talking of Gray's Odes, Johnson said:—“They are forced plants raised in a hot-bed; and they are poor plants; they are but cucumbers after all.”’ Boswell's Johnson, iv. 13.

131. Macbeth, iv. 1. 10.

     ‘Whatever Prior obtains above mediocrity seems the effort of struggle and of toil.’ Ante, Prior, 72.

132. ‘We meet with a similar thought in Quintilian (ii. 3):—“Prima est eloquentiae virtus perspicuitas; et quo quisque ingenio minus valet, hoc se magis attollere et dilatare conatur; ut statura breves in digitos eriguntur, et plura infirmi minantur.”’ Parr, Works, iv. 324.

133. ‘I think there is something very majestic in Gray's Installation Ode [Ode for Music]; but as to The Bard and the rest of his lyrics, I must say I think them frigid and artificial.’ Coleridge, Table Talk, 1884, p. 264.

     ‘Gray was a singular instance of a man of taste, poetic feeling and fancy without imagination.’ Ib. p. 275.

     ‘Gray's Pindaric Odes are stately and pedantic, a kind of methodical borrowed frenzy.’ Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets, 1819, p. 234.

     ‘He failed as a poet, not because he took too much pains, and so extinguished his animation, but because he had very little of that fiery quality to begin with, and his pains were of the wrong sort. He wrote English verses as his brother Eton schoolboys wrote Latin, filching a phrase now from one author and now from another. I do not profess to be a person of very various reading; nevertheless, if I were to pluck out of Gray's tail all the feathers which I know belong to other birds, he would be left very bare indeed.’ Wordsworth, R. P. Gillies's Memoirs, 1851, ii. 165.

     Carlyle, writing of Goethe, describes Gray's poetry as ‘a laborious mosaic, through the hard stiff lineaments of which little life or true grace could be expected to look.’ Misc. (n.d.), i. 185.

134. Walpole wrote in 1761:—‘Gray has translated two noble incantations from the Lord knows who, a Danish Gray, who lived the Lord knows when.’ Letters, iii. 399. See also ib. v. 91.

135. ‘About things on which the public thinks long it commonly attains to think right.’ Ante, Addison, 136; see also ante, Pope, 280.

     ‘This is a very fine poem, but overloaded with epithet. … The latter part is pathetic and interesting.’ Goldsmith, Works, iii. 436. See Boswell's Johnson, i. 404 n., for Goldsmith ‘mending the Elegy by leaving out an idle word in every line,’ and ante, Parnell, 10.

     ‘Coleridge (in his Literary Life) says that his friend Mr. Wordsworth had undertaken to show that the language of the Elegy is unintelligible: it has however been understood.’ Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets, 1819, p. 234.

     Professor Robison told how ‘he was on the boat in which Wolfe went to visit some of his posts, the night before the battle [at Quebec]. As they rowed along, the General, with much feeling, repeated nearly the whole of the Elegy to an officer who sat with him in the stern, adding that “he would prefer being the author of that poem to the glory of beating the French to-morrow.”’ John Playfair's Works, 1822, iv. 126.

136. ‘Johnson. His Elegy has a happy selection of images, but I don't like what are called his great things.’ Boswell's Johnson, i. 403.

137. See Appendix AA.