acted, commented on the large number of familiar quotations that it contained, for the "Elegy" is so well known that it seems thereby somewhat trite and valueless. PERRY, THOMAS S., 1880, Gray, Collins and Beattie, Atlantic Monthly, vol. 46, p. 812.

It was whilst Gray was quietly vegetating in Bloomsbury that an event occurred of which he was quite unconscious, which yet has singularly endeared him to the memory of Englishmen. On the evening of the 12th of September, 1759-whilst Gray, sauntering back from the British Museum to his lodgings, noted that the weather was cloudy, with a south-southwest wind-on the other side of the Atlantic the English forces lay along the river Montmorency, and looked anxiously across at Quebec and at the fateful heights of Abraham. When night-fall came, and before the gallant four thousand obeyed the word of command to steal across the river, General Wolfe, the young officer of thirty-three, who was next day to win death and immortality in victory, crept along in a boat from post to post to see that all was ready for the expedition. It was a fine, silent evening, and as they pulled along with muffled oars, the General recited to one of his officers who sat with him in the stern of the boat nearly the whole of Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," adding as he concluded, "I would prefer being the author of that poem to the glory of beating the French tomorrow." Perhaps no finer compliment was ever paid by the man of action to the man of imagination, and, sanctified, as it were, by the dying lips of the great English hero, the poem seems to be raised far above its intrinsic rank in literature, and to demand our respect as one of the acknowledged glories of our race and language.-GOSSE, EDMUND, 1882, Gray (English Men of Letters), p. 143.

Gray's Elegy is better known and more widely loved than any single poem in our language. It is because the original charm is still as fresh as ever, that we may call the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" the central poem of the age. -HARRISON, FREDERIC, 1883-86, The Choice of Books and Other Literary Pieces, pp. 381, 382.

Its melancholy music gets somehow stamped on the brain of nearly all of us,

and lends a poetic halo to every old graveyard that has the shadow of a churchtower slanted over it.-MITCHELL, DONALD G., 1895, English Lands Letters and Kings, Queen Anne and the Georges, p. 79.

Gray's famous "Elegy," 1751, which was originally sold for sixpence, jumped from £36 in 1888 to £59 in 1892, and when the next copy came into the market in December 1893 it sold for £74.-ROBERTS, W., 1896, Rare Books and Their Prices, p. 25.

It is the habit of anthologists to include the "Elegy" in collections of Lyric poetry, but no definition of a lyric poem that I have ever heard of can be so strained as to bring this long and almost perfect elegiac poem into such a collection as the present.-CRAWFURD, OSWALD, 1896, ed. Lyrical Verse from Elizabeth to Victoria, note, p. 431.

The fame of Thomas Gray is unique among English poets, in that, although world-wide and luminous, it springs from a single poem, a flawless masterpiece,"The Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.' This is the one production by which he is known to the great mass of readers and will continue to be known to coming generations; yet in his own time his other poems were important factors, in establishing the high repute accorded to him then and still maintained in the esteem of critics. Lowell says

of the "Elegy" that it won its popularity "not through any originality of thought, but far more through originality of sound." There must, however, be some deeper reason than this for the grasp which it has upon the minds and hearts of all classes. LATHROP, GEORGE PARSONS, 1897, Library of the World's Best Literature, ed. Warner, vol. XI, pp. 6623, 6625.

There is no poem in the English language more decidedly popular. It appeals to a feeling all but universal,-applicable to all ranks and classes of society. The poem exhibits the highest poetic sensibility and the most cultivated taste. No poem in the English language is more figurative, nor is there any of greater metrical beauty. The popularity which it first attained, today continues unabated. JONES, WILLIAM C., 1897, Elements and Science of English Versification, p. 272.

The "Elegy" is the masterpiece of this whole "Il Penseroso" school, and has

Even my friends tell me they [the Odes] do not succeed, and write me moving topics of consolation on that head; in short, I have heard of nobody but a player [Garrick] and a doctor of divinity [Warburton] that profess their esteem for them.-GRAY, THOMAS, 1757, Letter to Dr. Hurd, Aug. 25; Works, ed. Gosse, vol. II, p. 325.

He speaks to a people not easily impressed with new ideas, extremely tenacious of the old; with difficulty warmed, and as slowly cooling again. How unsuited then to our national character is that species of poetry which rises upon us with unexpected flights! Where we must hastily catch the thought, or it flies from us; and, in short, where the Reader must largely partake of the Poet's enthusiasm in order to taste his beauties.-GOLDSMITH, OLIVER, 1757, Odes by Mr. Gray, London Monthly Review, vol. 17, p. 239.

Talking of Gray's "Odes," he said, "They are forced plants raised in a hotbed; and they are poor plants; they are but cucumbers after all." A gentleman A gentleman present, who had been running down Odewriting in general, as a bad species of poetry, unluckily said, "Had they been literally cucumbers, they had been better things than Odes."-"Yes, Sir (said Johnson), for a hog."-JOHNSON, SAMUEL, 1780, Life by Boswell, ed. Hill, vol. IV, P. 15.

I yet reflect with pain upon the cool reception which those noble odes, "The Progress of Poetry" and "The Bard," met with at their first publication; it appeared that there were not twenty people in England who liked them.-WHARTON, THOMAS, 1781, Letter to Mason, May 29.

No piece can now be selected from his works that can justly come into competition with the "Bard" of Gray; over his inimitable ode a tinge so wildly, awful, so gloomily terrific, is thrown, as without any exception to place it at the head of lyric poetry.-DRAKE, NATHAN, 17981820, Literary Hours, No. XXV, vol. II, p. 22.

Gray (to whom nothing is wanting to

render him, perhaps, the finest poet in the English language but to have written. a little more) 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.-SMITH, ADAM, 1801, Theory of Moral Sentiments, vol. I, p. 255.

"The Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College" is more mechanical and commonplace [than the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard]; but it touches on certain strings about the heart, that vibrate in unison with it to our latest breath. No one ever passes by Windsor's "stately heights," or sees the distant spires of Eton College below, without thinking of Gray. He deserves that we should think of him; for he thought of others, and turned a trembling, ever-watchful ear to the "still sad music of humanity."HAZLITT, WILLIAM, 1818, Lectures on the English Poets, Lecture vi.

I have this evening been reading a few passages in Gray's Odes. I am very much pleased with them. The "Progress of Poesy" and the "Ode on Eton College" are admirable. And many passages of "The Bard," though, I confess, quite obscure to me, seem to partake in a great degree of the sublime. Obscurity is the great objection which many urge against Gray. They do not consider that it contributes in the highest degree to sublimity; and he certainly aimed at sublimity in these Odes. Every one admires his Elegy, and if they do not his Odes, they must attribute it to their own want of taste.-LONGFELLOW, HENRY WADSWORTH, 1823, Letter to His Mother, Life, ed. Longfellow, vol. I, p. 29.

That beautiful stanza where he has made the founders of Cambridge to pass before our eyes like shadows over a magic glass.-HALLAM, HENRY, 1827-46, Constitutional History of England.

Who has not felt the sentiments and the regrets expressed here with all the sweetness of the Muse? Who has not been affected at the remembrances of the sports, the studies, the loves, of his early years! But can we recall them to life? The pleasures of youth reproduced by memory are ruins viewed by torch-light. -CHATEAUBRIAND, FRANÇOIS RENÉ VISCOUNT DE, 1837, Sketches of English Literature, vol. II, p. 259.

Overflies ["The Bard"] all other English lyrics like an eagle. It was the prevailing blast of Gray's trumpet that more than anything else called men back to the legitimate standard.-LowELL, JAMES RUSSELL, 1871, Pope, My Study Windows, pp, 337, 338.

Gray's Odes have a stately swing to their measures, which comes nearer to Pindar than any other poetry. He is the most successful copyist of the Greek metres, and he never fails to stir us by the mere power of style.-POOR, LAURA ELIZABETH, 1880, Sanskrit and Its Kindred Literatures, p. 436.

Compared, not with the work of the great masters of the golden ages of poetry, but with the poetry of his own contemporaries in general, Gray's may be said to have reached, in his style, the excellence at which he aimed; while the evolution, also, of such a piece as his "Progress of Poesy," must be accounted not less noble and sound than its style. -ARNOLD, MATTHEW, 1880, The English Poets, ed. Ward, vol. III, p. 316.

In the "Eton College," again, the change from emotion to emotion, the balance of the parts, the pathetic humor of the conclusion, which recalls and binds together and suffuses the whole, must strike everybody who reflects for a moment on the construction of the poem. The effect of the whole, and of each part as contributing to the whole, has been elaborately calculated, elaborately, and yet with such vividness of emotional insight that there is no trace of labor. Stanza follows stanza as if by spontaneous growth, and the concluding reflection arises as if by irresistible suggestion.MINTO, WILLIAM, 1894, The Literature of the Georgian Era, ed. Knight, p. 96.

LETTERS

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-and though, from his childhood, he was grave and reserved his genius led him to see things ludicrously and satirically; and though his health and dissatisfaction gave him low spirits, his melancholy turn was much more affected than

his pleasantry in writing. You knew him enough to know I am in the right.WALPOLE, HORACE, 1775, To Rev. William Cole, Letters; ed. Cunningham, vol. VI, p. 206.

Read Gray's Letters on his Tour to the Lakes. He saw little, and that little hastily; but what he did see he sketched with the pen inimitably. The touches with which he occasionally gives life and spirit to the delineation are equisite. Yet in Gray's prose, as in his verse, there is some thing affected; and his wit, though very refined and pure, has the air of being forced. The description of the_sunrise is incomparably fine.-GREEN, THOMAS, 1779-1810, Diary of a Lover of Literature.

Gray's letters very much resemble what his conversation was. He had none of the airs of either a scholar or a poet; and though on those and all other subjects he spoke to me with the utmost freedom, and without any reserve, he was in general company much more silent than one could have wished.-FORBES, SIR WILLIAM, 1806, Life of Beattie.

His letters are inimitably fine. If his poems are sometimes finical and pedantic, his prose is quite free from affectation. He pours his thoughts out upon paper as they arise in his mind; and they arise in his mind without pretence, or constraint, from the pure impulse of learned leisure and contemplative indolence. He is not here on stilts or in buckram; but smiles in his easychair as he moralizes through the loopholes of his retreat on the bustle and raree-show of the world, or "those reverend bedlams-colleges and schools!"-He had nothing to do but to read and think, and to tell his friends what he read and thought. His life was a luxurious, thoughtful dream.-HAZEnglish Poets, Lecture vi. LITT, WILLIAM, 1818, Lectures on the

Delightful indeed are these "Letters:" evincing the taste of a virtuoso, the attainments of a scholar, and the gaiety of a classical wit.-DIBDIN, THOMAS FROGNALL, 1824, Library Companion.

Gray appears to us to be the best letter-writer in the language. Others equal him in particular qualities, and surpass him in amount of entertainment; but none are so nearly faultless. Chesterfield

wants heart, and even his boasted "delicacy;" Bolingbroke and Pope want simplicity; Cowper is more lively than strong; Shenstone reminds you of too many rainy days, Swift of too many things he affected to despise, Gibbon too much of the formalist and the litterateur. The most amusing of all our letter-writers are Walpole and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; but though they have abundance of wit, sense, and animal spirits, you are not always sure of their veracity. Now, "the first quality in a companion," as Sir William Temple observes, "is truth;" and Gray's truth is as manifest as his other good qualities. He has sincerity, modesty, manliness (in spite of a somewhat effeminate body), learning, good-nature, playfulness, a perfect style; and if an air of pensiveness breathes all over, it is only of that resigned and contemplative sort which completes our sympathy with the writer.

Gray is the "melancholy Jaques" of English literature, without the sullenness or causticity.-HUNT, LEIGH, 1849, A Book for a Corner, Second Series.

Everyone knows the letters of Gray, and remembers the lucid simplicity and directness, mingled with the fastidious sentiment of a scholar, of his description of such scenes as the Chartreuse. That is a well-known description, but those in his journal of a "Tour in the North" have been neglected, and they are especially interesting since they go over much of the country in which Wordsworth dwelt, and of which he wrote. They are also the first conscious effort-and in this he is a

worthy forerunner of Wordsworth to describe natural scenery with the writer's eye upon the scene described, and to describe it in simple and direct phrase, in distinction to the fine writing that was then practised. And Gray did this intentionally in the light prose journal he kept, and threw by for a time the refined carefulness and the insistance on human emotion which he thought necessary in poetic description of Nature. In his prose then, though not in his poetry, we have Nature loved for her own sake.-BROOKE, STOPFORD, A., 1874, Theology in the English Poets, p. 36.

Kindly feeling, an indolent turn, intellectual fastidiousness, are traceable up and down the course of the correspondence, and present a genuine likeness of

the man. ROSSETTI, WILLIAM MICHAEL, 1878, Lives of Famous Poets, p. 158.

However people may differ in their estimate of Gray as a poet, as a man he is secure of our affection, so soon as we get to know him, and any one may know him who will read his letters. Here, surely, there is no want of speaking out. Indeed, there are few literary men of so attractive a nature as Gray. Perhaps he is the most lovable of all except Charles Lamb, and with Lamb, despite many obvious differences, he has many points in common. They were both solitary creatures, living a recluse life in the world, but not of it, their best friends among the dead; they were both exquisite critics and no mean writers of poetry; they were both a prey to melancholy or rather, as Gray says, to "leucocholy;" they had both a delicate and delightful humour; they were both the very soul of gentle goodness. And so it comes about that their letters, in which they live to us, are among the few external good things which are necessary to happiness. The charm of a letter of Gray's lies partly in this interest of his character, and partly in the perfect felicity with which everything is said.BEECHING, H. C., 1885, The Academy, vol. 27, p. 53.

His letters are all but the best in the best age of letter-writing. They are fascinating not only for the tender and affectionate nature shown through a mask of reserve, but for gleams of the genuine humour which Walpole pronounced to be his most natural vein.-STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1890, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XXIII, p. 27.

GENERAL

"What muse like Gray's shall pleasing, pensive, flow,

Attempered sweetly to the rustic woe;
Or who like him shall sweep the Theban lyre,
And, as his master, pour forth thoughts of
fire?"
-LLOYD,
Churchill.

ROBERT, 1762, Epistle to

The author of the finest odes, and of the finest moral elegy in the world. -BEATTIE, JAMES, 1776-9, On the Usefulness of Classical Learning, Essays on Poetry and Music, p. 483, note.

I have been reading Gray's Works, and think him the only poet since Shakspeare entitled to the character of sublime.