the post, so long as Gray held it, was a sinecure. He died in his rooms at Pembroke, falling ill one evening in the College hall, and dying six days later. Gray's poetry was very popular among his contemporaries; and, in 1757, when Cibber died, he might have been Poet Laureate. Johnson, however, utterly failed to appreciate him, and not only did he write a most un Gray's 66 poetry. worthy life of Gray in the Lives of the Poets, but lost no opportunity of saying harsh things about his poems. "They are forced plants, raised in a hotbed; and they are poor plants; they are but cucumbers after all." Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him great. He was a mechanical poet." This was not a malicious judgment: it was simply a vehement aberration of criticism. Gray was actually in advance of his age. Few of his contemporaries at Cambridge really understood the solitary student who read perpetually in his rooms and introduced some artistic method into their decoration. A curious parallel might be drawn between him and the late Mr. Walter Pater-both of them living secluded lives in college, both indefatigable workers, both so much in harmony with the personal note in nature, and both producing little, and that little so polished and exquisite. Gray's literary acquirements were immense; he had not merely studied the classics to advantage, but was thoroughly erudition. versed in medieval romance literature, in French and Italian poetry, and in that early Celtic and Scandinavian literature about which very few people cared just then. His learning, of course, had a very powerful influence upon his poetical work; his classical studies and his researches in the frigid Italian poets of the seventeenth century made him more than a common prey to the tedious method of allegory which we have already remarked in Collins, the constant personification of abstract qualities; it led also to a love of undiluted allusion which makes certain of his poems meaningless without a commentary. But his erudition is not the only thing in his work. His Critical importance For, judging him as poet alone, he stands at the place where two roads meet. He is the last poet of his work. who is troubled by classical formalism; he is the first poet who gives his testimony clearly on the side of romance. The Elegy in a Country Churchyard looks back to Thomson on the one hand, and forward to Wordsworth on the other. The Progress of Poesy, while retaining traces of the classical influence of Pope and his school, anticipates Shelley's freer treatment of myth and legend. The Bard, for all its Pindaric form, is, in its subject and the essential quality of its treatment, kindled by a love for medieval romance, while The Descent of Odin and The Fatal Sisters are the precursors of Scott's romantic ballads. The work which has thus so much of the old spirit in its external features, but, upon its more intellectual side, is so closely related to the new, although it can be contained in a mere pamphlet, was, in fact, the work of many careful years. He began to write in 1742, but it was not till 1747 that he published his Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College; and his Elegy in a Country Churchyard, begun in 1742, was not finished before 1749, or published before 1750. These two poems, with the odes On Spring and To Adversity, the Ode on the Death of a favourite Cat, and A Long Story, were published in one volume in 1753, and make up Gray's contribution to the poetry of nature. If he is to be compared with Collins-and the comparison is more apparent than profitable-this is the part of his work in which the likeness is most obvious. The Elegy is one of the best-known The "Elegy" poems in English, and to praise its peaceful and (1750). matured rhythm is now superfluous. The same spirit of philosophic contemplation prevails in the remaining odes; the same abstractions, Ambition, Luxury, Honour, and so on, appear with a far more numerous train in Eton College and the Hymn to Adversity, and aid Gray's wonderful talent for lending distinction to reflections which, without these ingenious devices, would be merely obvious. Above all Gray's merits in these early poems, above his great ingenuity, his employment of his learning, his careful art, and the pleasant musical chime of his verse, we see a curiously minute observation of scenery, a note of every detail of landscape, which turns almost every verse of the Elegy into a vignette of trees, fields, little streams, and distant village spires. "The (1758). But the spirit of the two Pindaric odes, written between 1754 and 1757, and published in 1758, is more ambitious, and their range of view more extensive. The Progress of Poesy is, roughly speaking, a historic sketch, be- Progress ginning with an invocation, proceeding with a de- of Poesy" scription of the universal sway of poetry, and tracing its advance through Greece and Rome to England, where it culminates in the glory of Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden. Although Gray deliberately chose to clothe his verse in a form more artificial than he had yet attempted, he moves freely in his fetters, and succeeds in shaking off any prosaic relics of trite classicism. His ode is not the usual Pindaric imitation which saw its original through two pairs of thick spectacles, French and Latin; it is derived at first hand from the Hellenic love of nature, and catches the spirit of the greatest naturepoetry the world has ever seen. Shelley, with his intimate feeling for Greek poetry, Byron, with his impassioned reverence for the greatness of historic Greece, wrote nothing more truly approximating to the charm of Greek lyric verse than Gray's lovely stanza, beginning "Woods, that wave o'er Delphi's steep." It belongs to that class of English lyrics which stand in the closest filial relation to the choruses of the great Athenian dramatists; it has a fire and passion totally different from the philosophic melancholy of the Elegy, and, with this, a restraint of expression and a simplicity purely Hellenic ; and, further, it leads the final stanzas of an ode, which up to this point has been picturesque and melodious enough, to a rare pitch of sublimity. The fire which is perceptible at the end of this poem communicates itself to the second Pindaric ode, The Bard. But The Bard has less "The Bard" of this obvious Hellenism, save in its outward form (1758). and its ascending scale of passion, in which alone it is comparable with The Progress of Poesy. It is a noble romantic poem, a historical prophecy put into the mouth of one of the Celtic bards whom Edward I slaughtered in his conquest of Wales, and forecasting the terrible warfare of the houses of Lancaster and York and the glories of the reign of Elizabeth. It shows us Gray's love of nature turning for its inspiration to Celtic myth and legend, to the tales of magic and second-sight which abounded among the mountains of Scotland and Wales. In short, it places him, even more nearly than his later Descent of Odin, in immediate connection with the masters of romance who were before long to have so abiding an influence in England. The growth of this affection for romantic subjects explains, and is partly explained by, the long journeys which Gray constantly made, about this time, to the North of England and Scotland. His Diary of a Journey and diary. to the Lakes in 1769, published after his death (1775), and describing a long delightful journey through Cumberland, Westmorland, and the wild passes of the Pennine chain, is full of passages which show how much he was at home in those mountain solitudes, and how the very bulk of hills, like "that huge creature of God, Ingleborough," and the constant changes of cloud and sunshine, delighted and fascinated him. He was one of the first of our modern poets who reconciled the discrepancies between the English and the Celtic attitude to nature, and introduced the awful charm of mountain scenery into English poetry. He is buried next his mother at Stoke Poges, in the churchyard which, in spite of the claims of numerous competitors, seems to have been the scene of his Elegy. Gray's travels § 5. The last poet of the group which may be said to include Thomson, Shenstone, Collins, and Gray, is the frigid MARK AKENSIDE, who was a distinguished physician as well as a poet. His father was a butcher at Newcastle-on-Tyne, and he was educated in the medical schools of Edinburgh and Leyden. His earliest 5. MARK AKENSIDE (1721-1770). work was a very juvenile poem in Spenserian stanza, The Virtuoso (1737), which, although written after Thomson had begun to write The Castle of Indolence, was published much earlier either than that Spenserian imitation or than Shenstone's Schoolmistress. The Pleasures of Imagination (1744) is a philo sophical poem in three books, investigating and illustrating the emotions excited in the human mind by beautiful objects in art and nature. Esthetic treatises in prose are not always very interesting; in poetry they can only represent misapplied energy. The Thomsonian vein of description is lost in Akenside's monotonous and correct blank verse. His Odes (1745), in which we see him in direct relation to Collins and Gray, are cold and statuesque, without the compensating vitality of great sculpture. Akenside was saturated with classical learning; and his verse caught the classical stateliness of movement with none of its life. His Hymn to the Naiads (1758) is, perhaps, the only poem in which he wrote with fire and vivacity; he might have advanced still further in his art, but this was his last work. Till his death he devoted himself to medicine, and became a fellow of the Royal Society. He died early enough to earn a place in Johnson's Lives of the Poets. THOMAS and § 6. Before we pass on to Cowper and Crabbe, the chief members of the second period of nature-poetry, who form the link between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there are one or two important features to be noticed JOSEPH and in the history of the epoch whose principal poets we WARTON have just mentioned. The first of these is the service (1722-1800 rendered to English poetry by the family of Warton. 1728-1790). JOSEPH WARTON and THOMAS WARTON, the sons of a vicar and schoolmaster of Basingstoke, who had been fellow of Magdalen and Professor of Poetry at Oxford, both took a critical interest in the subject. Joseph became warden of Winchester; Thomas was fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, Professor of Poetry in the University, like his father, and for five years (1785-90) Poet Laureate. Both wrote original verses of no great merit, although Thomas Warton showed some capacity for sonnet-writing. Between 1774 and 1781 three volumes of a History of English Poetry by Thomas Warton were "History published; but these went only as far as the opening of English of the Elizabethan period; and, during the rest of Poetry" their author's life, very little more was done. The (1774-1781). idea of the history was, without doubt, taken from the rough sketch of a similar work left behind by Pope, which also came into Gray's hands and inspired him with the same notion. However, in the year before his death, he courteously resigned his project to his Oxford contemporary, with the result that Warton wrote a book which, although unfinished, is still of great importance to the student of literature. Joseph Warton intended to complete his younger brother's work-he survived him by ten years-but did not finish the task. In addition to this great undertaking, Thomas Warton published Observations on The Fairy Queen of Spenser (1754) and an edition of Milton's minor poems (1785), and otherwise helped on the literary movement of his day by calling attention to preRestoration poetry. He was one of Johnson's dearest and most intimate friends, but this did not prevent the dictator of letters from making fun of his lyric verse. Joseph Warton's contribution to critical literature was an edition of Pope (1797), with an admirable essay on his subject. § 7. Secondly, we come to the two great literary forgeries of the middle of the eighteenth century-English and Scottish. Literary forgeries: 1. THOMAS CHAT. TERTON (1752-1770). The first of these, unscrupulous as it was, was certainly an example of genius. THOMAS CHATTERTON, after a short life of only eighteen years, died by his own hands at his lodgings in Brook Street, Holborn. He was the posthumous son of a schoolmaster and sub-chanter of Bristol Cathedral, and lived close to the magnificent church of St. Mary Redcliffe, one of the finest monuments of medieval devotion in England. His uncle happened to be the sexton of the church; and the boy spent a great part of his childhood in exploring the building and filling himself with the spirit of its Gothic antiquity. Romantic enthusiasm of the kind was not widely spread in England, and it is a singular thing that this mere child should instinctively have formed a passion which, in those days of "neat edifices" and "handsome colonnades," was an unknown thing. His own education was received at Colston's Hospital in Bristol, and did not amount to very much; all his learning was borrowed from the great church and the picturesque streets of the city, then crowded with overhanging gables and medieval buildings. Among the curiosities of St. Mary Redcliffe was a parvise chamber above the octagonal north porch, in which still exist a number of old chests. In one of these, called Canynge's coffer, had been preserved charters and other documents recording the benefactions of the great merchant, William Canynge, who had rebuilt the church in the reign of Edward IV; many had been removed, but there remained a large mass of parchments which had been thrown aside as of no value, and had been used by Chatterton's father for covering his scholars' copybooks. Chatterton had picked up some knowledge of black-letter and heraldry; and these documents gradually inspired him with the ingenious idea of forging a whole series of valuable manuscripts, which he pretended to have found in this muniment room, or to have transcribed from originals in Canynge's coffer. Meanwhile he was writing small poems and satires which gained him some reputation as a local prodigy. His leisure moments were probably occupied in practising the rudiments of his scheme. This child of twelve produced by degrees a number of extraordinary compositions, with which he deceived the local news The Rowley forgeries. papers and his acquaintances in the town-William Barrett, a surgeon, and George Catcott, a pewterer with a taste for heraldry, being among his first victims. On the occasion of the opening of a new bridge over the Avon he came forward with an account of processions, tournaments, and religious solemnities which had |