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meet me, kissed me on both sides with all the ease of one who receives an acquaintance just come out of the country, squatted me into a fauteuil, began to talk of the town, and this, and that, and t' other, and continued, with little interruption, for three hours, when I took my leave very indifferently pleased, but treated with monstrous good breeding." Two days afterwards they breakfasted together, "when," says the poet, "we had all the éclaircissement I ever expected, and I left him far better satisfied than I have been hitherto."

When the quarrel took place, Gray immediately returned to Venice, and retraced his steps to England nearly by the same route through France which he had travelled before. In November, two months after his arrival in London, his father died of gout in the stomach; and his mother, with means much impaired by her husband's folly, retired with a maiden sister to the house of another sister, Mrs. Rogers, at Stoke, near Windsor. At the time of going abroad, Gray intended to enter the Temple, and prepare himself for the practice of the law. This pursuit was but little adapted to his tastes and temperament. He now easily persuaded himself that his patrimony was insufficient to bear the charges of a long apprenticeship, and abandoned without reluctance all thoughts of the profession.

On his return to England, Gray found Mr. West rapidly declining in health, and oppressed by family misfortunes. He was in the habit of communicating all his compositions to his friend, and now sent him a part of the tragedy of Agrippina. West objected to the length of Agrippina's speech, which Gray himself thought so long that the tragedy, if ever finished, would be in the nature of Nat. Lee's Bedlam tragedy, which had twenty-five acts and some odd scenes. Mr. Mason tells us, with great naïveté, that he has obviated this objection by putting part of the speech into the mouth of Aceronia, and breaking it in a few other places. It was originally, he says, too long for the lungs of any actress; and, he might have added, for the patience of any audience. West's criticism discouraged Gray, and he laid Agrippina "up to sleep" till next summer. There is no reason to regret that her sleep was never disturbed. Four years afterwards, he tried Walpole with the same specimens, and was gratified with the compliments he received for them. "I had a mind," he writes, " to send you the remainder of Agrippina, that was lost in a wilderness of papers. Certainly you do her too much honor;

she seemed to me to talk like an old boy, all in figures and mere poetry, instead of nature and the language of real passion." There is more merit in Gray's criticism of it than in the specimens extant of the tragedy. Walpole seems to have been as frank in his mode of treating the matter as West, for Gray wrote him soon afterwards: "Agrippina can stay very well, she thanks you, and be damned at leisure I hope you have not mentioned, or showed to anybody, that scene (for, trusting in its badness, I forgot to caution you concerning it); but I heard, the other day, that I was writing a play, and was told the name of it, which nobody here could know, I am sure." It is fortunate that the tragedy was thus arrested. Dr. Johnson says that it was certainly no loss to the English stage that Agrippina was never finished. This is almost the only judgment of the literary Goliath on Gray's writings in which we can concur, It must be confessed, however, that the specimens we have of it give us reason to believe that Agrippina, completed as begun, would have proved of as little interest for the stage or the closet as the Doctor's own Irene.

Gray now devoted himself to the study of the ancient authors. He read the Greek historians and poets, and in pursuing his Italian studies cultivated Petrarch. He translated and wrote Latin epistles and Greek epigrams. These he continued to send to his friend West, and to him also, when Gray was on a visit to his family at Stoke, in 1742, he sent his Ode to Spring, which was written there, but which did not reach Hertfordshire till after the death of his beloved friend. The letter enclosing it was returned unopened. West's loss was never supplied. Gray had attached friends in after life, but none for whom he seems to have cherished so warm and confiding a friendship.

During this visit to Stoke, the muse of Gray was "in flower.” In the autumn of that year he composed the Ode on the Distant Prospect of Eton College, and the Hymn to Adversity; and Mason ascribes to this period the greater part of the Elegy written in a Country Church-yard. His relatives being desirous that he should fulfil his original intention of pursuing a profession, he had compromised the matter by taking a degree of bachelor of civil law, and fixing his residence at Cambridge. Here he pursued his classical studies so assiduously, that in six years he had gone through nearly the whole range of Greek authors, with a digest of their contents, and a run

ning commentary, to say nothing of a chronological table which he compiled with a vast expenditure of labor. A number of his critical commonplace books are preserved in the library of Pembroke College; and many others exist, showing very minute erudition, and all written in a very delicate penmanship. On the margins of his classical books he inserted various critical notices and many conjectural emendations. In 1747 he thus reports progress: "I have read Pausanias and Athenæus all through, and Eschylus again. I am now in Pindar and Lysias; for I take verse and prose together, like bread and cheese." He gave much attention to Strabo and geography. Thucydides he thought the model of history, and the Retreat before Syracuse among the choicest pieces of writing in the world. Of Aristotle he said, that he was the hardest author he ever meddled with; that he had a dry conciseness, which rather resembled a table of contents than a book, and, to crown all, an abundance of fine, uncommon things, which were worth the trouble it cost to get at them. He had the highest admiration of Socrates; and ranked the Memorabilia of Xenophon among the most valuable works on morality. But his favorite author was Plato. "What he admired in him," he said, in conversation, "was, not his mystic doctrines, which he did not pretend to understand, nor his sophistry, but his excellent sense, sublime morality, elegant style, and the perfect dramatic propriety of his dialogues."

More than four years thus rolled on, after his flowering season at Stoke, which produced no fruit of his studies, unless the satirical fragment which Mason has entitled a Hymn to Ignorance may be referred to this period. It was probably written soon after his return to Cambridge. By the autumn of 1747 he was ready to venture before the public with the Ode to Eton College, which was published in folio by Dodsley. It was the first English production of Gray that appeared in print; and we are told, in Joseph Warton's Essay on Pope, that it attracted little notice. It was also published in Dodsley's Collection, with the verses which have been dignified with the style of Ode, but which Gray mentions, in a letter to Dr. Wharton, as "a Pôme on the Uncommon Death of Mr. Walpole's Cat." In the same collection the Ode to Spring was published with the simple title of Ode.

It was two or three years previous to this time that Gray made

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the acquaintance of Mr. Mason, then a bachelor scholar of St. John's, and subsequently elected to a vacant fellowship at Pembroke through the influence of the poet and Dr. Heberden. Mason was devoted and deferential to Gray during his lifetime, and became his literary executor and biographer; but he was artificial and conceited, and repaid Gray's confidence by mutilating his correspondence, and "completing one of his unfinished poems. The latter, being an open offence, was comparatively venial; but there can be no apology for the liberties taken by Mr. Mason with the poet's letters. Mr. Mitford asserts, and furnishes abundant proof, that “there is scarcely a genuine letter of Gray in the whole of Mason's work." Besides Mason, the intimate friends of Gray in his riper years were Dr. Wharton, Mr. Chute, Mr. Brown (the president of Pembroke College), Mr. Stonhewer, and the Rev. Mr. Nicholls.

In the August of 1748, Gray "fills up' a letter to Dr. Wharton with "the beginning of a sort of an essay." "What name to give to it," he adds, "I know not; but the subject is the alliance of education and government. I mean to show that they must necessarily concur, to produce great and useful men." He asked his friend's judgment on it, and begged him to show the fragment to no one, except Stonhewer, who had seen it already. It always remained a fragment. Gibbon calls it an exquisite specimen of a philosophic poem; and Dr. Johnson admits that it has many excellent lines. Gray was the best judge of his own powers, and probably did not think it worth while to provoke a comparison with Pope in that style of composition where he is still without a rival. The thesis which Gray proposed to himself might, perhaps, be better worked out in prose; and we would not part with one of his odes for all the philosophical essays in rhyme that he could have written in a lifetime. We are inclined to think that Gray gave the true reason for not finishing the poem, when he told his friend, Mr. Nicholls, that "he could not." This he explained by adding that, being used to write only lyrical poems, he accustomed himself and was able to polish every part; but that the labor of this in a long poem would be intolerable.

In June, 1750, from Stoke, where he had written the greater part of the "Elegy," eight years before, Gray sent it in a finished state to Walpole. "I have been here at Stoke a few days," he says,

"where I shall continue a good part of the summer; and, having put an end to a thing whose beginning you have seen long ago; I immediately send it you. You will, I hope, look upon it in the light of a thing with an end to it; a merit that most of my writings have wanted, and are like to want." It was handed about in manuscript by Walpole, and was received with great favor. Copies were taken, and one of them at last fell into the hands of" certain gentlemen who were conductors of the Magazine of Magazines. They wrote to the fastidious scholar, informing him that his "ingenious poem was about to be printed under their auspices, for which they beg his indulgence, and the honor of his correspondence. Gray was horrified at the idea of such a connection, and entreated Walpole to "make Dodsley print it immediately," ," "which may be done," he adds in a parenthesis, "in less than a week's time." He gives special charge that it should be printed without his name, but on the bookseller's best paper and character. "He must correct the press himself, and print it without any interval between the stanzas, because the sense is in some places continued beyond them; and the title must be, Elegy written in a Country Church-yard. If he would add a line or two, to say it came into his hands by accident, I should like it better. If you behold the Magazine of Magazines in the light that I do, you will not refuse to give yourself this trouble on my account, which you have taken of your own accord before now. If Dodsley do not do this immediately, he may as well let it alone.”

The elegy was received with delight, and soon ran through eleven editions. Gray was surprised at its popularity. "It spread," said Mr. Mason, in his Life of Whitehead, "at first, on account of the affecting and pensive cast of the subject, just like Hervey's Meditations on the Tombs. Soon after its publication, I remember sitting with Mr. Gray in his college apartment; he expressed to me his surprise at the rapidity of its sale. I replied,

'Sunt lacrymæ rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt.'

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He paused a while, and, taking his pen, wrote the line on a printed copy of it lying on his table. 'This,' said he, shall be its future motto.' 'Pity,' cried I, that Dr. Young's Night Thoughts have preoccupied it.' 'So,' replied he, indeed it is.'"

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The elegy proved to be no less popular with scholars than with the

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