CiKAV 



GRAYLING 



369 



IVterhoii-e, which lie entered in IT.'U. The pre- 

 .lomiii.ui! mathematics in tin; Mudies of Cambridge 

 \\.-i'- ili>ia-i.-fiil to lii> mind, ami a habitual lutt 

 paasivr melancholy fin I y seized and mastered him. 

 In tin- March of' 1739 he wu prevailed upon by 

 \\alpole to accompany him on the grand tour. 

 They -pent I In- ne\t two anil a half years visiting 

 i In- to\\ns ;iii<l exploring the picture-galleries of 

 !' ranee and Italy, and (i ray's letters home reveal 

 not only an exquisite taste in art and music, 

 I. in al.-o the tirst touch of that romantic love of 

 nature which Rousseau was M(M>n to make so 

 f.i.-hionable. The two friends quarrelled at Keggio 

 and parted. Waljiole afterwards took the blame 

 entirely on himself, and certainly by his efforts the 

 breach was healed within three years, and the 

 friendship never again interrupted, (iray reached 

 England in the September of 1741, and seems now 

 to have, begun seriously to write poetry, his Ode on 

 l-'.fuii Citllrijf being written in the autumn of 1742, 

 and the Elegy at least begun. In the winter he 

 \\ent back to Peterhouse, took his bachelorship in 

 civil law, and became a rasident there. For the 

 next four or live years he studied Greek literature 

 profoundly, and busied himself with abortive pro- 

 jects for editions of Strabo, Plato, and the Greek 

 Anthology. This was perhaps the happiest period 

 <>f his life, while he breathed the serene air of noble 

 libraries, and was as yet untroubled by broken 

 health. He found his relaxation and his keenest 

 pleasure in the company of his friends, and in 

 writing, when absent from them, letters such as only 

 men at that time could write. His holidays were 

 -pent with his mother and aunt at Stoke Poges, with 

 Walpole at London, Windsor, and Strawberry Hill, 

 <>r in travelling in different parts of the country. 

 From his letters we see that he had a quick eye for 

 the variety and colour of nature, and certainly he 

 w.-i> almost the first of modern Englishmen to see 

 the beauty as well as the horror in the Highland 

 mountains those ' monstrous children of Goo.' 



In the summer of 1747 Dodsley printed Gray's 

 famous Ode on a Distunt Prospect of Eton College, 

 and early next year reprinted it with two other 



jiit s in his Miscellany. The death of Gray's aunt, 



Nlary Antrobus, in the November of 1749 appeal's 

 to have brought back to his recollection his Elegy, 

 ami he seems about June 1750 to have finished it 

 where he began it seven years before at Stoke- 

 Poges. This humane and stately poem is perhaps 

 the best-known piece of English verse, a master- 

 piece in the balanced perfection of a metre that 

 1>eats true to the pulse of human sympathy in the 

 solemn alternation of passion and reserve, and 

 e>peeially happy in a subject that can never lose 

 its interest for mankind. The poem was sent to 

 Walpole, was handed about in manuscript, and 

 soon became so well known that (iray was forced 

 to print it in the February of 1751. Early in 

 .March 1753 appeared in a 'thin folio the editio 

 princepsal Gray's collected poem-, with designs by 

 lientley, only son of the famous Master of Trinity. 

 Gray's mother died 1 1th March 1753, and was buried 

 at Stoke Poges, with an exquisitely simple and 

 affecting epitaph from her son's pen upon her 

 tomtatone. 



Walpole said that Gray was 'in flower' during 

 the years 1750-55, and during this period he com- 

 menced his most ambitious poems, the Pindaric 

 Odes, the splendidly resonant Progress of Poesy, 

 perhaps his really greatest work, being finished 

 by the close of 1754. T/ie Bard, begun at the 

 same time, was not completed till the summer of 

 1767. Gray had long had a nervous horror of fire, 

 and had fixed a rope-ladder from his window in 

 Peterhouse by which to escape in emergency. One 

 night in February 1756 he was roused from sleep 

 by a pretended alarm of fire, and, without staying 

 232 



to put on his clothe*, descended from hut window 

 into a tub of water that bad been placed under hi" 

 window by some frolicsome undergraduate*. Dis- 

 pleased at the authorities of Peterhouse for not 

 punishing this brutal practical joke, the poet 

 migrated in 1756 to Pembroke Hall, where he 

 spent the remaining fifteen years of hi* life sur- 

 rounded by congenial friends, in the mid-t of his 

 books, his china, his pictures, and his (lower*. His 

 two odes were printed at Strawberry Hill in 

 1757, and were admitted to have put their author 

 at one bound at the head of living English i>oetH. 

 The laureateship was offered him in I7">7 on Gollev 

 Gibber's death, but declined. During the yeai> 

 1760 and 1761 he devoted himself to early English 

 poetry, of which he intended to write a history ; 

 later lie made studies in. Icelandic and Celtic verse, 

 which bore fniit in his Eddaic poems, The r'atul 

 Sisters and The Descent of Odin genuine precursor* 

 of romanticism. In 1768 he collected his poems 

 in the first general edition, and accepted the pro- 

 fessorship of History and Modern Languages at 

 Cambridge, an office which entailed no duties and 

 yielded an income of 400 a year. Johnson in his 

 perverse life of Gray made, from ' a slight inspec- 

 tion of his letters,' one solitary remark that showed 

 insight, that Gray ' was a man likely to love much 

 where he loved at all.' Certainly no silent and 

 melancholy poet was ever more happy in his friend- 

 ships, and few men have been loved with such 

 singleness and devotion. His biographer Mason's 

 affection was not entirely disinterested, but the love 

 of friends like Nicholls, Bonstetten, Robinson, 

 Wharton, Stonehewer, and Brown proves that 

 there must have been some singular charm in the 

 object on which it was lavished. 



Gray's latest journeys were made to Glamis 

 Castle and to the Cumbrian lakes, the beauties 

 of which he was the first to discover. He was now 

 comparatively rich, and enjoyed a reputation pecu- 

 liarly dear to a scholar's heart, and his life glided 

 quietly on, troubled only by tits of dejection and 

 by attacks of hereditary gout. As he was dining 

 one day in the college hall at Pembroke, a severe 

 attack seized him, and after a week's suffering 

 he died, 30th July 1771. He was buried fittingly 

 by his mother's side in his own Country Churchyard 

 Stoke Poges. 



Gray said of his own poetry that ' the style he 

 aimed at was extreme conciseness of expression, 

 yet pure, perspicuous, and musical.' The excel- 

 lence he aimed at he attained, and in his lyrical 

 work, moreover, he reached in a high degree the 

 Greek quality of structure, especially in nis Pin- 

 daric Odes. ' I do not think,' says Edward Fitz- 

 gerald, ' that his scarcity of work was from design : 

 he had but a little to say, I believe, and took his 

 time to say it.' At anyrate all his work bears the 

 stamp of dignity and distinction, and it was perhaps 

 as much the fault of the chilling atmosphere of his 

 age as of his own hyper-refinement of taste or inter- 

 mittency in the fits of creative fancy that its 

 quantity was so little. Yet this slender garland 

 of verse has been sufficient to give Gray his rank 

 among the dii majores of English poetry. 



The earlier Lives of Gray and editions of his works by 

 Mason and Mitford have been superseded by the study 

 by Edmund W. Gosse (1882) in the 'English Men of 

 Letters ' series, and by the same editor's complete edition 

 of his works in prose and verse, including as many as 349 

 of his letters (4 vols. 1884). See also the essay by Matthew 

 Arnold in voL iii. (1880) of T. H. Ward's Englith Poett. 



dray's Inn, one of the four Inns of Court 

 (ij.v. ) in London. 



Grayling (Thymallus), a genus of fresh- water 

 fishes in the salmon family, distinguished from 

 trout, &c. by the smaller mouth and teeth, and 

 by the long many -rayed dorsal fin- The gen us is 



