fident that he is worthy enough for you to hear, and more than worthy enough for me to speak about.

In point of mere bulk, he has probably written less than any other poet, whose works are comprised in any collection of English poetry; yet but few have attempted a greater variety of styles, and these, too, among the most difficult and lofty in the whole range of song. He has written odes, which may be divided into the regular and the Pindaric; he has written heroic verses: he has written elegiac verses; he has written Latin heroic, Latin elegiac, and Latin lyric poetry; he has written burlesque; he has written satire; he has written part of a tragedy—and all he has written is not only excellent, but nearly perfect in its kind. If he had done more-if he had exhibited the prodigality, as well as the perfection of his inspiration-I know not the height of eminence to which he might not have been held entitled. His leading characteristic, and probably that which interfered mainly with his being a more prolific writer, is the nicety and purity of his taste. If forced to compare his style and genius with those of any other great writer, I believe that I should select Virgil. Gray had not, of course, his copiousness; he had, indeed, great variety in the forms of composition, but the same unerring delicacy of taste the same appropriate, but not exaggerated loftiness of diction-the same elaborate and exquisite workmanship.

"I gladly back my own estimate of the poetical merits of Gray by the weightier authority of that accomplished and discriminating writer, Sir James Mackintosh, who says, "Of all English poets he was the most finished artist. He attained the highest degree of splendour of which poetical style seems to be capable."

His life and character demand a passing notice, though neither the one nor the other were marked by any such salient or striking points as need detain us long. He appears to have suffered under an hereditary tendency to gout, both of his parents having died of that malady. It also closed his own more illustrious career, in his fifty-fifth year, and probably gave to the whole of his sedentary and uneventful life that disposition to a pensive, but not morose melancholy, to which he frequently alludes in his correspondence, and which has left most distinct impressions even on his highly-polished and carefullylaboured poetry. It will be remembered that he says of the "Youth," whom he evidently in a great degree intended for himself, that

"Melancholy marked him for her own."

It is in this light that he is represented in a poem of the last century, "The Pursuits of Literature," which attracted much attention at the time, from its general ability, from the stores of learning contained in its notes, and perhaps most of all from its long-sustained anonymous character; it is now

known to have been written by Mr. Mathias, a distinguished classical and Italian scholar :

"Go then and view, since closed his cloistered day,

The self-supported, melancholy Gray.

Dark was his morn of life, and bleak the spring,
Without one fost'ring ray from Britain's King:

Granta's dull abbots cast a sidelong glance,
And Levite gownsmen hugged their ignorance:
With his high spirit strove the master bard,
And was his own exceeding great reward."

I confess that these lines, very good and forcible in themselves, appear to me rather overcharged as a correct statement of the case. "The dull abbots" of Cambridge are spoken of with extreme irreverence by Gray himself, and we may suspect that the superciliousness was quite as much on his side as on theirs; at all events he did not find the residence at his own University by any means intolerable, as he spent there by choice the greater portion of the last twenty-nine years of his life. And with reference to the want of any "fostering ray from Britain's King," it certainly would have been very creditable to our Brunswick Sovereigns (who, it must be owned, were not then enlightened patrons of art and learning), if they had distinguished so excellent a poet as Gray; but, in the first place, he not only had the option of becoming the Poet Laureate, which, perhaps, is not saying much, considering some of those who in those days wore the laurel wreath (far different from those, such as Wordsworth and Tennyson, who have conferred honour upon it in our own time); but Gray did actually receive a lucrative office, which, I fear, he made a sinecure that of Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge, if not actually from George III. himself, at least from his Minister, the Duke of Grafton, with the King's formally conveyed assent. And I imagine, moreover, that at almost every period of his life, Gray, who never was a distressed man, would have shrunk instinctively from all the common appearances of patronage. When he travelled with the son of the most powerful Prime Minister whom England ever had, he contrived to quarrel with him, though I have the most direct authority* (unhappily just removed from us) for stating, that Horace Walpole himself not only sought a reconciliation, and took frequent opportunities of marking his respect and admiration for Gray, but to his dying day he impressed upon those with whom he conversed, that the blame had been entirely on his own side-an admission

The elder Miss Berry, to whom Horace Walpole offered his hand.

which Dr. Johnson, of whom more shortly, chooses first to record, and then to sneer away. However, I say it neither in the way of praise nor blame, but probably there scarcely ever was an author who had so little of the spirit of authorship about him.

To begin, he wrote extremely little-one of the greatest of readers, he was one of the most sparing of writers-even, too, when he had been brought very reluctantly to allow the publication of the immortal Elegy, he specially desires that it should be without his name, and in one place he expresses almost a ludicrous degree of horror at the notion of its being published with an engraving of his own head prefixed to it; lastly, and most conclusively of all, when later in life he authorizes two separate editions of his entire works in England and Scotland, he expressly mentions that he is to receive no remuneration for them.

The same sensitive and fastidious delicacy which pruned every expression of his pen, guarded every action of his life; and we are told by his attached and devoted editor and friend, the poet Mason, that he even assumed an appearance of delicacy and effeminacy, as if to ward off persons whom he did not wish to please. Such may have been his weakness, and it is rather confirmed to us by the prim, closed appearance of the lips, which may be ob served in the medallion of his face as it appears on his tablet, not his tomb, in Westminster Abbey.

However, I must pause for a moment longer on the undeniable merits and virtues which distinguished his character and dignified his life. His existence, on the whole, was that of a scholar and recluse, pursuing varied walks of learning, many of which he mastered, not with the massive completeness of a German student, yet with the refined diligence of an English gentleman. His fine organization specially disposed and fitted him for the skilful appreciation and enlightened enjoyment of all that falls within the domain of the fine arts; and thus, in addition to his own captivating art of poetry, he was keenly alive to the excellences of music, painting, and archi

tecture.

But a candid biographer of Gray would have both softer and higher qualities to dwell upon. However retiring and reserved he appears to have constitutionally been, and although there would appear to be no trace of his having ever been in love, his heart was open to the warmest emotions of friendship, nor is it easy to remember a more congenial union of tastes and feelings than distinguished the too brief intimacy between him and his accomplished friend, Richard West, whose premature death, as we shall shortly see, lent probably some of its most thrilling cadences to his pensive lyre. His affection for his mother was tender, constant, and practical; as one evidence of it, let me quote the short inscription on the tombstone he placed to her

memory, in that same churchyard of Stoke Poges, which, in all probability, was the scene of his own most successful inspiration. After a few words upon the remains of his aunt, who had preceded her in the same grave to which he himself afterwards followed her, the simple epitaph thus goes on:-

"IN THE SAME PIOUS CONFIDENCE,

BESIDE HER FRIEND AND SISTER,

HERE SLEEP THE REMAINS OF

DOROTHY GRAY,

WIDOW, THE CAREFUL TENDER MOTHER

OF MANY CHILDREN, ONE OF WHOM ALONE

HAD THE MISFORTUNE TO SURVIVE HER."

The same affectionate and persevering love to a mother is dwelt upon in a delightful preface to the "Memoirs of the poet Moore," composed by Lord John Russell, and which I had the satisfaction of purchasing on my way here this morning. Were I, however, to make the present occasion one of controversy, I must say, when I find Lord John Russell writing that "surely of English lyrical poets Moore is the first," I should feel almost guilty of treason to the subject of this lecture, if I did not observe that the word "surely" was a more positive one than the opinion fairly warranted.

To these amiable natural affections which Gray exhibited, we must add a becoming tone of religious sentiment, whenever it is introduced, and the occasions are not unfrequent, either in his correspondence or his verse; and it kindles even into a noble scorn, whenever it is called forth by any display of shallow scepticism, or aping of infidel philosophy. He appears to have always spoken with the utmost repugnance of Bolingbroke and Voltaire. In one place he thus pointedly describes himself:

"No very great wit,--he believed in a God."

It would be doing great injustice to Gray if no mention should be made of him as a letter-writer. He occupies no mean place among that entertaining, and surely not ignoble, company; with less of sparkle and amusing matter than his fellow-traveller, Horace Walpole--with less of the unapproachable charm of simplicity and power of vivifying the most common-place topics than Cowper, he holds rather a middle station between them; and, falling short of their respective extremes of excellence, partakes to a certain extent of both. His correspondence is more full of illustration from varied learning, and the rich colouring of art, than the homely Cowper's; his letters during his Italian travels, and his descriptive tour of the English lakes, are both more graphic and more simple than the artificial Walpole's.

With respect to his different notices of scenery, I cannot quote a more distinct authority than that again of Sir James Mackintosh, who says in one

g

of his letters, "I am struck by the recollection of a sort of merit in Gray, which is not generally observed that he was the first discoverer of the beauties of nature in England, and has marked out the course of every picturesque journey that can be made in it."

My business on these occasions is not, or but very subordinately at least, with composition in prose; and I will only, in the way of example, give three very brief extracts from our poet's letters. I will begin with pure description. Here is a glimpse of Italy-the merest glimpse-but it puts the reader right in the midst of it :

"I am going to the window, to tell you it is the most beautiful of Italian nights. There is a moon! There are stars for you! Do not you hear the fountain? Do not you smell the orange-flowers? The building yonder is the Convent of St. Isidore, and that eminence with the cypress trees and firs upon it, the top of Mount Quirinal."

We will next transfer ourselves to an English landscape, and will take what he says of one of the smallest of our northern lakes, Little Grasmere :-

"The bosom of the mountain, spreading here into a broad basin, discovers in the midst Grasmere water; its margin is hollowed into two small bays, with bold eminences, some of rock, some of soft turf, that half conceal and vary the form of the little lake they command: from the shore, a lone promontory pushes itself far into the water, and on it stands a white village, with the parish church rising in the midst of it: hanging enclosures, cornfields, and meadows green as an emerald, with their trees, and hedges, and cattle, fill up the whole square from the edge of the water; and just opposite to you is a large farmhouse, at the bottom of a steep, smooth lawn, embosomed in old woods, which climb halfway up the mountain side, and discover above them a broken line of crags that crown the scene. Not a single red tile, no glaring gentleman's house, or garden walls, break in upon the repose of this little unsuspected paradise; but all is peace, rusticity, and happy poverty, in its neatest and most becoming attire."

Does not every word prove to us that it is intended to show off the scene, and not one of them the writer?

My remaining extract shall approach nearer to sentiment, and to that one sentiment which displays itself more amiably than any other in Gray's whole character-the affection for his mother, to which I have already referred. There is, as you will perceive, some levity in the mode of expression, but none, as I think you will feel, to neutralize its tenderness. He is writing to a young friend :-

"I had written to you to beg you would take care of your mother, and to inform you that I had discovered a thing very little known, which is, that in one's whole life one can never have any more than a single mother. You may think this is obvious, and what you call a trite observation. You are a green gosling! I was, at the same age, as wise as you, and yet I never discovered this (with full evidence and conviction,