It is not within my purpose to criticise Mr. Gosse's edition of Gray's works; enough to say that though it needs some emendations and a careful revision before it can be pronounced perfect, yet it must eventually supersede all former editions of the poet. My wish is to give a sketch of Gray's life, and to speak of him as a poet and a letter-writer.

The year 1885 was made memorable in literary circles by the unveiling of a bust of one of the most faultless of our poets, and one of the most illustrious children of the University, in the hall of Pembroke College, Cambridge, in the presence of men as distinguished as the late Lord Houghton, the late Mr. Russell Lowell, Sir Frederick Leighton, and others of celebrity in the world of art and literature, as well as of name and note in the University. And so, after 114 years, the poet who, as Mr. Lowell said on the occasion referred to, "has written less, and perhaps pleased more people than any other," has at last a visible memorial within the walls of the college, where he passed the longer and happier portion of his life, and where, in the arms of his friend, Dr. Brown, Master of Pembroke, he died. It will be "its own exceeding great reward" to dwell for a time on the life and writings of a poet who, if not one of the supreme poets of the world, has yet done more than any other poet, with the exception of Shakespeare and Pope, to enrich our language with felicitous lines and phrases that

have become household words, and passed into the common speech of the million.

Thomas Gray was born in Cornhill on December 26, 1716. He seems to have sprung on the side of both father and mother from the lower middle classes. When he became famous as a poet, Baron Gray, of Gray, in Forfarshire, claimed him as a relation; but the poet showed no anxiety to prove that he had gentle blood in his veins. "I know no pretence," he said to Beattie, "that I have to the honour Lord Gray is pleased to do me; but if his lordship chooses to own me, it certainly is not my business to deny it." The only proof that he was related to this ancient family was the possession of a bloodstone seal which had belonged to his father, engraved with Lord Gray's arms, and these have been accepted at Pembroke College as the arms of the poet. His father, Philip Gray, apparently an only son, inherited from his father, a successful merchant, a portion of £10,000, and about his thirtieth year married Miss Dorothy Antrobus, a Buckinghamshire lady about twenty years of age, who, with her elder sister Mary, kept a milliner's shop in the City. A third sister, Anna, married a country lawyer, and the two brothers, Robert and John Antrobus, were Fellows of Cambridge Colleges, and afterwards tutors at Eton. His mother was not happy in her married life; her husband was violent, jealous, and probably mad. She had twelve children, but all except Thomas died in

infancy; he, too, would have died as an infant had not his mother, finding him in a fit, opened a vein with her scissors, and so relieved the determination of blood to the brain. His father neglected him, and he was brought up by his mother and his aunt Mary. Indeed, so miserable was his home-life at Cornhill from the cruelties of his father, that his uncle, Robert Antrobus, removed the boy to his own house at Burnham, in Buckinghamshire. With his uncle, who was a Fellow of Peterhouse, Thomas studied. botany, and became learned, according to Horace Walpole, in the virtues of herbs and simples. Unhappily for the boy, this uncle died in January, 1729. Though his father about this time had, in one of his extravagant fits, a full-length of his son painted by Richardson, the fashionable portraitpainter of the day, a picture which is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, he absolutely refused to educate him. It was at the expense of his mother, and under the auspices of his uncles, that he was sent to Eton about 1727. It was here, and in the same year, that he made the acquaintance, which ripened into a lifelong friendship, of Horace Walpole, then ten years old, and the son of a Prime Minister. They were both oppidans and not collegers, and, as Walpole confesses, they "never made an expedition against bargemen, or won a match at cricket, but wandered through the playing-fields, tending a visionary flock, and sighing out some pastoral

name to the echo of the cascade under the bridge which crosses Chalvey Brook." An avenue of limes among the elms is still named "The Poet's Walk," and is connected by tradition with Gray. The young friends were neither of them physically strong, and cared nothing for the athletic sports in which their fellows took delight. Two other boys, similar to them in character, were drawn by sympathy to Walpole and Gray. These were West, son of a Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and grandson, on the mother's side, of the famous Bishop Gilbert Burnet, and Ashton, who died in 1775. Besides this inner circle of friends, there was an outer ring with whom Gray shared those boyish delights which he has described in one of the stanzas of his Eton Ode:

"Say, Father Thames, for thou hast seen
Full many a sprightly race
Disporting on thy margent green
The paths of pleasure trace,
Who foremost now delight to cleave
With pliant arm thy grassy wave?

The captive linnet which enthral?
What idle progeny succeed

To chase the rolling circle's speed,
Or urge the flying ball?"

But there is no doubt that Gray's tastes and temperament drew him more to study than to sport, and even while he was at Eton he began to write verses.*

enough to find among the play exercise" in the poet's been printed, and which is

* Mr. Gosse was fortunate MSS. in Pembroke College a handwriting, which has never valuable as showing us the early ripeness of his scholarship.

In 1734 he went to Cambridge, and was for a short time a pensioner of Pembroke Hall; but in July he entered Peterhouse as a fellow-commoner. Walpole went to King's College, Cambridge, in 1735, and West was sent by his friends to Christ Church, Oxford, much against his will. It is probable that Ashton was a student at Cambridge. During Gray's residence both at Eton and at Cambridge, he owed almost everything to his mother, who supported him from the receipts of the shop kept by herself and her sister, his father, who was miserly and most cruel to his wife, providing nothing for the maintenance of his son. Gray repaid the struggles and self-sacrifice of his mother by a passionate attachment, and remembered her with tenderness till the day of his death.

During his residence at Cambridge the poet was a victim to that melancholy which endured to the end of his life. "He was considered," to use Mr. Gosse's word, "effeminate" at College, but the only proof that is given of this is one with which the most robust modern reader must sympathize, namely, that he drank tea for breakfast, while all the rest of the University, except Horace Walpole, drank beer. He accuses himself, in a letter to West, of idleness; says "all the employment of my hours may be best explained by It is a Latin theme, in seventy-three hexameter verses; its thoughts borrowed in the main from Horace and Pope, but suggestive of the author's maturer moral and elegiac manner, the boy being here seen as the father of the man.