GRAY. CHAPTER I. CHILDHOOD AND EARLY COLLEGE LIFE. THOMAS GRAY was born at his father's house in Cornhill, on the 26th of December, 1716. Of his ancestry nothing is known. Late in life, when he was a famous poet, Baron Gray of Gray in Forfarshire claimed him as a relation, but with characteristic serenity he put the suggestion from him. "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 of his connexion with this ancient family is that he possessed a bloodstone seal, which had belonged to his father, engraved with Lord Gray's arms, gules a Lion rampant, within a bordure engrailed argent. These have been accepted at Pembroke College as the poet's arms, but as a matter of fact we may say that he sprang on both sides from the lower-middle classes. His paternal grandfather had been a successful merchant, and died leaving Philip, apparently his only son, a fortune of 10,000. Through various vicissitudes this money passed, at length almost B reaching the poet's hands in no very much diminished quantity, for Philip Gray seems to have been as clever in business as he was extravagant. He was born in 1676. Towards his thirtieth year he married Miss Dorothy Antrobus, a Buckinghamshire lady, about twenty years of age, who, with her sister Mary, a young woman three years her senior, kept a milliner's shop in the city. They belonged, however, to a genteel family, for the remaining sister, Anna, was the wife of a prosperous country lawyer, Mr. Jonathan Rogers, and the two brothers, Robert and John Antrobus, were fellows of Cambridge colleges, and afterwards tutors at Eton. These five persons take a prominent place in the subsequent life of the poet, whereas he never mentions any of the Grays. His father had certainly one sister, Mrs. Oliffe, a woman of violent temper, who married a gentleman of Norfolk, and was well out of the way till after the death of Gray's mother, when she began to haunt him, and only died two or three months before he did. She seems to have resembled Philip Gray in character, for the poet, always singularly respectful and loyal to his other elderly relations, calls her "the Spawn of Cerberus upon the Dragon of Wantley." Dorothy Gray was unfortunate in her married life; her husband was violent, jealous, and probably mad. Of her twelve children, Thomas was the only one whom she reared, but Mason is donhts wrepa saying that the eleven who diec by infantile convulsions. Mrs. 66 in ner "all manner of case " of the expense of providing apparel for her children." Thomas, however, certainly would have died as an infant, but that his mother, finding him in a fit, opened a vein with her scissors, by that means relieving the determination of blood to the brain. His father neglected him, and he was brought up by his mother and his aunt Mary. He also mentions with touching affection, in speaking of the death of a Mrs. Bonfoy in 1763, that "she taught me to pray." Home life at Cornhill was rendered miserable by the cruelties of the father, and it seems that the boy's uncle, Robert Antrobus, took him away to his own house at Burnham, in Bucks. This gentleman was a fellow of Peterhouse, as his younger brother Thomas was of King's College, Cambridge. With Robert the boy studied botany, and became learned, according to Horace Walpole, in the virtues of herbs and simples. Unfortunately this uncle died on January 23, 1729, at the age of fifty; there still exists a copy of Waller's Poems, in which Gray has written his own name, with this date; perhaps it was an heirloom of his uncle. In one of Philip Gray's fits of extravagance he seems to have had a full-length of his son painted, about this time, by the fashionable portrait-painter of the day, Jonathan Richardson the elder. This picture is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. The head is good in colour and modelling; a broad pale brow, sharp nose and chin, large eyes, and a pert expression give a lively idea of the precocious and not very healthy young gentleman of thirteen. He is dressed in a blue satin coat, lined with pale shot silk, and crosses his stockinged legs so as to display dapper slippers of russet leather. His father, however, absolutely refused to educate him, and he was sent to Eton, about 1727, under the auspices of his uncles, and at the expense of his mother. On the 26th of April of the same year, a smart child of ten with the airs of a little dancing-master, a child who |