ridden and with Mrs. Oliffe for its other inmate. The hospitable Whartons seem again to have taken pity on him, and he went from Jermyn Street up to Durham to spend with them Christmas of this same year, 1753.

Walpole remarked that Gray was "in flower" during these years 1750-1755. It was the blossoming of a shrub which throws out only one bud each season, and that bud sometimes nipped by an untimely frost. The rose on Gray's thorn for 1754 was an example of these blighted flowers, that never fully expanded. The Ode on Vicissitude, which was found after the poet's death, in a pocket-book of that year, should have been one of his finest productions, but it is unrevised and hopelessly truncated. Poor Mason rushed in where a truer poet might have feared to tread, and clipped the straggling lines, and finished it; six complete stanzas, however, are the genuine work of Gray. The verse-form has a catch in the third line, which is perhaps the most delicate metrical effect Gray ever attained; while some of the nature-painting in the poem is really exquisite.

New-born flocks, in rustic dance,
Frisking ply their feeble feet;
Forgetful of their wintry trance,

The birds his presence greet:

But chief the sky-lark warbles high

His trembling thrilling ecstasy,

And, lessening from the dazzled sight,

Melts into air and liquid light.

Here is a stanza which might almost be Wordsworth's :

See the wretch, that long has tost
On the thorny bed of pain,
At length repair his vigour lost,
And breathe and walk again :

The meanest floweret of the vale,

The simplest note that swells the gale,

The common sun, the air, the skies,

To him are opening paradise.

That graceful trifler with metre, the sprightly Gresset, had written an Epitre à ma Sour to which Gray frankly avowed that he owed the idea of his poem on Vicissitude. But it was only a few commonplaces which the English poet borrowed from the French one, who might, indeed, remind him that

Mille spectacles, qu'autrefois

On voyait avec nonchalance,

Transportent aujourd'hui, présentant des appas
Inconnus à l'indifférence,

but was quite incapable of Gray's music and contemplative felicities. This Ode on Vicissitude seems, in some not very obvious way, to be connected with the death of Pope. It is possible that these were the "few autumn verses " which Gray began to write on that occasion. His manner of composition, his slow, half-hearted, desultory touch, his whimsical fits of passing inspiration, are unique in their kind; there never was a professional poet whose mode was so thoroughly that of the amateur.

A short prose treatise, first printed in 1814, and named by the absurd Mathias Architectura Gothica, although the subject of it is purely Norman architecture, seems to belong to this year 1754. Gray was the first man in England to understand architecture scientifically, and his taste was simply too pure to be comprehended in an age. that took William Kent for its architectural prophet. Even among those persons of refined feeling who desired to cultivate a taste for old English buildings, there was a sad absence of exact knowledge. Akenside thought that

the ruins of Persepolis formed a beautiful example of the Gothic style; and we know that Horace Walpole dazzled his contemporaries with the gimcrack pinnacles of Strawberry Hill. We may see from Bentley's frontispiece to the Elegy, where a stucco moulding is half torn away, and reveals a pointed arch of brick-work, that even among the elect the true principles of Gothic architecture were scarely understood. What Georgian amateurs really admired was a grotto with cockle-shells and looking-glass, such as the Greatheads made at Guy's Cliff, or such follies in foliage as Shenstone perpetrated at Leasowes. Gray strove hard to clear his memory of all such trifling, and to arm his reason against arguments such as those of Pococke, who held that the Gothic arch was a degradation of the Moorish cupola, or of Batty Langley, who invented five orders in a new style of his own. Gray's treatise on Norman architecture is so sound and learned that it is much to be regretted that he has not left us more of his architectural essays. He formed his opinions from personal observation and measurement. Among the Pembroke MSS. there are copious notes of a tour in the Fens, during which he jotted down the characteristics of all the principal minsters, as far as Crowland and Boston. It is not too much to say that Gray was the first modern student of the history of architecture. Norton Nicholls has recorded that when certain would-be people of taste were wrangling about the style in which some ancient building was constructed, Gray cut the discussion short by saying, in the spirit of Mr. Ruskin, "Call it what you please, but allow that it is beautiful." He did not approve of Walpole's Gothic constructions at Strawberry Hill, and frankly told him, when he was shown the gilding and the glass, that he had "degenerated into finery."

CHAPTER VI.

THE PINDARIC ODES.

Ir is not known at what time Gray resolved on composing poems which should resemble in stanzaic structure the triumphal odes or epinikia of Pindar, but it is certain that towards the close of 1754 he completed one such elaborate lyric. On the 26th of December of that year he gave the finishing touches to an "ode in the Greek manner," and sent it from Cambridge to Dr. Wharton, with the remark, "If this be as tedious to you as it is grown to me, I shall be sorry that I sent it you. I desire you would by no means suffer this to be copied, nor even show it, unless to very few, and especially not to mere scholars, that can scan all the measures in Pindar, and say the scholia by heart." Months later, Mason was pleading for a copy, but in vain. The poem thrown off so indifferently was that now known to us as The Progress of Poesy, and it marked a third and final stage in Gray's poetical development. In the early odes he had written for his contemporaries; in the Elegy in a Country Churchyard he had written for all the world; in the Pindaric Odes he was now to write for poets. In the Elegy he had dared to leave those trodden paths of phraseology along which the critics of the hour, the quibbling Hurds and Warburtons, could follow him step by step, but his

startling felicities had carried his readers captive by their appeal to a common humanity. He was now about to launch upon a manner of writing in which he could no longer be accompanied by the plaudits of the vulgar, and where his style could no longer appeal with security to the sympathy of the critics. He was now, in other words, about to put out his most original qualities in poetry.

That he could not hope for popularity, he was aware at the outset; "be assured," he consoled his friends, "that my taste for praise is not like that of children for fruit ; if there were nothing but medlars and blackberries in the world, I could be very well content to go without any at all;" he could wait patiently for the suffrage of his peers. The very construction of the poem was a puzzle to his friends, although it is one of the most intelligibly and rationally built of all the odes in the language. It is in point of fact, a poem of three stanzas, in an elaborately consistent verse-form, with forty-one lines in each stanza. The length of these periods is relieved by the regular division of each stanza into strophe, antistrophe, and epode, the same plan having been used by no previous English poet but Congreve, who had written in 1705 a learned and graceful Discourse on the Pindarique Ode, which Gray was possibly acquainted with. Congreve's practice, however, had been as unsatisfactory as his theory was excellent, and Gray was properly the first poet to comprehend and follow the mode of Pindar.

Mr. Matthew Arnold has pointed out that the evolution of The Progress of Poesy is no less noble and sound than its style. It is worthy of remark that the power of evolution has not been common among lyrical poets even of a high rank. Even in Milton it is strangely absent, and we feel that all his odes, beautiful as they are, do not bud and