In April of the same year, 1758, Dr. Wharton lost his eldest and at that time his only son. Gray not only wrote him a very touching letter of condolence, but some verses on the death of the child, which were in existence thirty years ago, but which I have been unable to trace. In May, Gray started on that architectural tour in the Fens, of which I have already spoken, and in June was summoned to Stoke by the illness of his aunt Mrs. Oliffe, who had a sort of paralytic stroke while walking in the garden. She recovered, however, and Gray returned to London, made a short stay at Hampton with Lord and Lady Cobham, and spent July at Strawberry Hill. In August the Garricks again visited him at Stoke, but he had hardly enough physical strength to endure their vivacity. "They are now gone, and I am not sorry for it, for I grow so old, that, I own, people in high spirits and gaiety overpower me, and entirely take away mine. I can yet be diverted. by their sallies, but if they appear to take notice of my dullness, it sinks me to nothing. I continue better than has been usual with me, in the summer, though I neither walk nor take anything: 'tis in mind only that I am weary and disagreeable." His position at Stoke, with Mrs. Oliffe laid up, and poor bed-ridden Mrs. Rogers growing daily weaker and weaker, was not an exhilarating one. Towards the end of September, Mrs. Rogers recovered her speech, which had for several years been almost unintelligible, flickered up for two or three days, and then died. She left Mrs. Oliffe joint executrix of her small property with Gray, who describes himself in November 1758 as "agreeably employed in dividing nothing with an old Harridan, who is the Spawn of Cerberus and the Dragon of Wantley." In January 1759 Mrs. Oliffe having taken herself off to her native country of Norfolk,

Gray closed the house at Stoke Pogis, and from this time forth only visited that village, which had been his home for nearly twenty years, when he was invited to stay at Stoke House. At the same time, to the distress of Dr. Brown, he ceased to reside at Pembroke, and spent the next three years in London.

CHAPTER VIL

BRITISH MUSEUM-NORTON NICHOLLS.

WHEN the Sloane Collection became national property at the death of its founder in 1753, and was incorporated under an act which styled it the British Museum, scholars and antiquaries expected to enter at once upon their inheritance. But a site and a building had to be secured, and when these were discovered, it took a long while to fit up the commodious galleries of Montagu House. On the 15th of January, 1759, the Museum was thrown open to the public, and among the throng of visitors was Gray, who had settled himself and his household gods close by, in Southampton Row, and who for some weeks had been awaiting the official Sesame. He had been seeing something of London society meanwhile, entertained by Lady Carlisle, invited to meet Rousseau, and attending concerts and plays. He gives some account of the performance of Metastasio's Ciro Riconosciuto, with Cocchi's agreeable music.

The British Museum he found "indeed a treasure." It was at first so crowded that "the corner room in the basement, furnished with a wainscot table and twenty chairs," was totally inadequate to supply the demand, and in order to be comfortable it was necessary to book a place a fortnight beforehand. This pressure, however. only lasted

for a very short time; curiosity was excited by the novelty, but quickly languished, and this little room was found quite ample enough to contain the scholars who frequented it. To reach it, the intrepid reader had to pass in darkness, like Jonah, through the belly of a whale, from which he emerged into the room of the Keeper of Printed Books, Dr. Peter Templeman, a physician who had received this responsible post for having translated Norden's Travels, and who resigned it, wearily, in 1761, for a more congenial appointment at the Society of Arts. By July 1759 the rush on the reading-room had entirely subsided, and on the 23rd of that month Gray mentions to Mason that there are only five readers that day. These were Gray himself, Dr. Stukeley the antiquary, and three hack-writers who were copying MSS. for hire.

A little later on, Gray became an amused witness of those factions which immediately broke out among the staff of the British Museum, and which practically lasted until a very few years ago. People who were the diverted or regretful witnesses of dissensions between a late Principal Librarian and the scholars whom he governed may be consoled to learn that things were just as bad in 1759. Dr. Gowin Knight, the first Principal Librarian, a pompous martinet with no pretence to scholarship, made life so impossible to the keepers and assistants that the Museum was completely broken into a servile and a rebellious faction. Gray, moving noiselessly to and fro, noted all this and smiled; "the whole society, trustees and all, are up in arms, like the fellows of a college." Dr. Knight made no concessions; the keepers presently refused to salute him when they passed his window, and Gray and his fellow-readers were at last obliged to make a détour every day. because Dr. Knight

had walled up a passage in order to annoy the keepers. Meanwhile the trustees were spending 5007. a year more than their income, and Gray confidently predicts that before long all the books and the crocodiles and Jonah's whale will be put up to public auction.

At Mr Jermyn's, in Southampton Row, Bloomsbury, Gray was very comfortably settled. It was a cleaner Bloomsbury than we know now, and a brighter. Gray from his bedroom-window looked out on a south-west garden-wall covered with flowering jessamine through June and July. There had been roses, too, in this London garden. Gray must always have flowers about him, and he trudged down to Covent Garden every day, for his sweet peas and pinks, scarlet martagon-lilies, double stocks, and flowering marjoram. His drawing-room looked over Bedford Gardens, and a fine stretch of upland fields, crowned at last, against the sky, by the villages of Highgate and Hampstead. St. Giles's was at his back, with many a dirty court and alley, but in front of him against the morning light, there was little but sunshine and greenery and fresh air. He seems to notice nature here on the outskirts of London far more narrowly than at Cambridge; there are little parenthetical notes, asides to himself, about "fair white flying clouds at 9 in the morning" of a July day, or wheelbarrows heaped up with small black cherries on an August afternoon. He bought twenty walnuts for a penny on the 8th of September, and enjoyed a fine perdrigon-plum upon the 4th.

Meanwhile he is working every day at the Museum, feasting upon literary plums and walnuts, searching the original Ledger-Book of the Signet, copying Sir Thomas Wyatt's Defence and his poems, discovering "several odd things unknown to our historians," and