in all nascent societies of men, where the necessaries of life force every one to think and act much for himself." This critical temper attracted him to the Edda, made him indulgent to Ossian, and led him to see more poetry in the ancient songs of Wales than most non-Celtic readers can discover there. In 1764 Evans published his Specimens of Welsh Poetry, and in that bulky quarto Gray met with a Latin prose translation of the chant written about 1158 by Gwalchmai, in praise of his master Owen Gwynedd. The same Evans gave a variety of extracts from the Welsh epic, the Gododin, and three of these fragments Gray turned into English rhyme. One has something of the concision of an epigram from the Greek mythology :— Have ye seen the tusky boar, Or the bull, with sullen roar, On surrounding foes advance ? So Caradoc bore his lance. The others are not nearly equal in poetical merit to the Scandinavian paraphrases. Gray does not seem to have shown these romances to his friends, with the same readiness that he displayed on other occasions. From critics like Hurd and Warburton he could expect no approval of themes taken from an antique civilization. Walpole, who did not see these poems till they were printed, asks:"Who can care through. what horrors a Runic savage arrived at all the joys and glories they could conceive,the supreme felicity of boozing ale out of the skull of an enemy in Odin's Hall?" This is quite a characteristic expression of that wonderful eighteenth century through which poor Gray wandered in a life-long exile. The author of the Vegtamskvida a "Runic savage"! No wonder Gray kept his "Imitations" safely out of the sight of such critics. CHAPTER VIII. LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE-ENGLISH TRAVELS. THE seven remaining years of Gray's life were even less eventful than those which we have already examined. In November 1763 he began to find that a complaint, which had long troubled him, the result of failing constitution, had become almost constant. For eight or nine months he was an acute sufferer, until in July 1764 he consented to undergo the operation without which he could not have continued to live. Dr. Wharton volunteered to come up from Durham, and, if not to perform the act, to support his friend in "the perilous hour." But Gray preferred that the Cambridge surgeon should attend him, and the operation was not only performed successfully, but the poet was able to sustain the much-dreaded suffering with fortitude. As he was beginning to get about again, the gout came in one foot, "but so tame you might have stroked it, such a minikin you might have played with it; in three or four days it had disappeared." This gout which troubled him so constantly, and was fatal to him at last, was hereditary, and not caused by any excess in eating or drinking; Gray was, in fact, singularly abstemious, and it was one of the accusations of his enemies that he affected to be so dainty that he could touch nothing less delicate than apricot marmalade. While Gray was lying ill, Lord Chancellor Hardwicke died, at the age of seventy-four, on the 16th of May, 1764. The office of Seneschal of the University was thus vacated, and there ensued a very violent contest, and the result of which was that Philip Hardwicke succeeded to his father's honours by a majority of one, and the other candidate, the notorious John, Earl of Sandwich, though supported by the aged Dr. Roger Long and other clerical magnates, was rejected. Gray, to whom the tarnished reputation of Lord Sandwich was in the highest degree abhorrent, swelled the storm of electioneering by a lampoon, The Candidate, beginning : When sly Jemmy Twitcher had smugged up his face, In harmless society guttle and scold. Lord Sandwich found that this squib was not without its instant and practical effect, and he attempted to win so dangerous an opponent to his side. What means he adopted cannot be conjectured, but they were unsuccessful. Lord Sandwich said to Cradock, "I have my private reasons for knowing Gray's absolute inveteracy." The Candidate found its way into print long after Gray's death, but only in a fragmentary form; and the same has hitherto been true of Tophet, of which I am able to give, for the first time, a complete text from the Pembroke MSS. One of Gray's particular friends, "placid Mr. Tyson of Bene't College," made a drawing of the Rev. Henry Etough, a converted Jew, a man of slanderous and violent temper, who had climbed into high preferment in the Church of England. Underneath this very rude and hideous caricature Gray wrote these lines : Thus Tophet look'd: so grinn'd the brawling fiend, Mason These two pieces, however, are very far from being the only effusions of the kind which Gray wrote. appears to have made a collection of Gray's Cambridge squibs, which he did not venture to print. A Satire upon Heads, or Never a barrel the better Herring, a comic piece in which Gray attacked the prominent heads of houses, was in existence as late as 1854, but has never been printed and has evaded my careful search. These squibs are said to have been widely circulated in Cambridge, so widely as to frighten the timid poet, and to have been retained as part of the tradition of Pembroke common-room until long after Gray's death. I am told that Mason's set of copies of these poems, of which I have seen a list, turned up, during the present century, in the library of a cathedral in the north of England. This may give some clue to their ultimate discovery; they might prove to be coarse and slight, they could not fail to be biographically interesting. In October 1764 Gray set out upon what he called his "Lilliputian travels" in the south of England. He went down by Winchester to Southampton, stayed there some weeks, and then returned to London by Salisbury, Wilton, Amesbury and Stonehenge. "I proceed to tell you," he says to Norton Nicholls, "that my health is much improved by the sea; not that I drank it, or bathed in it, as the common people do. No! I only walked by it and looked upon it." His description of Netley Abbey. in a letter to Dr. Brown, is very delicate :-" It stands in a little quiet valley, which gradually rises behind the ruins into a half-circle crowned with thick wood. Before it, on a descent, is a thicket of oaks, that serves to veil it from the broad day, and from profane eyes, only leaving a peep on both sides, where the sea appears glittering through the shade, and vessels, with their white sails, glide across and are lost again. I should tell you that the ferryman who rowed me, a lusty young fellow, told me that he would not, for all the world, pass a night at the Abbey, there were such things seen near it." Still more picturesque, indeed showing an eye for nature which was then without a precedent in modern literature, is this passage from a letter of this time to Norton Nicholls: I must not close my letter without giving you one principal event of my history; which was, that (in the course of my late tour) I set out one morning before five o'clock, the moon shining through a dark and misty autumnal air, and got to the seacoast time enough to be at the Sun's levée. I saw the clouds and dark vapours open gradually to right and left, rolling over one another in great smoky wreaths, and the tide (as it flowed gently in upon the sands) first whitening, then slightly tinged with gold and blue; and all at once a little line of insufferable brightness that (before I can write these few words) was grown to half an orb, and now to a whole one, too glorious to be distinctly seen. It is very odd it makes no figure on paper; yet I shall remember it as long as the sun, or at least as long as I endure. I wonder whether anybody ever saw it before! I hardly believe it. In November Gray was laid up again with illness, being threatened this time with blindness, a calamity |