advantage of it, he freely told me of my faults. I declared I did not desire to hear them, nor would correct them. You will not wonder that with the dignity of his spirit, and the obstinate carelessness of mine, the breach must have grown wider till we became incompatible.

This is the last word on the subject of the quarrel, and after a statement so generous, frank and lucid, it only remains to remind the reader that these were lads of twenty-three and twenty-four respectively, that they had been thrown far too exclusively and too long on one another for entertainment, and that probably Walpole is too hard upon himself in desiring to defend Gray. There is not the slightest trace in his letters or in Gray's of any rudeness on Walpole's part. The main point is that the quarrel was made up in 1744, and that after some coldness on Gray's side, they became as intimate as ever for the remainder of their lives.

Walpole stayed at Reggio, and Gray's heart would have stirred with remorse had he known that his old friend was even then sickening for a quinsy, of which he might have died, if the excellent Joseph Spence, Oxford professor of Poetry and the friend of Pope, had not happened to be passing through Reggio with Lord Lincoln, and had not given up his whole time to nursing him. Meanwhile the unconscious Gray, sore with pride, passed on to Venice, where he spent two months, in the company of a Mr. Whitehead and a Mr. Chute. In July he hired a courier, passed leisurely through the north of Italy, visiting Padua and Verona, reached Turin on the 15th of August, and began to cross the Alps next day. He stayed once more at the Grande Chartreuse, and inscribed in the Album of the Fathers his famous Alcaic Ode, beginning "Oh Tu, severi Religio loci," which is

the best known and practically the last of his Latin poems. In this little piece of twenty lines we first recognize that nicety of expression, that delicate lapidary style, that touch of subdued romantic sentiment, which distinguish the English poetry of Gray; while it is perhaps not fantastic to detect in its closing lines the first dawn of those ideas which he afterwards expanded into the Elegy in a Country Churchyard. The original MS. in the album became an object of great interest to visitors to the hospice after Gray's death, and was highly prized by the fathers. It exists, however, no longer; it was destroyed by a rabble from Grenoble during the French Revolution. Gray reached Lyons on the 25th of August, and returned to London on the 1st of September, 1741, after an absence from England of exactly two years and five months. Walpole, being cured of his complaint, arrived in England ten days later. good-natured letter from Henry Conway, suggesting a renewal of intimacy between the friends, Gray returned an answer of the coldest civility, and Horace Walpole now disappears from our narrative for three years.

To a

CHAPTER IIL

STOKE-POGIS-DEATH OF WEST-FIRST ENGLISH POEMS.

ON his return from Italy Gray found his father lying very ill, exhausted by successive attacks of gout, and unable to rally from them. Two months later, on the 6th of November, 1741, he died in a paroxysm of the disease. His last act had been to squander his fortune, which seems to have remained until that time almost unimpaired, on building a country-house at Wanstead. Not only

had he not written to tell his son of this adventure, but he had actually contrived to conceal it from his wife. Mason is not correct in saying that it became necessary to sell this house immediately after Philip Gray's death, or that it fetched 20007, less than it had cost; it remained in the possession of Mrs. Gray. With the ruins of a fortune Mrs. Gray and her sister, Mary Antrobus, seem to have kept house for a year in Cornhill, till, at the death of their brother-in-law, Mr. Jonathan Rogers, on the 21st of October, 1742, they joined their widowed sister Anna in her house at Stoke-Pogis, in Buckinghamshire. During these months they wound up their private business in Cornhill, and disposed of their shop on tolerably advantageous terms; and apparently Gray first imagined that the family property would be enough to provide amply for him also. Accordingly he began the study of the law,

that being the profession for which he had been originally intended. For six months or more he seems to have stayed in London, applying himself rather languidly to common law, and giving his real thoughts and sympathies to those who demanded them most, his mother and his unfortunate friend Richard West. The latter, indeed, he found in a miserable condition; in June 1740 that young man, having lived at the Temple till he was sick of it, left chambers, finding that neither the prestige of his grandfather, nor the reputation of his uncle, Sir Thomas Burnet, advanced him at all in their profession. He was without heart in his work, his talents were not drawn out in the legal direction, and his affectionate and somewhat feminine nature suffered from loneliness and want of congenial society. He had hoped that Walpole would be able to find him a post in the diplomatic service, or in the army, but this was not possible. Gray strongly disapproved of the step West took in leaving the Temple, and wrote him from Florence a letter full of kindly and cordial good sense; but when he arrived in London he found West in a far more broken condition of mind and body than he had anticipated. In extreme agitation West confided to his friend a terrible secret which he had discovered, and which Gray preserved in silence until the close of his life, when he told it to Norton Nicholls. It is a painful story which need not be repeated here, but which involved the reputation of West's mother with the name of his late father's secretary, a Mr. Williams, whom she finally married when her son was dead. West had not the power to rally from this shock, and the comfort of Gray's society only slightly delayed the end. In March 1742 he was obliged to leave town, and went to stay with a friend at Popes,

near Hatfield, Herts, where he lingered three months, and died.

The winter which Gray and West spent together in London was remarkable in the career of the former as the beginning of his most prolific year of poetical composition, a vocal year to be followed by six of obstinate silence. The first original production in English verse was the fragment of a tragedy of Agrippina, of which one complete scene, and a few odd lines, have been preserved in his works. In this attempt at the drama he was inspired by Racine, and neither Addison, nor Aaron Hill, nor James Thomson, had contrived to be more cold or academic a playwright. The subject, which had been treated in tragedy more than a century earlier by May, was well adapted for stately stage-effect, and the scheme. of Gray's play, so far as we know it, was not without interest. But he was totally unfitted to write for the boards, and even the beauty of versification in Agrippina cannot conceal from us for a moment its ineptitude. All that exists of the play is little else than a soliloquy in which the Empress defies the rage of Nero, and shows that she possesses

A heart that glows with the pure Julian fire,

by daring her son to the contest:

Around thee call

The gilded swarm that wantons in the sunshine

Of thy full favour; Seneca be there

In gorgeous phrase of laboured eloquence

To dress thy plea, and Burrhus strengthen it
With his plain soldier's oath, and honest seeming.
Against thee-liberty and Agrippina !

The world the prize! and fair befall the victors!