EDITED WITH

INTRODUCTION AND NOTES

BY

JOHN BRADSHAW, LL.D.

INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS, MADRAS

EDITOR OF MILTON'S POETICAL WORKS AND OF AN ENGLISH ANTHOLOGY

London

MACMILLAN AND CO.

AND NEW YORK

1891

[All rights reserved]

PREFATORY NOTE.

THIS edition of Gray's Poems forms one of a series, and hence has to conform in certain respects to the general plan of that series-as regards the text, which is only a selection from the Poems, and in the nature of the Notes, which are intended for school use and for students in Colleges in India in particular.

The first ten poems are the ten published by Dodsley in 1768, that edition, corrected by Gray, representing all of his poetry that he cared to give to the world. These therefore in most editions of Gray are thus placed in the order in which he arranged them, and before poems written prior to some of them but not published in his life-time. In the Introduction will be found a list with particulars of all Gray's other poetical writings and fragments of verse; and in the Notes prefatory remarks to each poem in this edition, giving its history or the occasion on which it was written, etc.

I have made the edition of 1768 my authority for all the poems it contains, and, though not adopting Gray's peculiar spelling and use of capitals, both which are capricious, I have faithfully followed his text, while nearly all modern reprints have reproduced or added to the errors in Mason's and Mitford's editions. Thus in such standard works as Ward's English Poets, the Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics, Hales' Longer English Poems, Gosse's Works of Gray, and Rolfe's Select Poems, not to speak of countless school-books and popular editions, the

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