Introduction 1. THE LIFE OF GRAY THOMAS GRAY, one of the most eminent men of letters of his time, was born in Cornhill, London, on December 26, 1716, the son of Philip and Dorothy Antrobus Gray. He was the fifth of twelve children; all the others died in infancy. His father, a well-to-do merchant, was extremely eccentric, not to say brutal, and was probably insane. He refused to educate the lad, and the expense of his education was borne by his mother, who with her sister Mary "kept a kind of India warehouse." About 1727 Thomas Gray was sent to Eton College, where his uncle Robert Antrobus was assistant to Dr. George, the principal. At Eton Gray formed lasting friendships with Horace Walpole, son of the Prime Minister; Richard West, son of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland; and Thomas Ashton, nicknamed “ Plato.” The four formed what they called "the Quadruple Alliance," which produced at least the interesting letters collected by Mr. Tovey in Gray and His Friends. After seven years of Eton, Gray was ready for the university. Robert Antrobus was a fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and his younger brother Thomas was a fellow of King's College. It was natural, therefore, that their nephew should proceed to Cambridge; thither 1 H. Walpole, Letters, ed. Mrs. Toynbee, i. 10, 20. Thomas Gray went in 1734, and after a short stay at Pembroke Hall, he became on July 3 a pensioner of Peterhouse. The curriculum, especially the mathematical part, did not appeal to him, and he soon decided (Letters, ed. Tovey, i. 3) not to take a degree. He was not athletic; he had no exercise; and he was by some considered effeminate, partly because he drank tea for breakfast while others for the most part drank beer. Melancholy early "marked him for her own"; and the dulness of life never ceased to weigh on his spirits." But he was constantly doubtless too constantly busy, with his reading of the Latin, Greek, and Italian authors. He became familiar with Ovid, Horace, and Livy. He wrote Richard West (May 8, 1736) that he had been having a game at quoits with Statius. He read Virgil under a venerable beech on his uncle's estate at Burnham; in a Latin letter to West he quotes Lucretius, Poseidippus, and Homer. He was an ardent Greek scholar at a time when interest in Greek studies at Cambridge was at a low ebb. Gray left Cambridge in September, 1738, and after staying for a time at his father's house, accepted Horace Walpole's invitation 2 to join him in a tour of the Continent. Leaving Dover on March 29, 1739, the two men spent two months, in Paris, three in Rheims, and two at Lyons. Gray's letters to his father and mother reveal a mind alert, sensitive, and unconventional. At a time when men were only repelled by the horrors" See his Letters, ed. Tovey, i. 1, 3, 6, 9, 95, 103, 196, 281, 301, 334, 345, ii. 2, 14, 23, 24, 26, 36, 48, 54, 165; Works, ed. Gosse, iii. 167, 181, 240, 261, etc. 2 Cf. Walpole, Letters, ed. Mrs. Toynbee, viii. 259. of Alpine travel, he writes to West of his journey up to the Grande Chartreuse: There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief." Crossing the Alps, Gray and Walpole visited Turin, Genoa, which Gray thought a charming place," and Bologna, arriving at Florence about the middle of December. Here Gray began his De Principiis Cogitandi. In the spring they visited Siena, Rome, and Naples, returning to Florence in July. At Reggio a quarrel occurred between the two travelers, occasioned probably by Walpole's somewhat supercilious treatment of his sensitive companion; 1 and the two parted. Gray returned home by way of Padua, Verona, Milan, Turin, and Lyons, visiting a second time the Grande Chartreuse and writing in the album his ode O tu severi relligio loci. Two months after his return, on November 6, 1741, his father died of gout. About a year later his mother and aunt went to West End, Stoke Pogis, to live with their recently widowed sister Mrs. Rogers. I The year 1742 is memorable in Gray's life for his prolific composition of English verse. He began with a tragedy, Agrippina, inspired by Racine; but receiving frankly hostile criticism from his friend West, he abandoned it. At Stoke Pogis, in June, 1742, he wrote his Ode to Spring. In August he wrote his touching sonnet on the death of West; his Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College; and his Hymn to Adversity. In the autumn, too, he began the Elegy, which was to lie un 1 See Tovey, Gray and His Friends, pp. 5-12, and Walpole's letter to Mason, March 2, 1773, in his Letters, ed. Mrs. Toynbee, viii. 245 f. finished for seven years. Truly, had physical energy and ambition combined to spur on the young poet, this year had been an auspicious beginning of a great poetical career. The next six years of Gray's life, however, were to be devoted not to composition but to study. After his father's death, supposing his means to be ample, Gray had begun to read law in London; but the condition of the family finances after the death of his uncle Jonathan Rogers (in October, 1742) made it impossible to go on with the study of law. So he returned in the winter of 1742 to Peterhouse, and taking his degree of LL.B. in 1744,' settled down as a permanent resident of the college. The Greek authors claimed his attention, and he read widely and carefully, making notes on Plato, Aristotle, Strabo, Aristophanes, the Anthology, etc., and projecting editions of some of these writers. During these years he saw little of Cambridge society, for which he had a certain contempt; 2 but he made occasional journeys to London. Through the mediation of "a Lady who wished well to both parties," in November, 1745,3 he became reconciled to Walpole, and thereafter saw him frequently. He seems also to have known Pope (this is implied in his letter to Walpole, February 3, 1746); and he is said to have met Hogarth at a dinner given by Walpole. In 1748 he began a philosophical poem on The Alliance of Education and Government. He explained to Wharton that he intended to Cf. Letters, ed. Tovey, i. 113, n. I. 2 See his Hymn to Ignorance, written in 1742 or 1743. show that education and government ❝ must necessarily concur to produce great and useful Men." But when Montesquieu's L'esprit des lois appeared in 1749, Gray found that the French author had anticipated some of his best thoughts, and losing interest in his poem, soon ceased work upon it. The death of his aunt Mary Antrobus, on November 5, 1749, seems to have induced Gray to take up his Elegy again; and at length, on June 12, 1750, he finished it and sent it to Walpole. In this place criticism of the now classic poem is entirely superfluous. It is interesting, to those who love dates, to note that the Elegy in a Country Churchyard was finished exactly a century before the publication of In Memoriam, and that even Tennyson himself, though he strove to express universal feeling about death, did not succeed in coming so near the heart of mankind and in saying so exquisitely what the living ever think in regard to the dead. Recluse though he might be, the man who could write the Elegy had not lost his humanity. On February 16, 1751, the Elegy was published in a large quarto pamphlet and was immediately and prodigiously successful. While still in manuscript the Elegy had been read by Lady Cobham, Gray's neighbor at Stoke, who sent her guest Lady Schaub and her niece Miss Harriet Speed 2 to call on the poet. The incidents of this call and the one Gray made in return form the material of the amusing jeu d'esprit entitled A Long Story, which Gray wrote in the autumn. I Letters, ed. Tovey, i. 192. 2 Cf. Letters, ed. Tovey, i. 351, n. 3. |