John Armstrong (1709-1779) was a close disciple of Thomson, whom he followed

middle of the eighteenth century everything

of free art back to the bondage of rhetoric, and the work of Gray and Collins

Thomas Gray

was instantly retarded and parodied by the frosty talent of Akenside, in whose hands the newly found lyrical fire was turned to ice. The impact of Gray on Europe was delayed, but could not be suppressed. The Elegy in a Country Churchyard is the direct precursor, not only of Chateaubriand, but of Lamartine, and is the most characteristic single poem of the eighteenth century.

Thomas Gray (17161771) was the son of Philip Gray, a scrivener, and his wife Dorothy Antrobus; he was born in Cornhill on the 26th of December 1716. He was the only one of his parents' twelve children who survived infancy, and he was only saved by the desperate courage of his mother, who, when he was Philip Gray was of

attacked by a convulsion, opened a vein with her scissors.

a jealous and tyrannical disposition, and although he was well-to-do, he would contribute nothing to the support of his wife or child. The former kept a milliner's shop, and the latter was taken by a maternal uncle to his own house at Burnham, and in 1727 sent, at his mother's expense, to Eton. He made friends with Horace Walpole and Richard West. In 1734 he was removed to Cambridge, where he was entered as a pensioner first at Pembroke Hall and then at Peterhouse; from 1735 to 1738 he had the company of Horace Walpole at Cambridge, and he was already beginning to write verse, mostly in Latin. He was very unhappy, however, at the University, which he calls "that pretty collection of desolate animals," and he revolted against the deadness of the curriculum. In September 1738 he left Cambridge, and six months later he started

in company with Horace Walpole for a three years' tour on the Continent. The friends went first of all to Paris, where they stayed two months, and saw a good deal of fashionable and of literary society. They then settled for three months at Rheims, where they enjoyed very cordial hospitality. In the autumn of 1739 they were sauntering through France; they loitered a while in Geneva, and then,

HE Curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind flowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

protected by "muffs, hoods, and masks of beaver, fur boots and bearskins," they ventured over the Alps in November. This adventure deeply impressed the imagination of Gray; "not a precipice," he said, "not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry." All through 1740 the friends were together in Italy, but in the following May, while at Reggio, they quarrelled, and Gray returned alone to England. In November 1741 his father died, and was found to have

squandered the greater part of his fortune. Gray spent the winter of this year in London with West, and he now began to write English poetry; of his early tragedy of Agrippina only a fragment survives. In June 1742 West died, and Gray went down to Stoke Pogis, where one of his uncles had a house. Here he wrote his Ode to Spring, the Eton Ode, the Hymn to Adversity, and began the Elegy in a Country Churchyard. His uncle now died, and Gray's mother joined her two sisters in the house at Stoke Pogis, which now became Gray's occasional home until his death. He had given up the study of the law, and now, for cheapness' sake, he resolved to reside in Cambridge. In the winter of 1742 he proceeded to Peterhouse, and there for two years is lost to sight. In 1744 the difference between Gray and Walpole was made up, and the former began to correspond again with the latter and with other old acquaintances; in 1746 Walpole took a house in Windsor, so that, when Gray was at Stoke, the friends could spend one day of every week together. In 1747 Gray printed, in folio, his Eton Ode, and wrote the ode to Walpole's cat. On his thirtieth birthday he described himself as "lazy and listless, and old, and vexed, and perplexed"; but he was cheered up by the enthusiasm of a new friend, William Mason, afterwards his biographer, "a wellmeaning creature." His favourite aunt, Miss Mary Antrobus, died in November 1749, and her funeral seems to have led Gray to finish the Elegy which he had sketched seven years earlier. This famous poem was published by Dodsley in

Title-page of Gray's "Odes"

In

quarto in February 1751, and was greatly successful from the very first. 1753 Gray's poems were first collected, in folio, with plates by Richard Bentley ; in March of that year his mother died; his exquisite epitaph may still be read on her tombstone at Stoke Pogis. In 1754 he completed, in his slow way, The Progress of Poesy, and, in 1757, The Bard; these were published together, as Odes by Mr. Gray, in the latter year. In 1756 a cruel practical joke was played on the poet by some coarse undergraduates, who raised a cry of fire, and induced him to descend in his night-gown into a tub of water. Failing to obtain redress from the college authorities, he transferred himself from Peterhouse, where he had no intimates, to Pembroke, which was full of his friends. He was welcomed, and he made this college his

Cambridge home for the rest of his life. He was now able to live in greater comfort, since, the ladies whom he had supported being dead, he sank part of his little property in an annuity. Moreover, in 1759 he took a house in Bloomsbury, and was practically absent from Cambridge for three years, mainly engaged in studying early English and Icelandic poetry at the recently-opened British Museum. The final years of Gray's life were extremely uneventful; they were mainly spent, in great retirement and

constantly declining health, in Cambridge, diversified by "Lilliputian travels" through portions of England and Scotland. In 1768 he collected the poems of his lifetime into one slender volume, and was appointed Professor of Modern Literature at Cambridge, but delivered no lectures. In 1769 he made his celebrated journey to the Cumbrian Lakes, and wrote the Journal, in which for the first time the sublimity of that scenery was properly celebrated. In the same year Gray formed the last, and one of the most ardent of his friendships, that with the brilliant young Swiss, Charles de Bonstetten. He hoped to follow his young companion to Switzerland, he died of suppressed gout in

but lacked the strength, and on the 30th of July 1771 his rooms at Pembroke College, having been taken ill at dinner in hall six nights before. He was buried at Stoke Pogis. At the time of his death Gray was "perhaps the most learned man in Europe." He was a little plump person, very shy, with a fund of latent humour; the tottering and gingerly way in which he walked was the subject of ridicule, and he was altogether too delicate for the rough age he lived in. His admirable Letters, first published in 1775, revealed sides of his character previously unsuspected, and greatly to his honour.