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EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY

Pocket Edition

GRAY

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

LONDON. BOMBAY CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK. BOSTON CHICAGO
ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. TORONTO

ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS

GRAY

BY

EDMUND GOSSE

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

1909

First Edition 1882
Reprinted 1889, 1902, 1906,
Library Edition 1902
Pocket Edition 1909

THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

PREFATORY NOTE.

As a biographical study, this little volume differs in one important respect from its predecessors in this series. Expansion, instead of compression, has had to be my method in treating the existing lives of Gray. Of these, none have hitherto been published except in connexion with some part of his works, and none has attempted to go at all into detail. Mitford's, which is the fullest, would occupy, in its purely biographical section, not more than thirty of these pages.

The materials I have used are chiefly taken from the following sources :—

I. The Life and Letters of Gray, edited by Mason in 1775. This work consists of a very meagre thread of biography connecting a collection of letters, which would be more valuable, if Mason had not tampered with them, altering, omitting, and re-dating at his own free will.

II. Mitford's Life of Thomas Gray, prefixed to the 1814 edition of the Poems. This is very valuable so far as it goes. The Rev. John Mitford was a young clergyman who was born ten years after the death of Gray, and who made it the business of his life to collect from such survivors as remembered Gray all the documents and anecdotes that he could secure. This is the life which was altered and enlarged, to be prefixed to the Eton Gray, in 1845.

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