which were posthumously published from a MS. torn at the end. In the same year Gray’s mother died and was buried in the churchyard at Stoke Poges, the scene of the “Elegy,” in the same grave with Mary Antrobus. A visit to his friend Dr Wharton at Durham later in the year revives his earlier impressions of that bolder scenery which is henceforth to be in the main the framework of his muse. Already in 1752 he had almost completed “The Progress of Poesy,” in which, and in “The Bard,” the imagery is largely furnished forth by mountain and torrent. The latter poem long held fire; Gray was stimulated to finish it by hearing the blind Welsh harper Parry at Cambridge. Both odes were the first-fruits of the press which Walpole had set up at Strawberry Hill, and were printed together there in 1757. They are genuinely Pindaric, that is, with corresponding strophes, antistrophes and epodes. As the Greek motto prefixed to them implies, they were vocal to the intelligent only; and these at first were few. But the odes, if they did not attain the popularity of the “Elegy,” marked an epoch in the history of English poetry, and the influence of “The Bard” may be traced even in that great but very fruitful imposture, the pseudo-Ossian of Macpherson. Gray yields to the impulse of the Romantic movement; he has long been an admirer of ballad poetry; before he wrote “The Bard” he had begun to study Scandinavian literature, and the two “Norse Odes,” written in 1761, were in style and metrical form strangely anticipative of Coleridge and Scott. Meanwhile his Cambridge life had been vexed by the freaks of the fellow-commoners of Peterhouse, a peculiarly riotous set. He had suffered great inconvenience for a time by the burning of his property in Cornhill, and so nervous was he on the subject of fire that he had provided himself with a rope-ladder by which he might descend from his college window. Under this window a hunting-party of these rude lads raised in the early morning the cry of fire; the poet’s night-capped head appeared and was at once withdrawn. This, or little more than this, was the simple fact out of which arose the legend still current at Cambridge. The servile authorities of Peterhouse treated Gray’s complaints with scant respect, and he migrated to Pembroke College. “I left my lodgings,” he said, “because the rooms were noisy, and the people of the house dirty.”
In 1758 died Mrs Rogers, and Gray describes himself as employed at Stoke in “dividing nothing” between himself and the surviving aunt, Mrs Oliffe, whom he calls “the spawn of Cerberus and the Dragon of Wantley.” In 1759 he availed himself of the MS. treasures of the British Museum, then for the first time open to the public, made a very long sojourn in town, and in 1761 witnessed the coronation of George III., of which to his friend Brown of Pembroke he wrote a very vivacious account. In his last years he revealed a craving for a life less sedentary than heretofore. He visited various picturesque districts of Great Britain, exploring great houses and ruined abbeys; he was the pioneer of the modern tourist, noting and describing in the spirit now of the poet, now of the art-critic, now of the antiquary. In 1762 he travelled in Yorkshire and Derbyshire; in 1764 in the Lowlands of Scotland, and thence went to Southampton and its neighbourhood. In 1765 he revisits Scotland; he is the guest of Lord Strathmore at Glamis; and revels in “those monstrous creatures of God,” the Highland mountains. His most notable achievement in this direction was his journey among the English lakes, of which he wrote an interesting account to Wharton; and even in 1770, the year before his death, he visited with his young friend Norton Nicholls “five of the most beautiful counties of the kingdom,” and descended the Wye for 40 m. In all these quests he displays a physical energy which surprises and even perplexes us. His true academic status was worthily secured in 1768, when the duke of Grafton offered him the professorship of modern history which in 1762 he had vainly endeavoured to obtain from Bute. He wrote in 1769 the “Installation Ode” upon the appointment of Grafton as chancellor of the university. It was almost the only instance in which he successfully executed a task, not, in the strictest sense, self-imposed; the great founders of the university are tactfully memorized and pass before us in a kind of heraldic splendour. He bore with indifference the taunts to which, from Junius and others, he was exposed for this tribute to his patron. He was contemplating a journey to Switzerland to visit his youthful friend de Bonstetten when, in the summer of 1771, he was conscious of a great decline in his physical powers. He was seized with a sudden illness when dining in his college hall, and died of gout in the stomach on the 30th of July 1771. His last moments were attended by his cousin Mary Antrobus, postmistress through his influence at Cambridge and daughter of his Eton tutor; and he was laid beside his beloved mother in the churchyard of Stoke Poges.
Owing to his shyness and reserve he had few intimate friends, but to these his loss was irreparable; for to them he revealed himself either in boyish levity and banter, or wise and sympathetic counsel and tender and yet manly consolation; to them he imparted his quiet but keen observation of passing events or the stores of his extensive reading in literature ancient, medieval or modern; and with Proteus-like variety he writes at one time as a speculative philosopher, at another as a critic in art or music, at another as a meteorologist and nature-lover. His friendship with the young, after his migration to Pembroke College, is a noteworthy trait in his character. With Lord Strathmore and the Lyons and with William Palgrave he conversed as an elder brother, and Norton Nicholls of Trinity Hall lost in him a second father, who had taught him to think and feel. The brilliant young foreigner, de Bonstetten, looked back after a long and chequered career with remembrance still vivid to the days in which the poet so soon to die taught him to read Shakespeare and Milton in the monastic gloom of Cambridge. With the elderly “Levites” of the place he was less in sympathy; they dreaded his sarcastic vein; they were conscious that he laughed at them, and in the polemics of the university he was somewhat of a free lance, fighting for his own hand. Lampoons of his were privately circulated with effect, and that he could be the fiercest of satirists the “Cambridge Courtship” on the candidature of Lord Sandwich for the office of high steward, and the verses on Lord Holland’s mimic ruins at Westgate, sufficiently prove. The faculty which he displayed in humour and satire was denied to his more serious muse; there all was the fruit of long delay; of that higher inspiration he had a thin but very precious vein, and the sublimity which he undoubtedly attained was reached by an effort of which captious and even sympathetic criticism can discover the traces. In his own time he was regarded as an innovator, for like Collins he revived the poetic diction of the past, and the adverse judgments of Johnson and others upon his work are in fact a defence of the current literary traditions. Few men have published so little to so much effect; few have attained to fame with so little ambition. His favourite maxim was “to be employed is to be happy,” but he was always employed in the first instance for the satisfaction of his own soul, and to this end and no other he made himself one of the best Greek scholars at Cambridge in the interval between Bentley and Porson. His genius was receptive rather than creative, and it is to be regretted that he lacked energy to achieve that history of English poetry which he once projected, and for which he possessed far more knowledge and insight than the poet Thomas Warton, to whom he resigned the task. He had a fine taste in music, painting and architecture; and his correspondence includes a wide survey of such European literature as was accessible to him, with criticisms, sometimes indeed a little limited and insular, yet of a singularly fresh and modern cast. In person he was below the middle height, but well-made, and his face, in which the primness of his features was redeemed by his flashing eyes, was the index of his character. There was a touch of affectation in his demeanour, and he was sometimes reticent and secretive even to his best friends. He was a refined Epicurean in his habits, and a deist rather than a Christian in his religious beliefs; but his friend, Mrs Bonfoy, had “taught him to pray” and he was keenly alive to the dangers of a flippant scepticism. In a beautiful alcaic stanza he pronounces the man supremely happy who in the depths of the heart is conscious
