Gray Thomas

Gray, Thomas, was born at Cornhill on the 26th December, 1716. His father, a man of strange temper, refused to educate him, and he was sent by his mother to Eton, where he formed n lifelong friendship with Horace Walpole. He afterwards proceeded to Peterhonse, Cambridge, but left the University without a degree. He then travelled for two years on the Continent with Walpole, at the latter's expense. On his return he began to read for the Bar, but finding, when his father died, that the cost would embarrass his mother, ho returned to Peterhotise in 1742, and ever afterwards led the life of a studious recluse. Earlier in the same year he paid his first visit to Stoke Pogis in Buckinghamshire, a place at which lie settled his mother with two of her sisters, and which is associated with much of his poetry. At this time he wrote there his Ode to Spring, and the Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, and began the Elegg Written in a Country Churchyard, which, probably retouched in 1749, was not finished until 1750, when he sent it to Walpole. It was published in the following year, and at once raised Gray to a foremost place among English poets. In his private life it brought him a friendship with Lady Cobham and her niece, Harriet Speed, but the conjectures of his friends that the younger lady would become his wife were not fulfilled. In 1756 a practical joke of some undergraduates caused him to remove from Peterhonse to Pembroke Hal), which he made his home for the rest of his life, with the exception of three years (1759-1762) which he spent in London in order to be near the British Museum. In 1757 he published two odes in imitation of Pindar, The Progress of Poesy and The Bard, which marked an important step in the development of English lyrical poetry. At the end of this year, on the, death of C.ibber, he was offered the laureateship, which he declined. His last publication was in. 1768, when he brought out some paraphrases from Icelandic and Gaelic sources. In the same year he was appointed Professor of Modern Literature and Modern Languages at Cambridge. His health, however, always weak, soon gave way, and he died on the 30th July, 1771.

The true biography of Gray is in his letters. They show playful gleams of the brightest fancy, ei warmth of affection for his dearest friends, a student's interest in literature, and a love for nature, which, on the one hand, led him to fill bis window-seat with mignonette, and, on the other, to anticipate the feeling of the present century for the grander aspects of. mountain scenery. They afford an insight into the slow working of a genius which sought perfection of form in its slightest utterance, and they reveal an industry and a lack of ambition which make his story a record of abandoned projects. As much a scholarns a poet, he prepared the greater part of editions, which never saw the light, of Strabo, Plato, and the Greek Anthology, and of a History of English Poetry, while he left unfinished fragments of a Latin poem on the philosophy 06 Locke, and of one in English on The Alliance of

Education and Government: It may, however, be said that, in whatever he finished, he attainod the perfect ion which he sought. In a certain profound melancholy and depth of insight he stood nearer to the present generation than to his own; but, except for his Eleyy, he is not likely ever to be popular.

He is the poet of the poet and the scholar, not of the man of the street.