with no less force in what almost immediately follows, where Johnson attempts to ridicule a passage which few other men have read without delight, Gray's beautiful invocation of the Thames, in the Ode on Eton CollegeSay, Father Thames,' &c. 'This is useless,' he says, 'and puerile.' Father Thames had no better means of 'knowing than himself.' He forgets his own address to the Nile in Rasselas, for a purpose so very similar; and he expects his readers to forget one of the most affecting passages in Virgil. Father Thames might well know as much of the sports of boys as the 'great Father of Waters' knew of the discontents of men, or the Tiber himself of the obsequies of Marcellus."

In the autumn of 1742, Gray composed the ode on 'A distant Prospect of Eton College,' and the 'Hymn to Adversity.' The 'Elegy in a Country Church-yard' was commenced. An affectionate Sonnet in English, and an Apostrophe which opens the fourth book of his poem ' De Principiis Cogitandi,' (his last composition in Latin verse,) bear strong marks of the sorrow left on his mind from the death of West; and of the real affection with which he honoured the memory of his worth, and of his talents.

Mr. Mason thinks that Gray did not finish this poem, on account of the unfavourable reception, or rather neglect, of the Anti-Lucretius* of the Car

*This poem had the honour of being corrected by Boileau, and altered by Louis the XIVth. The author was so long

dinal Melchior de Polignac; a poem which had been long expected, and appeared about that time. The failure, however, of M. de Polignac's poem may be attributed partly to its length, (for it contains above thirteen thousand verses,) and to a want of sufficient variety and digression in the composition. The versification is not always finished and compact, and the language has lost much of its elegance in the endeavour to accommodate it with precision to the subject.

Gray's residence at Cambridge was now continued, not from any partiality to the place where he received his education, but partly from the scantiness of his income, and in a great measure, no doubt, for the convenience which its libraries afforded.* Original composition he almost entirely employed on it, and recited it so often, that many parts were stolen, and inserted in the works of other authors. Le Clerc got a fragment by heart, and published it in one of his literary journals. The cardinal died while his work was unfinished, and before he could add two more books to it against the Deists. See Anecdotes par Grimm, vol. i. p. 455. The line written under Franklin's picture, "Eripuit cœlo fulmen, sceptrumque tyrannis "—is an imitation of one in the Anti-Lucretius, “ Eripuitque Jovi fulmen, Phoeboque sagittas."

*In a note to the Spital Sermon, p. 117, Dr. Parr says: "After the opportunities which Mr. Gray enjoyed, and of which he doubtless had availed himself, for observing the state of literature and the characters of literary men upon the Continent, he did not merely visit the University, but fixed his chief residence there. And of a choice to which he adhered so steadily and so long, the scantiness of his fortune, the love of books, and the easy access he had to them in many libraries,

neglected; but his time was so assiduously occupied in a regular and studious perusal of the best Greek authors, that in six years he had read all the writers of eminence in that language, digesting and arranging their contents, remarking their peculiarities, and noting their corrupt and difficult passages with great accuracy and diligence. In the winter of 1742, he was admitted a bachelor of civil law; and a short recreation of his studies appears in a 'Fragment of an Address to Ignorance,' which contains a satire on the University where he resided,* whose system of education he always disliked and ridiculed, and against which he used to speak so openly, as to create many enemies. It is plain, from his Letters, that he

Dr. Parr,

will hardly be considered as the sole motives." however, does not assign any other motives that influenced Gray, in his choice of the University for a residence.

Nec tu credideris urbanæ commoda vitæ

Quærere Nasonem, quærit et illa tamen.

Ov. Ep. ex Pont. 1. 8. 29.

* In p. 117 of the Spital Sermon, Dr. Parr says: "At that very time in which Mr. Gray spoke so contemptuously of Cambridge, that very University abounded in men of erudition and science, with whom the first scholars would not have disdained to converse: and who shall convict me of exaggeration, when I bring forward the names of Bentley, Davies, Asheton - of Jesus: Provost Snape, Middleton, Tunstall the public orator, Baker of St. John's: Edmund Law, John Taylor, Thomas Johnson, Waterland, Whaley (afterwards regius professor of divinity), Smith (the nephew of Cotes), afterwards master of Trinity, Roger Long, Colson, the correspondent of Sir Isaac Newton, and Professor Saunderson?"

thought the attention and time bestowed there on mathematical and metaphysical pursuits, would have been more profitably spent in classical studies. There is some resemblance in the style of this Fragment to part of Pope's Dunciad; the fourth book of which had appeared but a year or two before: and Gray, I should think, had that poem in his mind when he wrote these lines, to ridicule what he calls "that ineffable Octogrammaton, the power of laziness."

In 1744 the difference between Walpole and Gray was adjusted by the interference of a lady who wished well to both parties. The lapse of three years had probably been sufficient, in some degree, to soften down, though not entirely obliterate, the remembrance of supposed injuries on either side; natural kindness of temper had reassumed its place, and we find their correspondence again proceeding on friendly and familiar terms. About this time Gray became acquainted with Mr. Mason, then a scholar of St. John's College, whose poetical talents he had noticed; and some of whose poems he revised at the request of a friend. He maintained a correspondence with his intimate and respectable friend, Dr. Wharton, of Durham; and he seems to have lived on terms of familiarity with the celebrated Dr. Middleton,* whose loss

* Dr. Middleton died the 28th of July, 1750, in the sixtyseventh year of his age, at Hildersham, in Cambridgeshire.

he afterwards laments. "I find a friend (he says) so uncommon thing, that I cannot help regretting even an old acquaintance, which is an indifferent likeness of it."

In the year 1747, the 'Ode to Eton College,' the first production of Gray that appeared in print, was published in folio, by Dodsley. Dr. Warton, in his Essay on Pope, informs us, that "little notice was taken of it, on its first publication."

This,

Walpole wished him to print his own poems with those of his deceased friend West. however, he declined, thinking the materials not sufficient: but he complied with another wish of Walpole, in commemorating in an Ode the death of his favourite cat. To this little poem I may be permitted to apply the words of Cicero, when speaking of a work of his own: "Non est enim tale, ut in arte poni possit, quasi illa Minerva Phidiæ; sed tamen, ut ex eâdem officinâ, exisse appareat.”* Soon after this, he sent to Dr. Wharton a part of his poem 'On the Alliance of Education and Government.' He never pursued this subject much further. About a hundred lines remain; and the commentary proceeds a little beyond the poem. Mr. Mason thinks that he dropped it from finding some of his best thoughts forestalled by M. de Montesquieu's L'Esprit des Loix,† which ap

* Vide Ciceronis Præf. Paradoxa. ed. Olivet, vol. iii. p. 356. Paris.

+ Compare Montesquieu, L'Esprit des Loix, liv. xiv. chap. ii.