novelist; Richardson, the only author who ever made long-windedness seem a benefaction; Sterne, the most subtle humorist since Shakespeare; Goldsmith, in whom the sweet humanity of Chaucer finds its nearest parallel; Cowper, the poet of Nature in her more domestic and familiar moods; Johnson, whose brawny rectitude of mind more than atones for coarseness of fibre. Toward the middle of the century, also, two books were published which made an epoch in æsthetics, Dodsley's "Old Plays" (1744) and Percy's "Ballads" (1765). These gave the first impulse to the romantic reaction against a miscalled classicism, and were the seed of the literary renaissance.

The temper of the times and the comfortable conditions on which life was held by the educated class were sure to produce a large crop of dilettantism, of delight in art and the things belonging to it as an elegant occupation of the mind without taxing its faculties too severely. If the dilettante in his eagerness to escape ennui sometimes become a bore himself, especially to the professional artist, he is not without his use in keeping alive the traditions of good taste and transmitting the counsels of experience. In proportion as his critical faculty grows sensitive, he becomes incapable of production himself. For indeed his eye is too often trained rather to detect faults than excellences, and he

can tell you where and how a thing differs for the worse from established precedent, but not where it differs for the better. This habit of mind would make him distrustful of himself and sterile in original production, for his consciousness of how much can be said against whatever is done and even well done reacts upon him and makes him timid. It is the rarest thing to find genius and dilettantism united in the same person (as for a time they were in Goethe), for genius implies always a certain fanaticism of temperament, which, if sometimes it seem fitful, is yet capable of intense energy on occasion, while the main characteristic of the dilettante is that sort of impartiality which springs from inertia of mind, admirable for observation, incapable of turning it to practical account. Yet we have, I think, an example of this rare combination of qualities in Gray, and it accounts both for the kind of excellence to which he attained, and for the way in which he disappointed expectation, his own, I suspect, first of all. He is especially interesting as an artist in words and phrases, a literary type far less common among writers of English, than it is in France or Italy, where perhaps the traditions of Latin culture were never wholly lost, or, even if they were, continued to be operative by inheritance through the form they had impressed upon the mind. Born in 1716, he died in his fifty-fifth year,

leaving behind him hardly fourteen hundred verses. Dante was one year older, Shakespeare three years younger when he died. It seems a slender monument, yet it has endured and is likely to endure, so close-grained is the material and so perfect the workmanship. When so many have written too much, we shall the more readily pardon the rare man who has written too little or just enough.

The incidents of Gray's life are few and unimportant. Educated at Eton and diseducated, as he seemed to think, at Cambridge, in his twenty-third year he was invited by Horace Walpole to be his companion in a journey to Italy. At the end of two years they quarrelled, and Gray returned to England. Dr. Johnson has explained the causes of this rupture, with his usual sturdy good sense and knowledge of human nature: " Mr. Walpole," he says, "is now content to have it told that it was by his fault. If we look, however, without prejudice on the world, we shall find that men whose consciousness of their own merit sets them above the compliances of servility, are apt enough in their association with superiors to watch their own dignity with troublesome and punctilious jealousy, and in the fervor of independence to exact that attention which they refuse to pay." Johnson was obeying Sidney's prescription of looking into his own heart when he wrote that.

Walpole's explanation is of the same purport: "I was young, too fond of my own diversion; nay, I do not doubt too much intoxicated by indulgence, vanity, and the insolences of my situation as a Prime Minister's son. . . . I treated him insolently. Forgive me if I say that his temper was not conciliating." They were reconciled a few years later and continued courteously friendly till Gray's death. A meaner explanation of their quarrel has been given by gossip; that a letter which Gray had written home was opened and read by Walpole, who found in it something not to his own advantage. But the reconciliation sufficiently refutes this, for if Gray could have consented to overlook the baseness, Walpole could never have forgiven its detection.

Gray was a conscientious traveller, as the notes he has left behind him prove. One of these, on the Borghese Gallery at Rome, is so characteristic as to be worth citing: "Several [Madonnas] of Rafael, Titian, Andrea del Sarto, etc., but in none of them all that heavenly grace and beauty that Guido gave, and that Carlo Maratt has so well imitated in subjects of this nature." This points to an admission which those who admire Gray, as I do, are forced to make, sooner or later, that there was a tint of effeminacy in his nature. That he should have admired Norse poetry, Ossian, and the Scottish

ballads is not inconsistent with this, but may be explained by what is called the attraction of opposites, which means merely that we are wont to overvalue qualities or aptitudes which we feel to be wanting in ourselves. Moreover these anti-classical yearnings of Gray began after he had ceased producing, and it was not unnatural that he should admire men who did without thinking what he could not do by taking thought. Elegance, sweetness, pathos, or even majesty he could achieve, but never that force which vibrates in every verse of larger-moulded men.

Bonstetten tells us that "every sensation in Gray was passionate," but I very much doubt whether he was capable of that sustained passion of the mind which is fed by a prevailing imagination acting on the consciousness of great powers. That was something he could never feel, though he knew what it meant by his observation of others, and longed to feel it. In him imagination was passive; it could divine and select, but not create. Bonstetten, after seeing the best society in Europe on equal terms, also tells us that Gray was the most finished gentleman he had ever seen. Is it over-fine to see something ominous in that word finished? It seems to imply limitations; to imply a consciousness that sees everything between it and the goal rather than the goal itself, that undermines enthusiasm through the haunting doubt