of being undermined. We cannot help feeling in the poetry of Gray that it too is finished, perhaps I should rather say limited, as the greatest things never are, as it is one of their merits that they never can be. They suggest more than they bestow, and enlarge our apprehension beyond their own boundaries. Gray shuts us in his own contentment like a cathedral close or college quadrangle. He is all the more interesting, perhaps, that he was a true child of his century, in which decorum was religion. He could not, as Dryden calls it in his generous way, give his soul a loose, although he would. He is of the eagle brood, but unfledged. His eye shares the æther which shall never be cloven by his wing.

But it is one of the schoolboy blunders in criticism to deny one kind of perfection because it is not another. Gray, more than any of our poets, has shown what a depth of sentiment, how much pleasurable emotion, mere words are capable of stirring through the magic of association, and of artful arrangement in conjunction with agreeable and familiar images. For Gray is pictorial in the highest sense of the term, much more than imaginative. Some passages in his letters give us a hint that he might have been. For example, he asks his friend Stonehewer, in 1760, " Did you never observe (while rocking winds are piping loud) that pause as the

gust is re-collecting itself?" But in his verse there is none of that intuitive phrase where the imagination at a touch precipitates thought, feeling, and image in an imperishable crystal. He knew imagination when he saw it; no man better; he could have scientifically defined it; but it would not root in the artificial soil of his own garden, though he transplanted a bit now and then. Here is an instance: Dryden in his "Annus Mirabilis," hinting that Louis XIV. would fain have joined Holland against England, if he dared, says:

"And threatening France, placed like a painted Jove, Held idle thunder in his lifted hand."

Gray felt how fine this was, and makes his Agrippina say that it was she

"That armed

This painted Jove and taught his novice hand.

To aim the forked bolt, while he stood trembling,
Scared at the sound and dazzled with its brightness."

Pretty well, one would say, for a "painted Jove"! The imagination is sometimes super grammaticam, like the Emperor Sigismund, but it is coherent by the very law of its being.'

Gray brought home from France and Italy a

It is always interesting to trace the germs of lucky phrases. Dryden was familiar with the works of Beaumont and Fletcher, and it may be suspected that this noble image was suggested by a verse in The Double Marriage "Thou woven Worthy in a piece of arras."

familiar knowledge of their languages, and that enlarged culture of the eye which is one of the insensible, as it is one of the greatest gains of travel. The adventures he details in his letters are generally such as occur to all the world, but there is a passage in one of them in which he describes a scene at Rheims in 1739, so curious and so characteristic of the time as to be worth citing:

"The other evening we happened to be got together in a company of eighteen people, men and women of the best fashion here, at a garden in the town to walk; when one of the ladies. bethought herself of asking, 'Why should not we sup here?' Immediately the cloth was laid by the side of a fountain under the trees, and a very elegant supper served up; after which another said, Come, let us sing,' and directly began herself; from singing we insensibly fell to dancing and singing in a round, when somebody mentioned the violins, and immediately a company of them was ordered. Minuets were begun in the open air, and then came country dances which held till four o'clock in the morning, at which hour the gayest lady there proposed that such as were weary should get into their coaches, and the rest . . . should dance before them with the music in the van; and in this manner we paraded through the principal streets of the city and waked everybody in it."

This recalls the garden of Boccaccio, and if it be hard to fancy the "melancholy Gray" leading off such a jig of Comus, it is almost harder to conceive that this was only fifty years before the French Revolution. 'And yet it was precisely this gay insouciance, this forgetfulness that the world existed for any but a single class in it, and this carelessness of the comfort of others that made the catastrophe possible.

Immediately on his return he went back to Cambridge, where he spent (with occasional absences) the rest of his days, first at Peter House and then at Pembroke College. In 1768, three years before his death, he was appointed professor of Modern Literature and Languages, but he never performed any of its functions. except that of receiving the salary - "so did the Muse defend her son." Johnson describes him as "always designing lectures, but never reading them; uneasy at his neglect of duty and appeasing his uneasiness with designs of reformation and with a resolution, which he believed himself to have made, of resigning the office, if he found himself unable to discharge it." This is excellently well divined, for nobody knew better than Johnson what a master of casuistry is indolence, but I find no trace of any such feeling in Gray's correspondence. After the easygoing fashion of his day he was more likely to consider his salary as another form of pension.

The first poem of Gray that was printed was the "Ode on the Distant Prospect of Eton College," and this when he was already thirtyone. The "Elegy " followed in 1750, the other lesser odes in 1753, the "Progress of Poesy and the " Bard" in 1757. Collins had preceded him in this latter species of composition, a man of more original imagination and more fervent nature, but inferior in artistic instinct. Mason gives a droll reason for the success of the Elegy": "It spread at first on account of the affecting and pensive cast of the subject—just like Hervey's 'Meditations on the Tombs.' What Walpole called Gray's flowering period ended with his fortieth year. From that time forward he wrote no more. Twelve years later, it is true, he writes to Walpole: “What has one to do, when turned of fifty, but really to think of finishing? . . . However, I will be candid . . . and avow to you that, till fourscore and ten, whenever the humor takes me, I will write because I like it, and because I like myself better when I do so. If I do not write much it is because I cannot."

Chaucer was growing plumper over his "Canterbury Tales," and the "Divina Commedia” was still making Dante leaner, when both those poets were "turned of fifty." Had Milton pleaded the same discharge, we should not have had "Paradise Lost" and "Samson Agonistes."