taste rebelled against the tawdry antics of Horace Walpole's Gothic. But it is chiefly in relation to landscape that the modern feeling stirred in him. Nature knew in him a lover, and in her turn loved to unseal to him her inmost secrets. Her beauties for him revealed a new and richer meaning, for him a fuller charm breathed from the meadow and from the mere, and the mountains lost their antique terrors, and their gloom, fired by a new light, turned in his eyes to glory; a new dawn had arisen. Salvator Rosa and his kind were dead. His path was clear for Turner, for Constable, for Crome. It was well, sir, that artists should join in doing homage to a man who amongst the foremost heralded the day in which such men were given to our country.-LEIGHTON, SIR FREDERICK, 1885, Speech at the Unveiling of the Gray Memorial, Cambridge, May 26.

The bulk exhibited by his poetry may not seem imposing to the critic, but it does not frighten the reader. It is natural for us to wish that a writer of Gray's order of genius should have produced some one large work; not because size is essential to greatness, but because it is necessary to the display of invention on a grand scale, and to the development of passions and activities working through mighty agencies. Yet it is extremely doubtful if his fame would have been enhanced in the slightest measure if he had accomplished what is so natural for us to desire. He probably knew the limits of his own powers better than his friends or critics. The unpublished fragments which he left do not, on the whole, make us regret very deeply that he never completed long and ambitious works. They would certainly have contained many fine lines, and might have contained many fine passages; but the spread of his reputation would most probably have been hindered rather than helped by the weight it had to carry.-LOUNSBURY, THOMAS R., 1885, Gray's Works, The Nation, vol. 40, p. 205.

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 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 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 school-boy 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. LOWELL, JAMES RUSSELL, 1886, Gray; New Princeton Review, vol. 1, p.163.

Gray and Collins, distinct enough in character to the careful critical inspector, have to the outward eye a curious similarity. They were contemporaries; they wrote very little, and that mostly in the form of odes; they both affected personation and allegorical address to a very unusual extent; both studied effects which were Greek in their precision and delicacy; both were learned and exact students of periods of literature now reinstated in critical authority, but in their day neglected. Yet, while Gray was the

greater intellectual figure of the two, the more significant as a man and a writer, Collins possessed something more thrilling, more spontaneous, as a purely lyrical poet. When they are closely examined, their supposed similarity fades away; and, without depreciating either, we discover that each was typical of a class-that Collins was the type of the poet who sings, as the birds do, because he must; and Gray of the artist in verse, who has learned everything which the most consummate attention to workmanship can teach him, when added to the native faculty of a singularly delicate ear. The most important poetical figure in our literature between Pope and Wordsworth. GOSSE, EDMUND, 1888, A History of Eighteenth Century Literature, pp. 235, 236.

I will admit that, although Gray is the author of what is perhaps the most imposing single short poem in the language, and although he has charm, skill, and distinction to a marvellous degree, his originality, his force of production, were so rigidly limited that he may scarcely be admitted to the first rank.—Gosse, EDMUND, 1889, What is a Great Poet? Questions at Issue, p. 100.

It is scarcely a paradox to say that he has left much that is incomplete, but nothing that is unfinished. His handwriting represents his mind; I have seen and transcribed many and many a page of it, but I do not recollect to have noticed a single carelessly written word, or even letter. The mere sight of it suggests refinement, order, and infinite pains. A mind searching in so many directions, sensitive to so many influences, yet seeking in the first place its own satisfaction in a manner uniformly careful and artistic, is almost foredoomed to give very little to the world; it must be content, as the excellent Matthias says, to be "its own exeeding great reward". But what is given is a little gold instead of much silver; a legal tender at any time, though it has never been soiled in the market. He claims our honour as one of those few who in any age have lived in the pursuit of the absolute best, and who help us to mistrust the glib facility with which we are apt to characterize epochs. In all that he has left, there is independence, sincerity, thoroughness; the highest exemplar of the critical spirit; a type of

how good work of any kind should be done. --TOVEY, DUNCAN C., 1890, Gray and His Friends, Introductory Essay, p. 31.

Yet he

The smallness of his actual achievements is sufficiently explained by his ill-health, his extreme fastidiousness, his want of energy and personal ambition, and the depressing influences of the small circle of dons in which he lived. The unfortunate eighteenth century has been blamed for his barrenness; but probably he would have found any century uncongenial. The most learned of all our poets, he was naturally an eclectic. He almost worshipped Dryden, and loved Racine as heartily as Shakespeare. He valued polish and symmetry as highly as the school of Pope, and shared their taste for didactic reflection and for pompous personification. also shared the tastes which found expression in the romanticism of the following period. Mr. Gosse has pointed out with great force his appreciation of Gothic architecture, of mountain scenery, and of old Gaelic and Scandinavian poetry. His unproductiveness left the propagation of such tastes to men much inferior in intellect, but less timid in utterance, such as Walpole and the Wartons. He succeeded only in secreting a few poems which have more solid bullion in proportion to the alloy than almost any in the language, which are admired by critics, while the one in which he has condescended to utter himself with least reserve and the greatest simplicity, had been pronounced by the vox populi to be the most perfect in the language.-STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1890, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XXIII, p. 27.

Why, then, with so many favorable conditions did Gray produce so little? The chief condition was unfavorable; the spirit of the age was alien to his genius. He was a poet of great gifts and defective impulse fallen upon a prosaic time. The atmosphere he breathed, instead of vitalizing, debilitated him. Nobly endowed, and richly furnished with knowledge, he lacked motivity, and the age was against him.-MABIE, HAMILTON WRIGHT, 189193, Short Studies in Literature, p. 66.

Although Gray's biographers and critics have very seldom spoken of it, the most interesting thing in a study of his poetry and the thing, of course, that exclusively concerns us here is his

steady progress in the direction of Romanticism. Beginning as a classicist and disciple of Dryden, he ended in thoroughgoing Romanticism. His early poems His early poems contain nothing Romantic; his "Elegy" has something of the Romantic mood, but shows many conventional touches; in the Pindaric Odes the Romantic feeling asserts itself boldly; and he ends in enthusiastic study of Norse and Celtic poetry and mythology. Such a steady growth in the mind of the greatest poet of the time shows not only what he learned from the age, but what he taught it. Gray is a much more important factor in the Romantic movement than seems to be commonly supposed. This will appear from a brief examination of his poetry.-PHELPS, WILLIAM LYON, 1893, The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement, p. 157.

He

Yet both in his poetry and, what now more closely concerns us, in his prose, he exhibits the art of concealing his art. We feel ourselves in the presence of a most finished artist, but we do not see him mixing his colours, or fingering his brushes. We enjoy the effect without having thrust upon our notice the process or processes by which it has been produced. In his Letters the habit of a refined and polished manner has become second nature. writes like a scholar, but without stiffness or effort. He is classical, but never pedantic. In addition to all the culture that so eminently distinguished Gray, he possessed natural gifts without which all his culture would have done little to endear him to the general reader. He had a genuine vein of humour, which not only prevents his being dull, but makes him at times highly entertaining. He had a keen He had a keen sense of the beauty of landscape, and one of his greatest pleasures was to gaze upon it and to describe it. He was Wordsworthian before Wordsworth was born. Lastly, though reserved and seemingly dry and cynical, he was a man of the tenderest affections. He does not wear his heart upon his sleeve; but it would be a gross mistake to conclude because he does not wear it, that he had none to wear.-HALES, JOHN W., 1895, English Prose, ed. Craik, vol. IV, p. 222.

Gray was not so well known as the others. The only one of his poems to be read in France was the "Elegy written in a country churchyard," which was

translated by the "Gazette littéraire" in 1765, and was freely copied by French poets, from Lemierre to Marie-Joseph Chénier, and from Fantanes or Delille to Chateaubriand. The "Elegy" is quite the most popular of Gray's works, but it by no means represents the profound and unique originality of the author of "The Bard" and the "Descent of Odin," than whom few poets have been more sincere. Nevertheless, this work, so modern in the sentiments it expresses yet at the same time so subtly classical in taste, attained something like celebrity in France. Gray's studious and highly cultivated. talent provided, as it were, a connecting link between new aspirations and the classical methods to which Frenchmen were accustomed; he was spoken of as a "sublime philosopher, and a child of harmony." By virtue of the sincerity of his religious feelings, of the delicious vagueness of his impressions, and of his serene and lofty inspiration, Gray is beyond dispute the predecessor of Chateaubriand and Lamartine, and of Rousseau before them. "With him," says his translator, the author of "René," "begins that school of the melancholy poets, which in our day has been transformed into a school of poets of despair." A valuable testimony, considering the authority with which it comes.—TEXTE, JOSEPH, 1895-99, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature, tr. Matthews, pp. 303, 304.

Every boy who leaves Eton creditably is presented with a copy of the works of Gray, for which everything has been done that the art of printers, bookbinders and photographers can devise. This is one of the most curious instances of the triumphs of genius, for there is hardly a single figure in the gallery of Etonians who is so little characteristic of Eton as Gray. His only poetical utterance about his school is one which is hopelessly alien to the spirit of the place, though the feelings expressed in it are an exquisite summary of those sensations of pathetic interest which any rational man feels at the sight of a great school. And yet, though the attitude of the teacher of youth is professedly and rightly rather that of encouragement than of warning, though he points to the brighter hopes of life rather than brandishes the horrors that infest it, yet the

Unto the end should charity endure. And candour hide those faults it cannot cure."

Thus Candour's maxims flow from Rancour's throat,

As devils, to serve their purpose, Scripture

quote.

-CHURCHILL, CHARLES, 1761, The Apology, v. 298-313.

A most worthless and dangerous fellow, and capable of any mischief.-WALPOLE, HORACE, 1770, To Sir Horace Mann, March 16; Letters, ed. Cunningham, vol. V, p. 231.

Dick Ivy carried me to dine with S[Smollett], whom you and I have long known by his writings. He lives in the skirts of the town; and every Sunday his house is open to all unfortunate brothers of the quill, whom he treats with beef, pudding, and potatoes, port, punch, and Calvert's entire butt-beer.

I

was civilly received in a plain yet decent habitation, which opened backwards into a very pleasant garden, kept in excellent order; and indeed I saw none of the outward signs of authorship, either in the house or the landlord, who is one of those few writers of the age that stand upon their own foundation, without patronage and above dependence. If there was nothing characteristic in the entertainer, the company made ample amends for his want. of singularity. At two o'clock I found myself one of ten messmates at a table; and I question if the whole kingdom could produce such another assemblage of originals. . . . After dinner we adjourned into the garden, where I observed Mr. Sgave a short, separate audience to every individual, in a small remote filbert walk, from whence most of them dropped off, one after another, without further ceremony; but they were replaced by other recruits of the class, who came to make an afternoon's visit.-SMOLLETT, TOBIAS GEORGE, 1771, Humphrey Clinker, Letter of Jerry Mulford.

Siste viator!

Si leporis ingeniique venam benignam,
Si morum callidissimum pictorem,
Unquam es miratus,
Immorare paululum memoriæ
TOBIE SMOLLETT, M. D.
Viri virtutibus hisce
Quas in homine et cive
Et laudes et imiteris,
Haud mediocriter ornati :
Qui in literis variis versatus,

Postquam, felicitate sibi propria
Sese posteris commendaverat,
Morte acerba raptus

Anno ætatis 51.
Eheu! quam procul a patria!
Prope Liburni portum in Italia,
Jacet sepultus.

Tali tantoque viro, patruelo suo,
Cui in decursu lampada
Se potius tradidisse decuit,
Hanc Columnam,

Amoris, eheu! inane monumentum
In ipsis Levinæ ripis,
Quas versiculis sub exitu vitæ
illustratas

Primis infans vagitibus personuit,
Ponendam curavit
JACOBUS SMOLLETT de Bonhill.
Abi et reminiscere,
Hoc quidem honore,

Non modo defuncti memoriæ, Verum etiam exemplo, prospectum esse;

Aliis enim, si modo digni sint, Idem erit virtutis præmium! -INSCRIPTION ON PILLAR, 1773, On Leven. In the practice of physic, Smollett, though possessed of superior endowments, and eminent scientific qualifications, had the mortification, from whatever cause, to be unsuccessful, at a moment when perhaps the neglect he experienced was aggravated by the unaccountable success of many a superficial unqualified contemporary, reaping the harvest of wealth and reputation. It has been supposed, that this want of success in a profession where merit cannot always ensure fame and affluence, was owing to his failing to render himself agreeable to the fair sex, whose favour is certainly of great consequence to all candidates for eminence, whether in physic or divinity. But his figure and address, which were uncommonly elegant and prepossessing, and his unsullied manners, renders this supposition highly improbable. It is more likely that his irritable temper, increased by the teazing and uncomfortable circumstances of the profession, and his contempt for the low arts of servility, suppleness, and cunning, were the real causes of his failure. It may be supposed also, that his publications, as a general satirist and censor of manners, were far more calculated to retard his progress as a physician, than to augment his practice.-ANDERSON, ROBERT, 1794-1803, The Life of Tobias Smollett, M. D., p. 47.

The person of Dr. Smollett was stout and