a confiderable merchant; but his father, Mr. Philip Gray, exercised the trade of a money-scrivener; and being of an indolent disposition, he did not add to his paternal fortune. He neglected not, however, the education of his son, whom he sent to Eton school; where he contracted an intimacy with Mr. Horace Walpole, who is at present so diftinguished in the republic of letters ; and with Mr. Richard West, a young gentleman of uncommon ability, whose father was Lord Chancellor of Ireland. From Eton Mr. Gray, in the year 1734, removed to Cambridge, and was admitted a pensioner of St. Peter's Col lege. Mr. West went to study in ChristChurch MR. GRAY. xiii Church College at Oxford; and these ingenious friends now commenced an epistolary correspondence, which, though not unworthy of their years, and of the hopes conceived of them, they little imagined was, one day, to be laid before the public. They were not long in their respective universities, when they turned their attention to the study of the law. For, with that view, they found themselves in London in the year 1738. Mr. West took chambers in the Inner Temple; but Mr. Gray being invited by Mr. Walpole to accompany him in his travels, delayed, for a time, his application to ! a science, which, furely, did not suit either his temper or his genius. The improvement he received from visiting France and Italy, was doubtless very great. But the pleasure arifing from his travels, was painfully interrupted by the disagreement which arose between him and Mr. Walpole. Their dispositions were different. The pensive and philofophical turn of the former, did not well agree with the gaiety and liveliness of the latter. They had fet out in the end of the year 1739, and they parted at Reggio in the year 1741. Many years, however, did not pass till a reconciliation was produced between them, MR. GRAY. XV them, by the intervention and offices of a lady, who had a friendship for both. On Mr. Gray's return to London,* he found his father altogether wasted with the severe attacks of the gout, to which he had long been subject. Two months after he lost him, and succeeded to a scanty patrimony. The intention he had formed, of studying the law as a profession, began now to be shaken. But his friends urging him to maintain his original purpose, and the delicacy of his nature inducing him not to give them uneasiness, by too fudden a declaration of the state of his mind, he went to Cambridge, and took his Bachelor's degree in the Civil Law. The time he had passed in his travels, the intense labour required by the study of the Common Law, and, above all, the narrowness of his fortune, estranged him from a design, which perhaps he had never entertained with affection or ardour; and the anxiety excited by this undecisiveness as to the scheme of life he should follow, was now embittered by the fickness of Mr. West, who had some time languished in a consumption; and who, in June 1742, in the twentyfixth year of his age, fell an unfufpecting victim to this distemper, A short time before this cruel event, Mr. Gray had gone to visit his mother, |