extracts from them, you will be so good as to make

no mention of my name.

"I am, dear Sir,

"Your most faithful and obedient,
humble servant,

The following Lecture was delivered by the Earl of Carlisle at the Sheffield Mechanics' Institute, December 14, 1852; and is now introduced, with his Lordship's kind permission, as a becoming Appendix to the Life of our Author.

I CHOSE for the subject of a lecture I delivered at Leeds, "The Poetry of Pope." I have chosen as my subject to-night, "The Writings of Gray." Why Gray it may be asked. I have myself admitted, when I had to speak of Pope, that upon the British Parnassus were loftier names than even his. Why then do I descend lower, instead of mounting higher, on the sacred steep? In the first place, I may feel, that to descant adequately upon Shakespeare or Milton would seem to demand gifts and powers more nearly approaching to their own; just as to write worthily of Socrates, it required no one less

than Plato. Next, in these transcendent cases, the endeavour, with whatever success, has been much more frequently made. And further, I believe there to be something instinctive, which leads every one of us, not to what in our unimpassioned judgment we think the best and greatest of its kind, but to what we are sensible is most specially attractive and congenial to ourselves. The strongest personal impulse I could feel led me first of all to Pope; that first one having been satisfied, the next leads me to Gray; and I am quite confident that he is worthy enough for you to hear, and more than worthy enough for me to speak about.

In point of mere bulk, he has probably written less than any other poet, whose works are comprised in any collection of English poetry; yet but few have attempted a greater variety of styles, and these too among the most difficult and lofty in the whole range of song. He has written odes, which may be divided into the regular and the Pindaric; he has written heroic verses; he has written elegiac verses; he has written Latin heroic, Latin elegiac, and Latin lyric poetry; he has written burlesque; he has written satire; he has written part of a tragedy-and all he has written is not only excellent, but nearly perfect in its kind. If he had done more-if he had exhibited the prodigality, as well as the perfection, of his inspiration—I know not the height of eminence to which he might not have been

held entitled. His leading characteristic, and probably that which interfered mainly with his being a more prolific writer, is the nicety and purity of his taste. If I was forced to compare his style and genius with those of any other great writer, I believe that I should select Virgil. Gray had not, of course, his copiousness; he had, indeed, greater variety in the forms of composition, but the same unerring delicacy of taste-the same appropriate, but not exaggerated loftiness of dictionthe same elaborate and exquisite workmanship.

I gladly back my own estimate of the poetical merits of Gray, by the weightier authority of that accomplished and discriminating writer, Sir James Mackintosh, who says, "Of all English poets he was the most finished artist. He attained the highest degree of splendour, of which poetical style seems to be capable."

His life and character demand a passing notice, though neither the one nor the other were marked by any such salient or striking points as need detain us long. He appears to have suffered under an hereditary tendency to gout, both of his parents having died of that malady. It also closed his own more illustrious career, in his fifty-fifth year, and probably gave to the whole of his sedentary and uneventful life that disposition to a pensive, but not morose, melancholy, to which he frequently alludes in his correspondence, and which has left

most distinct impressions even on his highlypolished and carefully-laboured poetry. It will be remembered that he says of the "Youth," whom he evidently in a great degree intended for himself, that

"Melancholy marked him for her own."

It is in this light he is represented in a poem of the last century, "The Pursuits of Literature,” which attracted much attention at the time, from its general ability, from the stores of learning contained in its notes, and perhaps most of all from its long-sustained anonymous character; it is now known to have been written by Mr. Mathias, a distinguished classical and Italian scholar.

"Go then and view, since closed his cloistered day,
The self-supported, melancholy Gray.

Dark was his morn of life, and bleak the spring,
Without one fost'ring ray from Britain's King:
Granta's dull abbots cast a sidelong glance,
And Levite gownsmen hugged their ignorance:
With his high spirit strove the master bard,
And was his own exceeding great reward."

I confess that these lines, very good and forcible in themselves, appear to me rather over-charged as a correct statement of the case. "The dull abbots" of Cambridge are spoken of with extreme irreverence by Gray himself, and we may suspect that the superciliousness was quite as much on his side as on theirs; at all events he did not find the residence