something which perhaps I did not bear as well as I ought." Mr. Bryant's opinion, which is worthy of attention, will be found in his letter. I think the following passage, in a letter from Walpole to Conway, shortly after Walpole returned to England, in 1741, is more to his credit than anything else that has appeared relating to this unhappy rupture of friendship. "Before I thank you for myself, I must thank you for the excessive good-nature you showed in writing to poor Gray. I am less impatient to see you, as I find you are not the least altered, but have the same friendly regard for him as you always had." It will be recollected that Mr. Conway travelled with Gray and Walpole in 1739, and separated from them at Geneva. Certain it is, that the wound of what Johnson calls "lacerated friendship" never healed. Gray never after visited him with cordiality, or spoke of him with much esteem. Mr. Cole says, and his account is supported by Gray's own letters, that "when matters were made up between Walpole and Gray, and the former asked Gray to Strawberry Hill, when he came, he without any ceremony told Walpole, that he came to visit as far as civility required, but by no means had he come there on the terms of his former friendship, which he had totally cancelled."* * See Gray's letter to Wharton, from Stoke, Nov. 16, 1744-5. Vol. II. p. 174, Ed. Ald. where his visit of reconciliation is graphically described. Their friend Asheton When he parted from Walpole, Gray went immediately to Venice, and returned through Padua and Milan, following nearly the same road homewards through France that he had travelled before. He again visited the Grande Chartreuse, the wild and sublime scenery of which had previously been so strongly impressed upon him; and in the album of the fathers he wrote his Alcaic Ode, his first lyrical piece in Latin. When I spent a day at the monastery, I looked over the album, and inquired anxiously for the original entry, but found that it had long disappeared. The collectors, who like vultures followed the French revolutionary armies over the Continent, swept away everything that ignorance and barbarity had previously spared. Without entering into any detailed criticism on Gray's Latin poetry, I may here observe, that if this ode, or any of Gray's lyrical Latin poetry, be examined with a critical accuracy, it will be found often deviating widely from the established laws which govern the metre; and in the collection of Gray's Latin poetry which is printed in the first volume of his collected works, I have given, I believe, a tolerably faithful account of the errors seems in some degree to have been mixed up with it, and with him he appears to have maintained afterwards no friendly communications. A friend of mine bought a book at Gray's sale, in which was written "Donum Amicissimi Hor. Walpole "--but the word Amicissimi was partially erased. which may be found in them. This certainly will impair the pleasure with which a scholar will read them; but he will still appreciate and admire the fine poetical spirit and picturesque imagery of such stanzas as the following Præsentiorem et conspicimus Deum Clivosque præruptos, sonantes Inter aquas, nemorumque noctem, &c. Gray returned to England in September, 1741, and two months after his arrival his father died, his constitution being worn out by repeated attacks of the gout. To the friend who condoled with Pope on his father's death, he answered in the pious language of Euryalus,-"Genitrix est mihi ;" and Gray, in like circumstances, felt no less the pleasure of watching over the happiness of a parent so deservedly beloved by him. With a small fortune, which her husband's imprudence and mis * This second line is very faulty, from the absence of the cæsura in the right place. Mr. Canon Tate also observes, "that Gray, though exquisite in the observance of the nicest beauty in the Hexameters in Virgil, showed himself strangely unacquainted with the rules of Horace's Lyric verse. What a pity it is, that the noble, engaging, and pathetic interest of the Ode on the Grand Chartreuse should be interrupted by a line so jarring and bad as the second of these below, 'Per invias rupes, &c.' in a stanza otherwise of such first-rate excellence." Vide Obs. on the Metres of Horace, p. 200: and Ald. Ed. of Gray, pp. 191 and 199: fortunes had much impaired, Mrs. Gray and a maiden sister retired to the house of Mrs. Rogers, another sister, at Stoke, near Windsor. But though it is not mentioned by his biographers, I presume that, previous to the family of Mrs. Rogers removing to Stoke, they had lived at Burnham; for Mr. Cole says, in his manuscript memoranda, that "Gray's uncle, Mr. Rogers, lived at a house in my parish, called Cant's Hall, a small house, and not far from the common." And again, in a note on a passage in the ninth letter of the first section of the life, where Gray says, "I arrived safe at my uncle's," Cole adds, "at Burnham, my living. Mr. Rogers was an attorney,* lived at Britwell, in Burnham parish, and lies buried in my church.” After his death, it is probable that the family removed to Stoke. The house, which is now called West-End, lies in a secluded part of the parish, on the road to Fulmer. It remained up to a late period in the same state in which it was when Gray resided there. It has lately been much enlarged and adorned by its present proprietor; but the room called "Gray's" is still preserved ;+ and a shady walk round an adjoining meadow, with a summer-house on the rising land, are still * Mason therefore is in error, in calling Mr. Rogers a clergyman. The room called "Gray's" is distinguished by a small balcony. |