SO Mr. Nicholls, who made a tour with him, as has been mentioned, the year before his death, says, "That with the society at Malvern, he had neither inclination to mix much in conversation, nor much facility, had he been willing. This arose partly from natural reserve, and which is called shyness, and partly from having lived retired in the University during so great a part of his life; where he had lost, as he told me himself, the versatility of his mind." This account is probably true enough, as regards mixed company and general society; but when it was worth his while to talk-when his companion was a man of knowledge, and his subject one of interest, we shall find a very different relation of his conversational nabits. "Gray's letters," says Dr. Beattie, "very much resemble what his conversation was: he had none of the airs either of a scholar or a poet; and though on these, and on all other subjects, he spoke to me with the utmost freedom, and without any reserve, he was in general company much more silent than one could have wished.” He writes to Sir W. Forbes; "I am sorry you did not see Mr. Gray on his return; you would have been much pleased with him. Setting aside his merit as a poet (which, however, is greater in my opinion than any of his contemporaries can boast, in this or any other nation), I find him possessed of the most exact taste, the soundest judgment,

and the most extensive learning. He is happy in a singular facility of expression. His composition abounds with original observations, delivered in no appearance of sententious formality, and seeming to arise spontaneously, without study or premeditation. I passed two days with him at Glammis, and found him as easy in his manner, and as communicative and frank as I could have wished."*

Soon after Gray's death, a character of him was drawn up and printed by the Rev. Mr. Temple. of whom the reader will find some account in the correspondence which has been lately published between Gray and Mr. Nicholls. This account was adopted both by Mr. Mason and Dr. Johnson, as impartial and accurate; and Boswell says, that Mr. Temple knew Gray well. The following is an extract from it :—"Perhaps Mr. Gray was the most learned man in Europe. He was equally acquainted with the elegant and proper parts of science, and that not superficially, but thoroughly. He knew every branch of history, both natural and civil; had read all the original histories of England, France, and Italy; was a great antiquarian. Criticism, metaphysics, morals, politics, made a principal part of his study. Voyages and travels of all sorts were his favourite amusement; and he

* See Life of Beattie, by Sir W. Forbes, Vol. II. p. 321.

had a fine taste in prints, paintings, architecture, and gardening.* With such a fund of knowledge, his conversation must have been equally instructive and entertaining. There is no character without some speck or imperfection; and I think the greatest defect in his was, an affectation of delicacy, or rather effeminacy, and a visible fastidiousness, or contempt and disdain of his inferiors in science. He had also in some degree that weakness, which disgusted Voltaire so much in Congreve. Though he seemed to value others chiefly according to the progress they had made in knowledge, yet he would rather not be considered merely as a man of letters; and though without birth, fortune, or station, his desire was to be looked upon as that of a private independent gentleman, who read for his amusement," &c.

* This is very incorrect. Gray always disclaimed any skill in gardening, and held it in little estimation, declaring himself only charmed with the wilder parts of unadorned nature. See also "Mason's English Garden," Book III. 25. It was mountain scenery in which he delighted. I remember in one of his MS. Letters, after he had returned from the Highlands of Scotland, his burst of delight, and saying—“One ought to go there every year." Sir James Mackintosh observed, in a letter to a friend, “In the beautiful scenery of Bolton Abbey, where I have been since I began this note, I am struck by the recollection of a sort of merit in Gray, which is not generally observed; that he was the first discoverer of the beauties of nature in England, and has marked out the course of every picturesque journey that can be made in it."

Towards the end of the year 1769, Mr. Nicholls introduced Mr. de Bonstetten, then a youth, in a letter from Bath, to Gray's notice. He resided at Cambridge some months, during which time he enjoyed daily the society of Gray, who appears to

have been quite captivated by the disposition and manners of the young foreigner. Sixty years after this time, and just before his death, Bonstetten printed a little volume of his Recollections, and the following very curious account of Gray is to be

found in it: "Eighteen years before my residence at Nyon, I passed some months at Cambridge with the celebrated poet Gray, in almost as much intimacy as I afterwards did with Mathison; only with this difference, that Gray was thirty years older, and Mathison sixteen years younger. My gravity, my love for English poetry, which I read with Gray, had so subdued and softened him (subjugué), that the difference of our age was no longer felt. I lodged at Cambridge, at a coffee-house close to Pembroke Hall. Gray lived there, buried in a kind of cloister, which the fifteenth century had not removed. The town of Cambridge, with its solitary colleges, was nothing else than an assemblage of monasteries, where the mathematics and some sciences took the form and habit of the theology of the middle ages; handsome conventional buildings, with long and silent corridors; solitary figures in black gowns; young noblemen metamorphosed into monks, with square caps; everywhere one was reminded of monks, by the side of the glory of Newton. No virtuous female cheered and amused the lives of these bookworms in human form; but knowledge sometimes flourished in the deserts of the heart. Such was Cambridge, as I saw it in 1769. What a contrast between the life of Gray at Cambridge, and that of Mr. Mathison at Nyon. Gray, in condemning himself to live at Cambridge, forgot that the genius