THOMAS GRAY, the subject of this narrative, was the fifth son of Mr. Philip Gray, whose father was a con­siderable merchant, and who himself was engaged in business^*, though not to the pecuniary advantage of his family, for being of a shy and indolent temper he suffered those opportunities of improving his fortune to escape him which others would have eagerly em­braced. His son Thomas was born Dec. 26th 1716, in Cornhill London, and sent early to Eton school under the tuition of Mr. Antrobus his maternal uncle. This gentleman, being both a good scholar and a man of taste, was assiduous in directing the attention of his nephew to those sources of improvement which he afterwards applied to with so much success. During the time of Mr. Gray's continuance in this abode of the Muses he contracted the strictest intimacy with two of their votaries, whose dispositions in many re­spects were congenial with his own. One of these was the Honourable Horace Walpole, who hath been so long conspicuous for his skill in the fine arts and his love of letters; the other Richard West Esq. son to a late lord chancellor of Ireland, and grandson by his mother to the celebrated Bishop Burnet. As the ac­cident of his uncle's being an assistant at Eton was the [Page vi] cause of his going thither for his classical learning, so to this gentleman's being Fellow of Peterhouse in Cambridge it was owing that he was sent to the same university, and admitted in the year 1734 a Pensioner of the same college.

The relish Mr. Gray had contracted for polite li­terature before his removal to Cambridge rendered the abstruse studies which then almost wholly en­grossed, and at present too much occupy, the attention of young men altogether tasteless and irkfome: still ‘"Song was his favourite and first pursuit;"’ and tho' his thoughts were directed towards the law as a profession for life, yet like Garrick in the picture between Tragedy and Comedy, he hung back with fond reluctance on the Muse. Nor was this bias of his inclination a little influenced by the constant exhor­tations of his two friends, particularly Mr. West, who was now removed to Christ's Church Oxford, and whose propensity to poetry and dislike to the law ap­pear to have even exceeded his own. After having passed four years in college Mr. Gray returned to his father in Town, where he remained till the following spring, at which time Mr. Walpole being about to travel invited his friend to go along with him. The invita­tion was accepted, and they accordingly set out for Italy together, but some disagreement arising between them (occasioned, as Mr. Walpole ingenuously con­fesses, less by his companion's conduct than his own) [Page vii] they parted at Rheggio, from whence, after having made a short stay at Venice, Mr. Gray returned. The time however devoted to this excursion was by no means lost: nothing that our poet saw was suffered to escape him. From no relation, though purposely designed for the publick eye, can so much informa­tion be drawn as from his casual letters. During this interval of his friend's absence Mr. West, finding that his aversion to the profession for which he had desti­ned himself (and with a view to which he had resided some time in the Temple) became almost insuperable, wrote to Mr. Gray on the subject, expressing in the strongest manner the ennui that almost overwhelmed him. To this letter an answer was returned which presents the finest picture of the writer's mind, and abounds with a justness of thinking far beyond his years. Gray was now at Florence, where he had spent in all eleven months, amusing himself at intervals with poetical compositions. It was here that he con­ceived the design, and produced the first book, of a di­dactick poem in Latin entitled De Principiis Cogitandi, and addressed to Mr. West, a work which he unfor­tunately never completed. From Florence proceed­ing to Venice he returned to England, deviating but little from the route he had gone, but particularly ta­king once more in his way the Grand Chartreuse, where in this visit he wrote on the album of that mo­nastery the following Alcaick ode:

On the 1st of September 1741 he arrived in Lon­don; where he had not been much more than two months before his father was carried off by the gout, a malady from which he had long and severely suffered. As the inactivity and ill health of the elder Mr. Gray had prevented him from accumulating the fortune he might have acquired with ease, so his imprudence had induced him to squander no inconsiderable part of what he possessed. The son therefore finding his pa­trimony inadequate to the profession he had intended to follow without diminishing the income of his mother [Page ix] and his aunt, resolved for this reason to relinquish it; yet to silence their importunities on the subject he proposed only to change the line of it, and accord­ingly went to Cambridge in the year 1742 to take his Bachelor's degree. But the inconveniencies incident to a scanty fortune were not the only evils he had now to combat. Poor West, the friend of his heart, was overborne by a consumption and family distresses; and these, alas! were burthens which friendship could not remove. After languishing a considerable time under their united oppression this amiable youth fell a victim to both on the 1st of June 1742 at Pope's, and was interred in the chancel of Hatfield church, beneath a stone bearing the epitaph below^*.

From the time of Mr. Gray's return out of Italy to the date of this melancholy event he seems to have employed himself chiefly in writing, for in this in­terval he communicated to Mr. West the fragment of his tragedy, and several other pieces. The shock how­ever of so severe a stroke disarranged his plans, and broke off his designs. The only addition he afterwards made to his didactick poem is the apostrophe to the friend he had lost^†; and nothing can more pathetically [Page x] display the feelings of a heart wounded by such a loss than that apostrophe and the sonnet in which he gave them vent:

The Ode to Spring was written early in June at Stoke, whither he had gone to visit his mother, and sent to Mr. West before Mr. Gray had heard of his death: how he employed his pen when this ode was returned to him with the melancholy news we have already seen. Impressions of grief on the generality of mankind, like characters marked on the sand of the sea, are speedily effaced by the influx of business or pleasure, but the traces of them on the heart of Gray were too deeply inscribed to be soon obliterated; we shall not therefore wonder at the subjects he has cho­sen, nor at the solemnity with which he hath treated them. His Ode on the Prospect of Eton College, as well as the Hymn to Adversity, were both written in the following August, and it is highly probable that the Elegy in the Country Church yard was begun also about this time.

Having made a visit of some length at Stoke to his mother and aunt our poet returned to Cambridge, which from this period became his principal home. The conveniencies resulting from that situation, to a person of circumscribed fortune and a studious temper, were in his estimation more than a counterbalance for the dislike which, on several accounts, he bore to [Page xii] the place. Less pleased with exerting his own powers than in contemplating the exertions of others, he al­most wholly devoted himself to the best writers of Greece; and so assiduously did he apply to the study of their works as in the course of six years to have read with critical exactness almost every author of note in that language. During this interval however he was not so entirely occupied with his stated em­ployment as to have no time for expressing his aver­sion to the ignorance and dulness which appeared to surround him; but of what he intended on this sub­ject a short fragment only remains.

In the year 1744 he appears to have given up en­tirely his didactick poem, and to have relinquished, for sometime at least, any further solicitations of the Muse. Mr. Walpole, notwithstanding, being desi­rous to preserve what he had already written, and to perpetuate the merit of their deceased friend, impor­tuned Mr. Gray to publish his own poems together with those of Mr. West; but this Mr. Gray declined, from the apprehension that the joint stock of both would hardly fill a small volume▪ A favourite cat be­longing to Mr. Walpole happening about this time (1747) to be drowned, Mr. Gray amused himself with writing on the occasion an elegant little ode, in which he hath happily united both humour and in­struction. But the following year was distinguished by a far more important effort of his Muse; the Fragment on Education and Government, which is [Page xiii] superiour to every thing in the same style of writing that our own language can boast of, and perhaps any other.

[Page xvi] How much it is to be wished that Gray, instead of compiling chronological tables, had completed what he thus admirably begun! In the year 1750 he put his last hand to the Elegy in the Country Church­yard, which when finished was communicated first to Mr. Walpole, and by him to several persons of di­stinction. I his brought Mr. Gray acquainted with Lady Cobham, and furnished an occasion for his Long Story, a composition in which the different colours of wit and humour are peculiarly and not less intimate­ly blended than the shifting hues on the faces of a diamond. The elegy having been for some time pri­vately transmitted from onehand to another, at length found its way into publick through The Magazine of Magazines. This disgraceful mode of appearance subjected the Author to the necessity of exhibiting it under a less disadvantageous form; and Mr. Bentley soon after wishing to supply every ornament that his pencil could contribute, drew, not only for it but also for the rest of Mr. Gray's productions^†, a set of de­signs, which were handsomely repaid by some very beautiful stanzas, of which unfortunately no perfect copy remains. In the March of 1753 Mr. Gray su­stained a loss which he long severely felt: his mo­ther, to whom his conduct was exemplary for the discharge of every filial duty, and who merited all [Page xvii] the tenderness and attention she received, was taken from him by death. The lines in which Mr. Pope hath expressed his piety, beautiful as they are, and much as they deserve to be praised, appear notwith­standing to excite less of sympathy than a single stroke in the epitaph on Mrs. Gray^*, or a passage in a let­ter to Mr. Mason, written the following Decem­ber, on the deaths of his father and friend: ‘"I have seen the scene you describe, and know how dread­ful it is; I know too I am the better for it. We are all idle and thoughtless things, and have no sense, no use in the world, any longer than that sad im­pression lasts: the deeper it is engraved the better."’

Mr. Gray, as is evident by a letter to Dr. Wharton, had finished his Ode on the Progress of Poetry early in 1755; his Bard also was begun about this time, and in the year following the beautiful fragment on the Pleasures of Vicissitude. From the loose hints in his commonplace-book he appears to have planned a fourth ode on the connexion between genius and grandeur, but it cannot now be ascertained if any part of it was actually written. A vacancy in the of­fice of Poet-Laureate was occasioned in 1757 by the death of Colley Cibber. The Duke of Devonshire, [Page xviii] being at that time Chamberlain, made a polite offer of it to Mr. Gray through the hands of Lord John Cavendish his brother; but the disgrace brought upon that office by the profligacy and inability of some who had filled it probably induced Mr. Gray to decline the appointment. This part of our poet's life was chiefly devoted to literary pursuits and the cultiva­tion of friendship. It is obvious from the testimony of his letters that he was indefatigable in the former, and that he was always ready to perform kind offices in the latter. Sir William Williams, an accomplished and gallant young officer, having been killed at Bellisle, his friend Mr. Fred. Montagu proposed to erect a mo­nument over him, and with this view requested Mr. Gray to furnish the epitaph. His slight acquaintance with Sir William would have been a sufficient reason for declining the task, but the friendliness of Mr. Montagu's disposition, and the sincerity of affliction with which he was affected, wrought so powerfully upon Mr. Gray that he could not refuse him, though he was by no means able to satisfy himself with the verses he wrote. The professorship of modern lan­guages and history in the University of Cambridge becoming vacant in 1762 through the death of Mr. Turner, Mr. Gray was spirited up by some of his friends to ask of Lord Bute the succession. His ap­plication however failed, the office having been pro­mised to Lady Lowther for the tutor of Sir James, from a motive which reflected more honour on her [Page xix] Ladyship than on the gentleman who succeeded. In 1765 Mr. Gray, ever attached to the beauties of Na­ture as well as to the love of antiquities, undertook a journey to Scotland for the purpose of gratifying his curiosity and taste. During his stay in this country Dr. Beattie (though not the first of philosophers yet a poet inferiour to none since the death of his friend, and whom he in many respects resembled) found the means of engaging his notice and friendship. Through the intervention of this gentleman the Ma­risehal College of Aberdeen had requested to know if the degree of Doctor of Laws would be acceptable to Gray; but this mark of their attention he civilly de­clined. In December 1767 Dr. Beattie, still desirous that his country should afford some testimony of its regard to the merit of our poet, solicited his permis­sion to print at the University press of Glasgow an elegant edition of his Works. Dodsley had before asked the like favour, and Mr. Gray, unwilling to re­fuse, gratified both with a copy containing a few notes and the imitations of the old Norwegian poe­try, intended to supplant the Long Story, which was printed at first only to illustrate Mr. Bentley's designs. The death of Mr. Brocket in the July fol­lowing left another opening to the professorship which he had before unsuccessfully sought. Lord Bute however was not in office, and the Duke of Grafton, to preclude a request, within two days of the vacancy appointed Mr. Gray. Cambridge before [Page xx] had been his residence from choice, it now became so from obligation, and the greater part of his time there was filled up by his old engagements or diverted to new ones. It has been suggested that he once embra­ced the project of republishing Strabo, and there are reasons to believe that he meant it, as the many geo­graphical disquisitions he left behind him appear to have been too minute for the gratification of general inquiry. The like observation may be transferred to Plato and the Greek Anthologia, as he had taken un­common pains with both, and has left a ms. of the latter fit for the press. His design of favouring the publick with the history of English poetry may be spoken of with more certainty, as in this he had not only engaged with Mr. Mason as a colleague, but actually paraphrased the Norse and Welsh poems inserted in his Works for specimens of the wild spirit which animated the bards of ancient days. The exten­sive compass however of the subject, and the knowledge that it was also in the hands of Mr. Warton, induced him to relinquish what he had thus successfully begun. Nor did his love for the antiquities of his country con­fine his researches to its poetry alone: the structures of our ancestors and their various improvements particu­larly engaged his attention. Hitherto there hath no­thing so authentick and accurate on the subject of Go­thick architecture appeared as the observations upon it drawn up by Mr. Gray, and inserted by Mr. Bentham in his Hist. of Ely. Of heraldry, its correlative science, [Page xxi] he possessed the entire knowledge. But of the various pursuits which employed his studies for the last ten years of his life none were so acceptable as those which explained the economy of Nature. For botany he ac­quired a taste of his uncle when young; and the ex­ercise which for the sake of improvement in this branch of the science he induced himself to take con­tributed not a little to the preservation of his health. How considerable his improvements in it were those only can tell who have seen his additions to Hudson, and his notes on Linnaeus. While confined to zoology he successfully applied his discoveries to illustrate Ari­stotle and others of the Ancients. From engagements of this kind Mr. Gray's attention was neither often nor long diverted. Excepting the time he gave up to experiments on flowers, for the purpose of investiga­ting the process of vegetation, (which can scarcely be called a relaxation from his stated occupations) his on­ly amusement was musick; nor was his acquaintance with this art less than with others of much more im­portance. His skill was acquired from the produc­tions of the best composers, out of whose works when in Italy he had made a selection. Vocal musick he chiefly preferred. The harpsichord was his favourite instrument, but though far from remarkable for a fi­nished execution, yet he accommodated his voice so judiciously to his playing as to give an auditor con­siderable pleasure. His judgment in statuary and painting was exquisite, and formed from an almost [Page xxii] instinctive perception of those graces beyond the reach of art in which the divine works of the great masters abound. As it was through the unsolicited favour of the Duke of Grafton that Mr. Gray was en­abled to follow the bent of his own inclination in the choice of his studies, we shall not be surprised to find, from a letter to Dr. Beattie, that gratitude prompted him to offer his firstling:

Accordingly on his Grace's being elected Chancellor of the University Mr. Gray, unasked, took upon him to write those verses which are usually set to musick on this occasion; and whatever the sarcastick Junius (notwithstanding his handsome compliment to the poet) might pretend, this was the offering of no ve­nal Muse. The ode in its structure is dramatick, and it contains nothing of the complimentary kind which is not entirely suited to the characters employed. Not long after the bustle of the installation was over Mr. Gray made an excursion to the sequestered lakes of Westmoreland and Cumberland. The impressions he there received from the wonderful scenery that every where surrounded him he transmitted to his friend Dr. Wharton in epistolary journals, with all the wild­ness of Salvator and the softness of Claude. Writing in May 1771 to the same friend, he complains of a [Page xxiii] violent cough which had troubled him for three months, and which he called incurable, adding, that till this year he never knew what (mechancial) low spirits were. One circumstance that without doubt contributed to the latter complaint was the anxiety he felt from holding as a sinecure an office the du­ties of which he thought himself bound to perform. The object of his professorship being twofold, and the patent allowing him to effect one of its designs by de­puty, it is understood that he liberally rewarded for that purpose the teachers in the University of Italian and French. The other part he himself prepared to execute; but tho' the professorship was instituted in 1724, none of his predecessors had furnished a plan. Embarassed by this and other difficulties, and re­tarded by ill health, the undertaking at length be­came so irksome that he seriously proposed to relin­quish the chair. Towards the close of May he remo­ved from Cambridge to Town, after having suffered from flying attacks of an hereditary gout, to which he had long been subject, and from which a life of singular temperance could not protect him. In Lon­don his indisposition having increased, the physician advised him to change his lodgings in Jermynstreet for others at Kensington. This change was of so much benefit that he was soon enabled to return to Cam­bridge, from whence he meditated a journey to his friend Dr. Wharton, which he hoped might reestablish his health; but his intentions and hopes were delusive. [Page xxiv] On the 24th of July 1771 a violent sickness came on him while at dinner in the College-hall; the gout had fixed on his stomach, and resisted all the powers of medicine. On the 29th he was seized by a strong convulsion, which the next day returned with addi­tional force, and the evening after he expired. At the first seizure he was aware of his danger, and tho' sensible at intervals almost to the last, he betrayed no dread of the terrours of death.

To delineate his portrait in this place would be needless. The reader will acquire the best idea of his character if after perusing his life and his writings he will use his own memory a sa cylindrick mirror, and collect into one assemblage the scattered features. Of Mr Gray's religious opinions but little is known; there are however sufficient traces left to shew him a believer. To Lord Bolingbroke's atheism he hath written an answer. His sentiments of Lord Saftesbury cannot be mistaken; and both Voltaire and Hume he censures with freedom. In private life he was most respected by those who best knew him: his heart was benevolent and his hand liberal.

On his poems it will be needless to bestow praises, or to repel the attacks of envy and rancour. If Mr. Gray was not a poet of the first order there is no poe­try existing; and if his bold expressions be nonsense, so are the best passages of Shakespeare and Milton, and the sublimest figures of divine inspiration.