Duncan Crookes Tovey

“ Gray yields to the impulse of the Romantic movement; he has long been an admirer of ballad poetry; before he wrote “The Bard” he had begun to study Scandinavian literature, and the two “Norse Odes,” written in 1761, were in style and metrical form strangely anticipative of Coleridge and Scott. Meanwhile his Cambridge life had been vexed by the freaks of the fellow-commoners of Peterhouse, a peculiarly riotous set. ”

“ Yet it is difficult to believe that he was not the better for that training in refinement of style which he partly owed to Pope, who almost unquestionably contributed some passages to The Seasons. And, except in The Castle of Indolence, there is much that is conventional, much that is even vicious or vulgar in taste when Thomson’s muse deals with that human life which must be the background of descriptive as of all other poetry ”

“ Herculaneum, an object of intense interest to the young poet and antiquary, had been discovered the year before. At length in April 1741 Gray and Walpole set out northwards for Reggio. Here they quarrelled. Gray, “never a boy,” was a student, and at times retiring; Walpole, in his way a student too, was at this time a very social being, somewhat too frivolous, and, what was worse, too patronizing. He good-humouredly said at a later date, “Gray loves to find fault,” and this fault-finding was expressed, no doubt with exaggeration, in a letter to Ashton, who violated Gray’s confidence. ”

“ Among the numerous lives of the poet may be mentioned those by his friend Patrick Murdoch, by Dr Johnson in Lives of the Poets, by Sir Harris Nicolas (Ald. ed., 1860) , by M. Morel, James Thomson, sa vie et ses œuvres (Paris, 1895) , and James Thomson, in the English Men of Letters Series, by G. C. Macaulay (1908) . See also Dr G. Schmeding’s Jacob Thomson, ein vergessener Dichter des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts; the life prefixed to the Aldine edition of his works in 1897; and an excellent edition of The Seasons in the Clarendon Press Series by J. Logie Robertson. (D. C. To.) ”

“ In 1734 Gray matriculated at Peterhouse, Cambridge, of which his uncle, Robert Antrobus, had been a fellow. At Cambridge he had once more the companionship of Walpole and Ashton who were at King’s, but West went to Christchurch, Oxford. Gray made at this time the firmest and most constant friendship of his life with Thomas Wharton (not the poet Warton) of Pembroke College. ”

“ In a beautiful alcaic stanza he pronounces the man supremely happy who in the depths of the heart is conscious of the “fount of tears,” and his characteristic melancholy, except in the few hours when it was indeed black, was not a pitiable state; rather, it was one secret of the charm both of the man and of the poet.
A very complete bibliography of Gray will be found in Dr. Bradshaw’s edition of the poems in the Aldine series. Dodsley published ten of the poems, exclusive of the “Long Story,” in 1768. ”

“ These Pope, if the handwriting be his, made in an interleaved edition of The Seasons dated 1738, and they were for the most part adopted by Thomson in the edition of 1744. The writer seldom makes more than verbal changes in passages of pure description, but sometimes strikingly enhances the scenes in which human character comes into lay, adding, for example, the comparison, in Autumn, of the fair Lavinia to a myrtle in the Apennines, of which the first suggestion can be found in The Rape of the Lock. ”

“ About this tragedy Gray preserved a mournful silence, broken only by the pathetic sonnet, and some Latin lines, in which he laments his loss. The year 1742, was, for him, fruitful in poetic effort, of which, however, much was incomplete. The “Agrippina,” the De principiis Cogitandi, the splenetic “Hymn to Ignorance” in which he contemplates his return to the university, remain fragments; but besides the two poems already mentioned, the “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” and the “Hymn to Adversity,” perhaps the most faultless of his poems, were written before the close of the summer. ”

“ In his own time he was regarded as an innovator, for like Collins he revived the poetic diction of the past, and the adverse judgments of Johnson and others upon his work are in fact a defence of the current literary traditions. Few men have published so little to so much effect; few have attained to fame with so little ambition. ”

“ He was established in May 1736 in a small house at Richmond, but his patron died in February 1737 and he lost his sinecure; he then “whips and spurs” to finish his tragedy Agamemnon, which appeared in April 1738, not before he had been arrested for a debt of £70, from which, according to a story which has been discredited on quite insufficient grounds, Quin relieved him in the most generous and tactful manner. ”

“ In the same year he sent to Wharton the beginning of the didactic poem, “The Alliance of Education and Government,” which remains a fragment. His aunt, Mary Antrobus, died in 1749.
There is little to break the monotony of his days till 1750, when from Stoke he sent Walpole “a thing to which he had at last put an end.” The “thing” was the “Elegy.” It was shown about in manuscript by his admiring friend; it was impudently pirated, and Gray had it printed by Dodsley in self-defence. Even thus it had “a pinch or two in its cradle,” of which it long bore the marks. ”

“ Gray was stimulated to finish it by hearing the blind Welsh harper Parry at Cambridge. Both odes were the first-fruits of the press which Walpole had set up at Strawberry Hill, and were printed together there in 1757. They are genuinely Pindaric, that is, with corresponding strophes, antistrophes and epodes. As the Greek motto prefixed to them implies, they were vocal to the intelligent only ”

“ Men of Letters (2nd ed., 1889) ; some further relics are given in Gray and His Friends by D. C. Tovey (Cambridge, 1890) ; and a new edition of the letters copiously annotated by D. C. Tovey is in the Standard Library (1900–1907) . Nicholl’s Illustrations, vol. vi. p. 805, quoted by Professor Kittredge in the Nation, Sept. 12th, 1900, gives the true story of Gray’s migration to Pembroke College. Matthew Arnold’s essay on Gray in Ward’s English Poets is one of the minor classics of literary criticism. (D. C. To.) ”