the fervor of independence to exact that attention which they refuse to pay." Johnson was obeying Sidney's prescription of looking into his own heart when he wrote that. Walpole's explanation is of the same purport: "I was young, too fond of my own diversion; nay, I do not doubt too much intoxicated by indulgence, vanity, and the insolences of my situation as a Prime Minister's son. I treated him insolently. . . . Forgive me if I say that his temper was not conciliating." They were reconciled a few years later and continued courteously friendly till Gray's death. A meaner explanation of their quarrel has been given by gossip; that a letter which Gray had written home was opened and read by Walpole, who found in it something not to his own advantage. But the reconciliation sufficiently refutes this, for if Gray could have consented to overlook the baseness, Walpole could never have forgiven its detection. Gray was a conscientious traveller, as the notes he has left behind him prove. One of these, on the Borghese Gallery at Rome, is so characteristic as to be worth citing: "Several (Madonnas) of Rafael, Titian, Andrea del Sarto, etc., but in none of them all that heavenly grace and beauty that Guido gave, and that Carlo Maratt has so well imitated in subjects of this nature." This points to an admission which those who admire Gray, as I do, are forced to make, sooner or later, that there was a tint of effeminacy in his nature. That he should have admired Norse poetry, Ossian, and the Scottish ballads is not inconsistent with this, but may be explained by what is called the attraction of opposites, which means merely that we are wont to overvalue qualities or aptitudes which we feel to be wanting in ourselves. Moreover these anti-classical yearnings of Gray began after he had ceased producing, and it was not unnatural that he should admire men who did without thinking what he could not do by taking thought. Elegance, sweetness, pathos, or even majesty he could achieve, but never that force which vibrates in every verse of larger-moulded men. Bonstetten tells us that "every sensation in Gray was passionate," but I very much doubt whether he was capable of that sustained passion of the mind which is fed by a prevailing imagination acting on the consciousness of great powers. That was something he could never feel, though he knew what it meant by his observation of others, and longed to feel it. In him imagination was passive; it could divine and select, but not create. Bonstetten, after seeing the best society in Europe on equal terms, also tells us that Gray was the most finished gentleman he had ever seen. Is it over fine to see something ominous in that word finished? It seems to imply limitations; to imply a consciousness that sees everything between it and the goal rather than the goal itself, that undermines enthusiasm through the haunting doubt of being undermined. We cannot help feeling in the poetry of Gray that it too is finished, perhaps I should rather say limited, as the greatest things never are, as it is one of their merits that they never can be. They suggest more than they bestow, and enlarge our apprehension beyond their own boundaries. Gray shuts us in his own contentment like a cathedral close or college quadrangle. He is all the more interesting, perhaps, that he was a true child of his century, in which decorum was religion. He could not, as Dryden calls it in his generous way, give his soul a loose, although he would. He is of the eagle brood, but unfledged. His eye shares the æther which shall never be cloven by his wing. But it is one of the school-boy blunders in criticism to deny one kind of perfection because it is not another. Gray, more than any of our poets, has shown what a depth of sentiment, how much pleasurable emotion, mere words are capable of stirring through the magic of association, and of artful arrangement in conjunction with agreeable and familiar images. For Gray is pictorial in the highest sense of the term, much more than imaginative. Some passages in his letters give us a hint that he might have been. For example, he asks his friend Stonehewer, in 1760, "Did you never observe (while rocking winds are piping loud) that pause as the gust is re-collecting itself?" But in his verse there is none of that intuitive phrase where the imagination at a touch precipitates thought, feeling, and image in an imperishable crystal. He knew imagination when he saw it; no man better; he could have scientifically defined it; but it would not root in the artificial soil of his own garden, though he transplanted a bit now and then. Here is an instance: Dryden in his "Annus Mirabilis,” |