was doing something, and that. he might have an excuse ready when conscience reproached him with not doing something he could do better. He speaks of "his natural indolence and indisposition to act," in a letter to Wharton. Temple tells us that he wished rather to be looked on as a gentleman than as a man of letters, and this may have been partly true at a time when authorship was still lodged in Grub Street and in many cases deserved no better. Gray had the admirable art of making himself respected by beginning first himself. He always treated Thomas Gray with the distinguished consideration he deserved. Perhaps neither Bonstetten nor Sainte-Beuve was precisely the man to understand the more than English reserve of Gray, the reserve of a man as proud as he was sensitive. And Gray's pride was not, as it sometimes is, allied to vanity; it was personal rather than social, if I may attempt a distinction which I feel but can hardly define. After he became famous, one of the several Lords Gray claimed kindred with him, perhaps I should say was willing that he should claim it, on the ground of a similarity of arms. Gray preferred his own private distinction, and would not admit their lordships to any partnership in it. Michael Angelo, who fancied himself a proud man, was in haste to believe a purely imaginary pedigree that derived him from the Counts of Canossa.

That I am right in saying that Gray's melancholy was in part remorse at (if I may not say the waste) the abeyance of his powers, may be read

between the lines (I think) in more than one of his letters. His constant endeavor was to occupy himself in whatever would save him from the reflection of how he might occupy himself better. "To find one's self business," he says, " (I am persuaded), is the great art of life. . . . Some spirit, some genius (more than common) is required to teach a man how to employ himself." And elsewhere: "to be employed is to be happy," which was a saying he borrowed of Swift, another selfdissatisfied man. Bonstetten says in French that "his mind was gay and his character melancholy." In German he substitutes "soul" for "character." He was cheerful, that is, in any company but his own, and this, it may be guessed, because faculties were called into play which he had not the innate force to rouse into more profitable activity. Gray's melancholy was that of Richard II. :—

"I wasted time, and now doth time waste me,

For now hath time made me his numbering-clock.”

Whatever the cause, it began about the time when he had finally got his two great odes off his hands. At first it took the form of resignation, as when he writes to Mason in 1757:

"I can only tell you that one who has far more reason than you, I hope, will ever have to look on life with something worse than indifference, is yet no enemy to it, but can look backward on many bitter moments, partly with satisfaction, and partly with patience, and forward, too, on a scene not very promising, with some hope and some expectation of a better day."

But it is only fair to give his own explanation of

his unproductiveness. He writes to Wharton, who had asked him for an epitaph on a child just lost:

"I by no means pretend to inspiration, but yet I affirm that the faculty in question is by no means voluntary. It is the result, I suppose, of a certain disposition of mind which does not depend on one's self, and which I have not felt this long time."

In spite of this, however, it should be remembered that the motive power always becomes sluggish in men who too easily admit the supremacy of moods. But an age of common sense would very greatly help such a man as Gray to distrust him

self.

If Gray ceased to write poetry, let us be thankful that he continued to write letters. Cowper, the poet, a competent judge, for he wrote excellent letters himself, and therefore had studied the art, says, writing to Hill in 1777 :

"I once thought Swift's letters the best that could be written; but I like Gray's better. His humor, or his wit, or whatever it is to be called, is never ill-natured or offensive, and yet, I think, equally poignant with the Dean's."

I think the word that Cowper was at a loss for was playfulness, the most delightful ingredient in letters, for Gray can hardly be said to have had humor in the deeper sense of the word. The nearest approach to it I remember is where he writes. (as Lamb would have written) to Walpole suffering with the gout: "The pain in your feet I can bear." He has the knack of saying droll things

in an off-hand way, and as if they cost him nothing. It is only the most delicately trained hand that can venture on this playful style, easy as it seems, without danger of a catastrophe, and Gray's perfect elegance could nowhere have found a more admirable foil than in the vulgar jauntiness and clumsy drollery of his correspondent, Mason. Let me cite an example or two.

He writes to Wharton, 1753:

"I take it ill you should say anything against the Mole. It is a reflection, I see, cast at the Thames. Do you think that rivers which have lived in London and its neighbourhood all their days will run roaring and tumbling about like your tramontane torrents in the North?”

"Pray that the Trent may not intercept us at Newark, for we have had infinite rain here, and they say every brook sets up for a river."

Of the French, he writes to Walpole, in Paris:

"I was much entertained with your account of our neighbours. As an Englishman and an anti-Gallican, I rejoice at their dulness and their nastiness, though I fear we shall come to imitate them in both. Their atheism is a little too much, too shocking to be rejoiced at. I have long been sick at it in their authors and hated them for it; but I pity their poor innocent people of fashion. They were bad enough when they believed everything."

Of course it is difficult to give instances of a thing in its nature so evanescent, yet so subtly per vasive, as what we call tone. I think it is in this,

if in anything, that Gray's letters are on the whole superior to Swift's. This playfulness of Gray very easily becomes tenderness on occasion, and even pathos.

Writing to his friend Nicholls in 1765, he says:

"It is long since I heard you were gone in haste into Yorkshire on account of your mother's illness, and the same letter informed me she was recovered. Otherwise I had then wrote to you only to beg you would take care of her, and to inform you that I had discovered a thing very little known, which is, that in one's whole life one can never have any more than a single mother. You may think this obvious and (what you call) a trite observation. . . . You are a green gosling! I was at the same age (very near) as wise as you, and yet I never discovered this (with full evidence and conviction, I mean) till it was too late. It is thirteen years ago and it seems but as yesterday, and every day I live it sinks deeper into my heart."

In his letters of condolence, perhaps the most arduous species of all composition, Gray shows the same exquisite tact which is his distinguishing characteristic as a poet. And he shows it by never attempting to console. Perhaps his notions on this matter may be divined in what he writes to Walpole about Lyttelton's "Elegy on his Wife: "

"I am not totally of your mind as to Mr. Lyttelton's elegy, though I love kids and fawns as little as you do. If it were all like the fourth stanza I should be excessively pleased. Nature and sorrow and tenderness are the true genius of such things; and something of these I find in several parts of it (not in the orange tree);