"Gray failed as a poet not because he took too much pains and so extinguished his animation, but because he had very little of that fiery quality to begin with, and his pains were of the wrong sort. He wrote English verses as his brother Eton schoolboys wrote Latin, filching a phrase now from one author and now from another. I do not profess to be a person of very various reading; nevertheless, if I were to pluck out of Gray's tail all of the feathers which I know belong to other birds, he would be left very bare indeed. Do not let anybody persuade you that any quantity of good verses can be produced by mere felicity; or that an immortal style can be the growth of mere genius. Multa tulit fecitque' must be the motto of all those who are to last.” 1

What would be left to Gray after this plucking would be his genius, for genius he certainly had, or he could not have produced the effect of it. The gentle Cowper, no bad critic also he, was kinder.

"I have been reading Gray's works," he says, “and think him the only poet since Shakespeare entitled to the character of sublime. Perhaps you will remember that I once had a different opinion of him. I was prejudiced."

In spite of unjust depreciation and misapplied criticism, Gray holds his own and bids fair to last

1 I need not point out that Wordsworth is a little confused, if not self-contradictory in this criticism. I will add only two quotations to show that accidents will happen to the best-regulated poets:

"At distance heard the murmur of many waterfalls not audible in the day-time." - Gray to Wharton, 1769.

"A soft and lulling sound is heard

Of streams inaudible by day." - White Doe.

Gray probably guided Wordsworth to the vein of gold in Dyer.

as long as the language which he knew how to write so well and of which he is one of the glories. Wordsworth is justified in saying that he helped himself from everybody and everywhere — and yet he made such admirable use of what he stole (if theft there was) that we should as soon think of finding fault with a man for pillaging the dictionary. He mixed himself with whatever he tookan incalculable increment. In the editions of his poems, the thin line of text stands at the top of the page like cream, and below it is the skim-milk drawn from many milky mothers of the herd out of which it has risen. But the thing to be considered is that, no matter where the material came from, the result is Gray's own. Whether original or not, he knew how to make a poem, a very rare knowledge among men. The thought in Gray is neither uncommon nor profound, and you may call it beatified commonplace if you choose. I shall not contradict you. I have lived long enough to know that there is a vast deal of commonplace in the world of no particular use to anybody, and am thankful to the man who has the divine gift to idealize it for me. Nor am I offended with this odor of the library that hangs about Gray, for it recalls none but delightful associations. It was in the very best literature that Gray was steeped, and I am glad that both he and we should profit by it. If he appropriated a fine phrase wherever he found it, it was by right of eminent domain, for surely he was one of the masters of language. His praise is that what he touched was idealized, and kindled

with some virtue that was not there before, but came from him.

And he was the most conscientious of artists. Some of the verses which he discards in deference to this conscientiousness of form which sacrifices the poet to the poem, the parts to the whole, and regards nothing but the effect to be produced, would have made the fortune of another poet. Take for example this stanza omitted from the "Elegy" (just before the Epitaph), because, says Mason, “he thought it was too long a parenthesis in this place."

"There scattered oft, the earliest of the year,
By hands unseen are showers of violets found;
The redbreast loves to build and warble there,
And little footsteps lightly print the ground."

Gray might run his pen through this, but he could not obliterate it from the memory of men. Surely Wordsworth himself never achieved a simplicity of language so pathetic in suggestion, so musical in movement as this.

Any slave of the mine may find the rough gem, but it is the cutting and polishing that reveal its heart of fire; it is the setting that makes of it a jewel to hang at the ear of Time. If Gray cull his words and phrases here, there, and everywhere, it is he who charges them with the imaginative or picturesque touch which only he could give and which makes them magnetic. For example, in these two verses of "The Bard:

"Amazement in his van with Flight combined,

And Sorrow's faded form and Solitude behind!"

The suggestion (we are informed by the notes) came from Cowper and Oldham, and the amazement combined with flight sticks fast in prose. But the personification of Sorrow and the fine generalization of Solitude in the last verse which gives an imaginative reach to the whole passage are Gray's own. The owners of what Gray "conveyed' would have found it hard to identify their property and prove title to it after it had once suffered the Gray-change by steeping in his mind and memory.

When the example in our Latin Grammar tells us that Mors communis est omnibus, it states a truism of considerable interest, indeed, to the person in whose particular case it is to be illustrated, but neither new nor startling. No one would think of citing it, whether to produce conviction or to heighten discourse. Yet mankind are agreed in finding something more poignant in the same reflection when Horace tells us that the palace as well as the hovel shudders at the indiscriminating foot of Death. Here is something more than the dry statement of a truism. The difference between the two is that between a lower and a higher; it is, in short, the difference between prose and poetry. The oyster has begun, at least, to secrete its pearl, something identical with its shell in substance, but in sentiment and association how unlike! Malherbe takes the same image and makes it a little more picturesque, though, at the same time, I fear, a little more Parisian, too, when he says that the sentinel pacing before the gate of the Louvre cannot forbid Death an entrance to the King. And how

long had not that comparison between the rose's life and that of the maiden dying untimely been a commonplace when the same Malherbe made it irreclaimably his own by mere felicity of phrase? We do not ask where people got their hints, but what they made out of them. The commonplace is unhappily within reach of us all, and unhappily, too, they are rare who can give it novelty and even invest it with a kind of grandeur as Gray knew how to do. If his poetry be a mosaic, the design is always his own. He, if any, had certainly "the last and greatest art," the art to please. Shall we call everything mediocre that is not great? Shall we deny ourselves to the charm of sentiment because we prefer the electric shudder that imagination gives us? Even were Gray's claims to being a great poet rejected, he can never be classed with the many, so great and uniform are the efficacy of his phrase and the music to which he sets it. This unique distinction, at least, may be claimed for him without dispute, that he is the one English poet who has written less and pleased more than any other. Above all it is as a teacher of the art of writing that he is to be valued. If there be any well of English undefiled, it is to be found in him and his master, Dryden. They are still standards of what may be called classical English, neither archaic nor modern, and as far removed from pedantry as from vulgarity. They were

"Tous deux disciples d'une escole

Où l'on forcene doucement,"

a school in which have been enrolled the Great Masters of literature.