THOMAS GRAY (1716-1771)

The life of Gray was singularly devoid of external incident. The records of a few personal ties, a little travel, and a few scattering and reluctant publications, alone give liveliness to the noiseless tenor' of his sequestered studies. At Eton he was noted for 'great delicacy and sometimes a too fastidious behavior,' but found sympathetic companions in Horace Walpole and Richard West. In 1734 he entered Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, and soon became a pensioner at Peterhouse. He devoted himself to classical literature, history, and modern languages, taking no degree on account of his dislike to mathematics. In 1739, on Walpole's invitation, Gray accompanied him to the continent and with great pleasure and profit, spent two years in Italy and France. Many of his Latin poems were written abroad and soon after his return he made his first trials in English verse. The death of his friend West, in 1742, deeply affected him and called forth the first sonnet of importance since those of Milton. About the same time, he began the far-famed Elegy,' while visiting his mother at Stoke, near Windsor. None of his poems were published until several years afterward. He now settled again at Peterhouse and when fifteen years later, he removed to Pembroke Hall, he referred to the incident as a sort of era in a life so barren of events as mine.' He graduated as LL.B. in 1744, but never entered the law. He made voluminous notes and collections for a History of English Poetry which was never written. Toward the end of his life he was appointed Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, but gave no lectures. A dozen poems in English, none long, were all that he published during his lifetime, and the two dozen fragments and fugitive pieces since collected add little to his fame.

By 1757 his reputation was such that he was offered, on the death of Colley Cibber, the poet laureateship; but he declined to be 'rat catcher to his Majesty.' Doctor Johnson, who is grudging in his estimate of Gray's genius, quotes without disparagement a statement that 'Perhaps he was the most learned man in Europe.' Gray was a precursor of the great romanticists in his taste for picturesque landscape, and he kept pace with the antiquarian movements of his time which were preparing the romantic revival. His Letters, which are among the best in the language, reveal the variety and enthusiasm of his interests. They also reveal a shrinking and fastidious taste dashed with piquant, half-cynical humor and not a little scholastic intolerance, and they help us to understand how the man who could write so tender and exquisite a poem as the Elegy in a Country Churchyard should have written so little else.