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 l your tramontane torrents in the North?

To Brown, 1767 :

"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 char- 1 acteristic 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);

poetical ornaments are foreign to the purpose, for they only show a man is not sorry; and devotion worse, for it teaches him that he ought not to be sorry, which is all the pleasure of the thing."

And to Mason he writes in September, 1753:

"I know what it is to lose a person that one's eyes and heart have long been used to, and I never desire to part with the remembrance of that loss." (His mother died in the March of that year.)

Gray's letters also are a mine of acute observation and sharply-edged criticism upon style, especially those to Mason and Beattie. His obiter dicta have the weight of wide reading and much reflection by a man of delicate apprehension and tenacious memory for principles. "Mr. Gray used to say," Mason tells us, "that good writing not only required great parts, but the very best of those parts." 1 "1 I quote a few of his sayings almost

at random :

"Have you read Clarendon's book? Do you remember Mr. Cambridge's account of it before it came out? How well he recollected all the faults, and how utterly he forgot all the beauties? Surely the grossest taste is better than such a sort of delicacy."

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'I think even a bad verse as good a thing or better than the best observation that ever was made upon it."

1 This, perhaps, suggested to Coleridge his admirable definition of the distinction between the language of poetry and of prose. It is almost certain that Coleridge learned from Gray his nicety in the use of vowel-sounds and the secret that in a verse it is the letter that giveth life quite as often as the spirit. Many poets have been intuitively lucky in the practice of this art, but Gray had formulated it.

"Half a word fixed upon or near the spot is worth a cart-load of recollection." (He is speaking of descriptions of scenery, but what he says is of wider application.)

Mason's wor

"Froissart is the Herodotus of a barbarous age." "Jeremy Taylor is the Shakespeare of divines.""I rejoice when I see Machiavel defended or illustrated, who to me appears one of the wisest men that any nation in any age has produced."

'In truth, Shakespeare's language is one of his principal beauties, and he has no less advantage over your Addisons and Rowes in this than in those other great excellencies you mention. Every word in him is a picture."

Of Dryden he said to Beattie :

"That if there was any excellence in his own numbers he had learned it wholly from that great poet, and pressed him with great earnestness to study, as his choice of words and [his] versification were singularly happy and harmonious.”

And again he says in a postscript to Beattie :
"Remember Dryden, and be blind to all his faults."
To Mason he writes:

"All I can say is that your 'Elegy 'must not end with the worst line in it; it is flat, it is prose; whereas that, above all, ought to sparkle, or at least to shine. If the sentiment must stand, twirl it a little into an apothegm, stick a flower in it, gild it with a costly expression; let it strike the fancy, the ear, or the heart, and I am satisfied."

Gray and Mason together, however, could not make the latter a poet!

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Not Grays.

"Now I insist that sense is nothing in poetry, but according to the dress she wears and the scene she appears in."

“I have got the old Scotch ballad on which 'Douglas' [Home's] was founded; it is divine, and as long as from hence to Ashton. Have you never seen it? Aristotle's best rules are observed in it in a manner that shows the author never had heard of Aristotle."

"This latter [speaking of a passage in 'Caractacus'] is exemplary for the expression (always the great point with me); I do not mean by expression the mere choice of words, but the whole dress, fashion, and arrangement of a thought."

"Extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical, is one of the grand beauties of lyric poetry; this I have always aimed at and never could attain."

Of his own Agrippina he says:

"She seemed to me to talk like an old boy all in figures and mere poetry, instead of nature and the language of real passion."

Of the minuteness of his care in matters of expression an example or two will suffice. Writing to Mason he says:

"Sure 'seers comes over too often; besides, it sounds ill." "Plann'd is a nasty stiff word." "I cannot give up 'lost' for it begins with an l."

Yet Gray's nice ear objected to "vain vision" as hard.

It may be asked if those minutiae of alliteration and of close or open vowel-sounds are consistent with anything like that ecstasy of mind, from