Paris, having been even in his early youth keenly alive to the frivolity of the French character of that period, he says:

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 rejoice at. I have been long 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!' -Ibid. p. 562.

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To Mason he writes: I have not read the Philosophical Dictionary. I can stay with great patience for anything that comes from Voltaire. They tell me it is frippery, and blasphemy, and wit.' He once,' says Mr. Nicholls, made it his particular request to a friend of his who was going to the Continent, that he would not pay a visit to Voltaire ;' and when his friend replied, What can a visit from a person like me to him signify?' he rejoined, with peculiar earnestness, Sir, every 'tribute to such a man signifies.' He said, prophetically, that no one could even conjecture the extent of public mischief that Voltaire would occasion; and he had a similar aversion to Hume, as a deliberate enemy of religion. Indeed, his habit of inquiring, when men of genius were first mentioned to him, 'Is he good for anything?' and his indifference to the most shining qualities, if disfigured by profligacy, or want of principle, were peculiarly honourable in a man who derived his chief pleasure from the exercise of the intellect in himself, and in the works of others.

The protest of such men in such times is of inestimable value; and English society was certainly fortunate in possessing two men of undisputed genius, who had in other respects but little in common, to lift up their voice against the irreligious spirit of the day; the one all-powerful in conversation, the other not less influential in a narrower, but yet important circle of devoted friends. That he used the power of a master mind well, we see not only on such important matters as we have just touched upon, and which, indeed, mainly concern his own character: we have also some very happy instances that he used this influence for the good of his friends in the duties and conduct of their daily thoughts and lives. The sensibility and tenderness of his nature, of which his friends alone were conscious, made him an excellent adviser in matters regarding the feelings and susceptibilities of others. Take the following counsels to a correspondent how to bring about a reconciliation between worthy mutual friends, once intimate, but now estranged through some misunderstanding. We ourselves attach great value to such efforts in one whose thoughts had strong currents of their own, for in most cases

minds of this order prefer to run in their own channel, and are not easily diverted to concern themselves for others in cases of mere feeling:

Remind him, (the person thinking himself aggrieved,) remind him eloquently, that is, from your heart, and in such expressions as that will furnish, how many idle suspicions a sensible mind, naturally disposed to melancholy, and depressed by misfortunes, is capable of entertaining, especially if it meets with but a shadow of neglect, or of contempt, from the very (perhaps the only) person in whose kindness it had taken refuge. Remind him of his former goodness, frankly and generously shown to N―; and beg him not to destroy the natural effects of it by any appearance of pique or of resentment; for that even the fancies and chimeras of a worthy heart deserve a little management and even respect. Assure him, as I believe you safely may, that a few kind words, the slightest testimony of his esteem, will brush away all N's suspicions and gloomy thoughts; and that, after this, there will need no constraint in his own behaviour, no, not so much as in the most trifling matter; for when one is secure of a person's intentions, all the rest passes for nothing.'-Ibid. p. 592.

Against the selfishness generally induced by a solitary life of leisure, Gray had indeed some natural safeguards; his leisure could never be wholly comfortable and easy, for he suffered both from bad health and low spirits. Though his letters contain but casual allusions to his bodily sufferings, his diary on his health, kept in Latin, is we are told a mournful record of pain and disease, of sleepless nights and feverish mornings. He suffered from constant attacks of hereditary gout, which his temperate habits could not do more than modify. He talks once, in sad enough jest, of inheriting all Mason's Cambridge friends, as he does all Delaval's diseases,'-and in his later years he was afflicted by such painful debilitating disorders, as to be confined mainly to his own rooms, and consequently to the society of intimate friends visiting him there. A certain delicacy of constitution belonged to him through life. Even at school he never engaged in any exercise or boyish amusement, and surveyed the sports of his schoolfellows in the beloved fields' he has so tenderly commemorated, from a distance. Hence he never fell into boyish ways, or school improprieties. Horace Walpole, indeed, used to say he never was a boy. He seems early to have contracted his horror of dirt, and he made in consequence what one of his quaint biographers calls 'an elegant little figure' at school, his dress and hair being never disordered by rude exercise. So great an aversion, indeed, had he to 'rough exercise,' that this same schoolfellow is convinced he was never on horseback in his life.

And doubtless his constitutional melancholy manifested itself in his character as early. Gray never wrote a line that he did not know to be strictly true; and when he wrote of himself that

Melancholy marked him for her own,'

it was no transient mood he was recording, but a settled habit, which had been his, and must be his while he lived; though, probably, his sedentary habits did much to enhance these painful feelings, and nothing relieved them so much as travelling and change of scene. Constantly we find such notices as these:

'Low spirits,' he writes at the age of twenty, are my true and faithful companions; they get up with me, and go to bed with me; make journeys and returns as I do; nay, and pay visits, and will even affect to be jocose, and force a feeble laugh with me; but most commonly we sit alone together, and are the prettiest insipid company in the world.'

'My health I cannot complain of, but as to my spirits, they are always many degrees below changeable; and I seem to myself to inspire everybody around me with ennui and dejection. But, some time or other, all these things must come to a conclusion.'-Mitford, p. 160.

I am just settled in my new habitation in Southampton Row; and, though a solitary and dispirited creature, not unquiet, nor wholly unpleasant to myself. The Museum will be my chief amusement.'-P. 183.

I cannot brag of my spirits, my situation, my employments, or my fertility. The days and the nights pass, and I am never the nearer to anything but that one to which we are all tending. Yet I love people who leave some traces of their journey behind them, and have strength enough to advise you to do so while you can.'—P. 152.

Dean Swift says, one should never write to one's friends but in high health and spirits. By the way, it is the last thing people in those circumstances usually think of doing. But it is sure, if I were to wait for them, I never should write at all.'-P. 369.

There are a few words in your letter that make me believe you wish I were in town. I know myself how little one like me is formed to support the spirits of another, or give him consolation; one that always sees things in their most gloomy aspects.'-P. 376.

Arising from this, no doubt, was his shyness, diffidence, and distrust of himself in general society, and his inability to shine there. His confessions on this score are sometimes amusing enough; as where Horace Walpole had designed to head his Works by his portrait. To appear in proper person at the head of my Works, consisting of half-a-dozen ballads in thirty pages, 'would be worse than the pillory. I do assure you, if I had ' received such a book with such a frontispiece without warning, 'I believe it would have given me the palsy:' or again, where the embarrassment of a public exhibition presents itself to him as the disagreeable feature of an execution. After commending the behaviour of Ratcliffe, brother of the Earl of Derwentwater, who died with so much dignity: One would not desire to die 'with a better grace,' he says; I am particularly satisfied with the humanity of that last embrace to all the people about him. Sure it must be somewhat embarrassing to die before so 'much good company.'-Gray's Works, p. 542.

This habitual dejection and self-distrust make Gray a remarkable contrast to most forms of the poetic temperament we are brought acquainted with; which all have their seasons of

elation and lofty self-appreciation, if these are not the habitual mood. To such Gray never makes any pretension. We know that he did think in a certain sense highly of his verse, but he never boasts of any exuberance of fancy, any uncontrollable impulses, any sublime self-confidence. His Pindaric Odes have more fire in them than are to be found now-a-days in the works of very excited minds, yet he was easily discouraged, and a few cold sentences of Mason's delayed their publication, and indeed the completion of the Bard, for a long period. In the same way the strictures of West quenched a tragedy altogether. Anything like inflation would be extremely repugnant to his philosophic mind, which was also fastidious of praise, patient under neglect, and indifferent to ridicule; so that though he respected the desire of fame, and considered it one of the defects of his own day that men disregarded it, his own aspirations were temperate, and under exact control. Being in the habit of selfstudy, and always, and under all circumstances, a lover of truth, he would be especially guarded not to exaggerate, either to himself or others, the nature or extent of his own powers. He frankly owned to the extreme effort and difficulty composition was to him: If I do not write much, it is because I cannot.' To Dr. Wharton, who has asked for an epitaph, he writes the apology which probably excited Dr. Johnson's ire:-'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 ⚫ oneself, and which I have not felt this long time. You that are a witness how seldom this spirit has moved me in my life, may easily credit what I say.' And to Mason he says, 'I have had no more poses and muscular inflations, and am only 'troubled with this depression of mind; you will not expect, therefore, that I should give you any account of my Muse, which is at the best, you know, of so delicate a constitution, and has such weak nerves, as not to stir out of its chamber I three days in a year.'

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When Nicholls asked him why he did not finish his poem on the Alliance between good Government and good Education, he said he could not; the labour of a long poem would be hardly tolerable, and he could not endure not to finish as he went along. In fact he never allowed himself in a rapid style of composition, trusting, after the ordinary fashion to after criticism; and this sitting in judgment on his own performance as he wrote, broke the delight of composition, and he was conscious of labour. He was besides so fully impressed with the importance of industry to happiness, the necessity of having something to do, hat it seemed as if he renounced the fitful visits of the Muse,

who needed to be waited for and caressed, for the steadier employment of learning and study. He could not always write, but he could always read. On one occasion we find him saying: It is indeed for want of spirits, as you suspect, that my 'studies lie among the cathedrals and the tombs and the ruins. To think, though to little purpose, has been the chief amuse'ment of my days: and when I would not, or cannot think, I 'dream. At present I feel myself able to write a Catalogue, or to read the Peerage book, or Miller's Gardener's Dictionary, ' and am thankful there are such employments and such authors in the world. Some people, who hold me cheap for this, are doing perhaps what is not half so well worth while.'

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Constant application thus became a habit, rendering him unfit for the alternations of repose and exertion, which seem indispensable when the imagination is tasked, and which he perhaps feared for himself, lest his spirits should sink in the intervals from active employment. But there is no doubt a form of diligence which grows to be a bondage and slavery to the mind which indulges in it; and to work for the sake of work and without a suitable ulterior object, is perhaps this bondage: we are not sure that Gray was not its victim, though in the dignified and imposing form of amassing a prodigious amount of knowledge.

Yet such instances are so rare, and learning is so grand a thing, that if a man of great powers of mind chooses to devote them to the acquisition of solid, deep, and varied informationto make himself a depositary of the wisdom, and the history, and the arts of ancient and modern times, so that no field of inquiry shall be neglected by him, and the dim unknown past shall be to him an explored region, where he has set up his landmarks, and can come and go at his pleasure;-though he makes no active use of his knowledge, though he does not impart it to us, yet we cannot allow his time to have been misspent. He is a benefactor to his race: it does us good to know what men can do: he raises the standard: if he makes us more conscious of our ignorance, the consciousness of his knowledge a little elevates and refines our souls; even the wholly uncultivated profit something by the obscure vision of his acquirements, their intellects expand, their souls are lifted up out of the routine of common life, in the thought of one whose course lies altogether far away from the vulgar or transient cares which occupy them, far away in a kind of spirit-land, where other tongues are spoken and other works are done;-a land where the dead still live, and of which he holds the key and talisman whereby to converse with them.

And this was the sort of prestige which distinguished Gray. He was supposed to know everything, and was known to have