architecture and decoration, and the new-found mysteries of Gothic. It is perhaps pleasanter still to think of him dreaming in the garden of Stoke Pogis, or chatting over a dish of tea with his old aunts, as he called his mother and his aunt collectively, or strolling, with a book in his hand, along the southward ridge of meadows to pay Lady Cobham a stately call, or flirt a little with Miss Harriet Speed. He But this quietude was not to last much longer. Walpole, indeed, was surprised to have a visit from him in January, 1753, just when Bentley's prints were going to press, for Gray had been suddenly called up from Cambridge to Stoke by the news of his mother's illness. had not expected to find her alive, but when he arrived she was much better, and remained so for more than a month. He did not choose, however, to leave her, and was at Stoke when the proof of Bentley's cul-de-lampe for the Elegy arrived; this represents a village-funeral, and being examined by the old ladies, was conceived by them to be a burying-ticket. They asked him whether anybody had left him a ring; and hereupon follows a remark which shows that Gray had never mentioned to his mother or either of his aunts that he wrote verses; nor would now do so, lest they should "burn me for a poet." A week or two later, Walpole and Gray very nearly had another quarrel. Walpole, in his officiousness, had had Eckhardt's portrait of Gray, which hung in the library at Strawberry Hall, engraved for the Six Poems, a step which, taken as it was without the poet's cognizance, drew down on Walpole an excessively sharp letter-"Gray does not hate to find fault with me"-and a final veto on any such parade of personality. Mrs. Gray soon ceased to rally, and after a painful struggle for life, expired on the 11th of March, 1753, at the age of sixty-seven. Her son saw her buried, in the family tomb, on the south side of the church-yard, near the church, where may still be read the exquisitely simple and affecting epitaph which he inscribed on her tombstone: In the same pious confidence, beside her friend and sister, here sleep the remains of Dorothy Gray, widow, the careful tender mother of many children, one of whom alone had the misfortune to survive her. When, a few months later, Mason had been standing by the death-bed of his father, and spoke to his friend of the awe that he experienced, Gray's thoughts went back to his mother, and he wrote:-"I have seen the scene you describe, and know how dreadful it is: I know too I am the better for it. We are all idle and thoughtless things, and have no sense, no use in the world any longer than that sad impression lasts; the deeper it is engraved the better." These are the words which came into Byron's memory when he received the news of his mother's death. The Whartons had by this time returned to Durham, and thither at last, in the autumn of 1753, Gray resolved to visit them. He had been unable to remain at Stoke now that it was haunted by the faces of the dead that he had loved, and he went into those lodgings over the hosier's shop in the eastern part of Jermyn Street, which were his favourite haunt in London. He left town for Cambridge in May, and in June wrote to Wharton to say that he was at last going to set out with Stonehewer in a post-chaise for the north. In the middle of July they started, proceeding leisurely by Belvoir, Burleigh, and York, taking a week to reach Studley. The journey was very agreeable, and every place on the route which offered anything curious in architecture, the subject at this moment most in Gray's thoughts, was visited and described in the note-book. Gray remained for two whole months and more in Dr. Wharton's house at Durham, associating with the bishop, Dr. Trevor, and having "one of the most beautiful vales in England to walk in, with prospects that change every ten steps, and open something new wherever I turn me, all rude and romantic." It had been proposed that on the return journey he should visit Mason at Hull, but the illness of that gentleman's father prevented this scheme, and the friends met at York instead. Gray travelled southwards for two days with "a Lady Swinburne, a Roman Catholic, not young, that has been much abroad, seen a great deal, knew a great many people, very chatty and communicative, so that I passed my time very well." I regret that the now-living and illustrious descendant of this amusing lady is unable to tell me anything definite of her history. Gray came back to Cambridge to find the lime-trees changing colour, stayed there one day, and was just preparing to proceed to his London lodgings, when an express summoned him to Stoke, where his aunt Mrs. Rogers had suffered a stroke of the palsy. He arrived on the 6th of October, to find everything "resounding with the wood-lark and robin, and the voice of the sparrow heard in the land." His aunt, who was in her seventy-eighth year, had rallied to a surprising degree, and her recovery was not merely temporary. It would seem from an expression in one of his letters, that his paternal aunt, Mrs. Oliffe, had now gone down from Norwich to Stoke, to live with Mrs. Rogers. I do not remember that the history of literature presents us with the memoirs of any other poet favoured by nature with so many aunts as Gray possessed. Stoke was not a home for Gray with Mrs. Rogers bed ridden and with Mrs. Oliffe for its other inmate. The hospitable Whartons seem again to have taken pity on him, and he went from Jermyn Street up to Durham to spend with them Christmas of this same year, 1753. Walpole remarked that Gray was "in flower" during these years 1750-1755. It was the blossoming of a shrub which throws out only one bud each season, and that bud sometimes nipped by an untimely frost. The rose on Gray's thorn for 1754 was an example of these blighted flowers, that never fully expanded. The Ode on Vicissitude, which was found after the poet's death, in a pocket-book of that year, should have been one of his finest productions, but it is unrevised and hopelessly truncated. Poor Mason rushed in where a truer poet might have feared to tread, and clipped the straggling lines, and finished it; six complete stanzas, however, are the genuine work of Gray. The verse-form has a catch in the third line, which is perhaps the most delicate metrical effect Gray ever attained; while some of the nature-painting in the poem is really exquisite. New-born flocks, in rustic dance, The birds his presence greet: But chief the sky-lark warbles high His trembling thrilling ecstasy, And, lessening from the dazzled sight, Melts into air and liquid light. Here is a stanza which might almost be Wordsworth's : See the wretch, that long has tost The meanest floweret of the vale, The simplest note that swells the gale, The common sun, the air, the skies, To him are opening paradise. That graceful trifler with metre, the sprightly Gresset, had written an Epitre à ma Sœur to which Gray frankly avowed that he owed the idea of his poem on Vicissitude. But it was only a few commonplaces which the English poet borrowed from the French one, who might, indeed, remind him that Mille spectacles, qu'autrefois On voyait avec nonchalance, Transportent aujourd'hui, présentant des appas but was quite incapable of Gray's music and contemplative felicities. This Ode on Vicissitude seems, in some not very obvious way, to be connected with the death of Pope. It is possible that these were the "few autumn " which Gray began to write on that occasion. His manner of composition, his slow, half-hearted, desultory touch, his whimsical fits of passing inspiration, are unique in their kind; there never was a professional poet whose mode was so thoroughly that of the amateur. verses A short prose treatise, first printed in 1814, and named by the absurd Mathias Architectura Gothica, although the subject of it is purely Norman architecture, seems to belong to this year 1754. Gray was the first man in England to understand architecture scientifically, and his taste was simply too pure to be comprehended in an age that took William Kent for its architectural prophet. Even among those persons of refined feeling who desired to cultivate a taste for old English buildings, there was a sad absence of exact knowledge. Akenside thought that |