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the last-named poet has degenerated into hands like Gray's :-

Hark! his hands the lyre explore!

Bright-eyed Fancy, hovering o'er,
Scatters from her pictured urn

Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.

But ah! 'tis heard no more

Oh! lyre divine, what daring spirit

Wakes thee now? Though he inherit

Not the pride, nor ample pinion,
That the Theban eagle bear,

Sailing with supreme dominion

Thro' the azure deep of air:

Yet oft before his infant eyes would run

Such forms as glitter in the Muse's ray,

With orient hues, unborrowed of the sun:

Yet shall he mount, and keep his distant way

Beyond the limits of a vulgar fate,

Beneath the Good how far,-but far above the Great.

In these passages, especially where he employs the double rhyme, we seem to catch in Gray the true modern accent, the precursor of the tones of Shelley and Byron, both of whom, but especially the former, were greatly influenced by this free and ringing music. The reader has only to compare the epode last quoted with the choruses in Hellas to see what Shelley owed to the science and invention of Gray. This manner of rhyming, this rapid and recurrent beat of song, was the germ out of which have sprung all later metrical inventions, and without which Mr. Swinburne himself might now be polishing the heroic couplet to its last perfection of brightness and sharp

ness.

Another Pindaric ode on The Liberty of Genius was planned about the same time, but of this there exists only the following fragment of an argument :-"All that men

of power can do for men of genius is to leave them at their liberty, compared to birds that, when confined to a cage, do but regret the loss of their freedom in melancholy strains, and lose the luscious wildness and happy luxuriance of their notes, which used to make the woods resound." The subject is one well-fitted to its author's power, and we regret its loss as we regret that of Collins' Ode on the Music of the Grecian Theatre. Unlike that blue rose of the bibliophiles, however, Gray's ode probably was never written at all.

In the meantime not much was happening to Gray himself. His friend Mason had taken holy orders, and in November 1754 had become rector of Aston and chaplain to the Earl of Holdernesse; "we all are mighty glad," says Gray, "that he is in orders, and no better than any of us." Early in 1755 both Mason and Walpole set upon Gray to publish a new volume of poems, whereupon he held up the single ode On the Progress of Poesy, and asked if they wished him to publish a "little sixpenny flam" like that, all by itself. He threatened if Wharton be tiresome, since the publishing faction had gained him over to their side, to write an ode against physicians, with some very stringent lines about magnesia and alicant soap. Pembroke meanwhile had just received an undergraduate of quality, Lord Strathmore, Thane of Glamis, "a tall, genteel figure" that pleased Gray, and presently was admitted within the narrow circle of his friends.

According to Mason, the exordium of the Bard was completed in March 1755, having occupied Gray for about three months. In the case of this very elaborate poem, Gray seems to have laid aside his customary reticence, and to have freely consulted his friends. Mason had seen the beginning of it before he went to Germany in May of that year, when

he found in Hamburg a literary lady who had read the "Nitt Toats" of Young, and thought the Elegy in a Country Church-Yard "bien jolie et mélancholique." Mason at Hanover meets Lord Nuneham, and is sure that Gray would delight in him, because he is so peevish and sensible and so good a hater, which gives us a passing glance at Gray himself. The Bard was exactly two years and five months in reaching completion, and the slowness of its growth was the subject of mirth with Gray himself, who called it "Odikle," and made fun of its stunted proportions.

On the 15th of July, 1755, Gray went down to the Vine, in Hampshire, to visit his old friend Chute, who was now beginning to recover a little from the shock of the death of his beloved heir and nephew. In the congenial company of the Italianate country gentleman Gray stayed a few days, and then went on to Southampton, Winchester, Portsmouth, and Netley Abbey, returning to Stoke on the 31st of July. Unfortunately he either took a chill on this little tour, or overtaxed his powers, and from this time to the end of his life, a period of sixteen years, he was seldom in a condition of even tolerable health. In August he was obliged to put himself under medical treatment; one alarming attack of gout after the other continued to undermine his constitution, and his system was further depressed by an exhausting regimen of magnesia and salts of wormwood. He had to lie up at Stoke for many weeks, with aching feet and temples, and was bled until he was too giddy and feeble to walk with comfort. All this autumn and winter of 1755 his symptoms were very serious. He could not sleep; he was troubled by a nervous deafness, and a pain in the region of the heart which seldom left him. Meanwhile he did not leave The Bard

untouched, but progressed slowly with it, as though he were a sculptor, deliberately pointing and chiselling a statue. He adopted the plan of copying strophes and fragments of it in his letters, and many such scraps exist in MS. Late in the autumn, however, he thought that he was falling into a decline, and in a fit of melancholy he laid The Bard aside.

Gray was altogether in a very nervous, distracted condition at this time, and first began to show symptoms of that fear of fire, which afterwards became almost a mania with him, by desiring Wharton to insure the two houses, at Wanstead and in Cornhill, which formed a principal part of his income; from the amount of the policies of these houses, we can infer that the first was a property of considerable value. The death of his mother, following on that of Miss Antrobus, had, it may here be remarked, removed all pressure of poverty from Gray for the remainder of his life. He was never rich, but from this time forward he was very comfortably provided for. Horace Walpole appears to have been alarmed at his friend's condition of health, and planned a change of scene for him, which it seems unfortunate that he could not persuade himself to undertake. George Hervey, Earl of Bristol, was named English Minister at Lisbon, and he offered to take Gray with him as his secretary, but the proud little poet refused. Perhaps the climate of Portugal might have proved too relaxing for him, and he might have laid his bones beside that grave where the grass was hardly green yet over the body of Fielding.

Gray's terror of fire has already been alluded to, and it had now become so marked as to be a subject of conversation in the college. He professed rather openly to believe that some drunken fellow or other would burn the

college down about their heads. On the 9th of January, 1756, he asked Dr. Wharton to buy him a rope-ladder of a man in Wapping who advertised such articles. It was to be rather more than thirty-six feet long, with strong hooks at the top. This machine Wharton promptly forwarded, and Gray proceeded to have an iron bar fixed within his bedroom-window. This bar, crossing a window which looks towards Pembroke, still exists and marks Gray's chambers at Peterhouse. Such preparations, however, could not be made without attracting great attention in the latter college, where Gray was by no means a favourite among the high-coloured young gentlemen who went bull-baiting to Heddington or came home drunk and roaring from a cock-shying at Market Hill. Accordingly the noisy fellowcommoners determined to have a lark at the timid little poet's expense, and one night in February 1756, when Gray was asleep in bed, they suddenly alarmed him with a cry of fire on his staircase, having previously placed a tub of water under his window. The ruse succeeded only too well: Gray, without staying to put on his clothes, hooked his rope-ladder to the iron bar, and descended nimbly into the tub of water, from which he was rescued with shouts of laughter by the unmannerly youths. But the jest might easily have proved fatal; as it was, he shivered in the February air so excessively that he had to be wrapped in the coat of a passing watchman, and to be carried into the college by the friendly Stonehewer, who now appeared on the scene. To our modern ideas this outrage on a harmless middle-aged man of honourable position, who had done nothing whatever to provoke insult or injury, is almost inconceivable. But there was a deep capacity for brutal folly underneath the varnish of the eighteenth century, and no one seems to have sympathized

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