While Gray was lying ill, Lord Chancellor Hardwicke died, at the age of seventy-four, on the 16th of May 1764. The office of Seneschal of the University was thus vacated, and there ensued a very violent contest, the result of which was that Philip Hardwicke succeeded to his father's honours by a majority of one, and the other candidate, the notorious John, Earl of Sandwich, though supported by the aged Dr. Roger Long and other clerical magnates, was rejected. Gray, to whom the tarnished reputation of Lord Sandwich was in the highest degree abhorrent, swelled the storm of electioneering by a lampoon, The Candidate, beginning : When sly Jemmy Twitcher had smugged up his face, In harmless society guttle and scold. Lord Sandwich found that this squib was not without its instant and practical effect, and he attempted to win so dangerous an opponent to his side. What means he adopted cannot be conjectured, but they were unsuccessful. Lord Sandwich said to Cradock, "I have my private reasons for knowing Gray's absolute inveteracy." The Candidate found its way into print long after Gray's death, but only in a fragmentary form; and the same has hitherto been true of Tophet, of which I am able to give, for the first time, a complete text from the Pembroke MSS. One of Gray's particular friends, "placid Mr. Tyson of Bene't College," made a drawing of the Rev. Henry Etough, a converted Jew, a man of slanderous and violent temper, who had climbed into high preferment in the Church of England. Underneath this very rude and hideous caricature Gray wrote these lines : Thus Tophet look'd: so grinn'd the brawling fiend, Hosannahs rang through hell's tremendous borders, Mason These two pieces, however, are very far from being the only effusions of the kind which Gray wrote. appears to have made a collection of Gray's Cambridge. squibs, which he did not venture to print. A Satire upon the Heads, or Never a barrel the better Herring, a comic piece in which Gray attacked the prominent heads of houses, was printed by me in 1884 from a MS. in possession of the late Lord Houghton. These squibs are said to have been widely circulated in Cambridge, so widely as to frighten the timid poet, and to have been retained as part of the tradition of Pembroke common-room until long after Gray's death. I am told that Mason's set of copies of these poems, of which I have seen a list, turned up, during the present century, in the library of a cathedral in the north of England. This may give some clue to their ultimate discovery; they might prove to be coarse and slight, they could not fail to be biographically interesting. In October 1764 Gray set out upon what he called his "Lilliputian travels" in the south of England. He went down by Winchester to Southampton, stayed there some weeks, and then returned to London by Salisbury, Wilton, Amesbury and Stonehenge. "I proceed to tell you," he says to Norton Nicholls, "that my health is much improved by the sea; not that I drank it, or bathed in it, as the common people do. No! I only walked by it and looked upon it." His description of Netley Abbey. in a letter to Dr. Brown, is very delicate:-" It stands in a little quiet valley, which gradually rises behind the ruins into a half-circle crowned with thick wood. Before it, on a descent, is a thicket of oaks, that serves to veil it from the broad day, and from profane eyes, only leaving a peep on both sides, where the sea appears glittering through the shade, and vessels, with their white sails, glide across and are lost again. . . . I should tell you that the ferryman who rowed me, a lusty young fellow, told me that he would not, for all the world, pass a night at the Abbey, there were such things seen near it." Still more picturesque, indeed showing an eye for nature which was then without a precedent in modern literature, is this passage from a letter of this time to Norton Nicholls:: I must not close my letter without giving you one principal event of my history; which was, that (in the course of my late tour) I set out one morning before five o'clock, the moon shining through a dark and misty autumnal air, and got to the seacoast time enough to be at the Sun's levée. I saw the clouds and dark vapours open gradually to right and left, rolling over one another in great smoky wreaths, and the tide (as it flowed gently in upon the sands) first whitening, then slightly tinged with gold and blue; and all at once a little line of insufferable brightness that (before I can write these few words) was grown to half an orb, and now to a whole one, too glorious to be distinctly seen. It is very odd it makes no figure on paper; yet I shall remember it as long as the sun, or at least as long as I endure. I wonder whether anybody ever saw it before! I hardly believe it. In November Gray was laid up again with illness, being threatened this time with blindness, a calamity which passed off favourably. He celebrated the death of Churchill, which occurred at this time, by writing what he calls "The Temple of Tragedy." We do not know what this may have been, but it would not be inspired by love of Churchill, who, in the course of his brief rush through literature in the guise of a "rogue" elephant, had annoyed Gray, though he had never tossed him or trampled on him. Gray bought all the pamphlet-satires of Churchill as they appeared, and enriched them with annotations. In his collection, the Ghost alone is missing, perhaps because of the allusions it contained to himself. On the 24th of December, 1764, that Gothic romance, the Castle of Otranto, was published anonymously. It was almost universally attributed to Gray, to the surprise and indignation of Horace Walpole, who said of his own work, modestly enough, that people must be fools indeed to think such a trifle worthy of a genius like Gray. The reputation of the poet as an antiquarian and a lover of romantic antiquity probably led to this mistake. At Cambridge another error prevailed, as Gray announces to Walpole within a week of the publication of the book. "It engages our attention here, makes some of us cry a little, and all in general afraid to go to bed o' nights. We take it for a translation, and should believe it to be a true story if it were not for St. Nicholas." This novel, poor as it is, was a not inconsiderable link in the chain of romantic revival started by Gray. We have little record of the poet's life during the early months of 1765. In June he was laid up with gout at York, while paying a visit to Mason, and in July went on to drink the waters and walk by the sea at Hartlepool. From this place he sent to Mason some excellent stanzas which have never found their way into his works; they are supposed to be indited by William Shakespeare in person, and to be a complaint of his sufferings at the hands of his commentators. The poem is in the metre of the Elegy, and is a very grave specimen of the mock-heroic style : Better to bottom tarts and cheesecakes nice, Than thus be patched and cobbled in one's grave. What would Gray, and still more what would Shakespeare say to the vapid confusion of opinions which have been laid on the bard's memory during the century that now intervenes between these verses and ourselves ;a heap of dirt and stones which he must laboriously shovel away who would read the true inscription on the Prophet's tomb? For criticism of the type which has now become so common, for the counting of syllables and weighing of commas, Gray, with all his punctilio and his minute scholarship, had nothing but contempt: Much I have borne from cankered critic's spite, Mason at last, at the age of forty, had fallen in love with a lady of small fortune and less personal appearance, but very sweet manners; and while Gray was still lingering in the North his friend married. Meantime Gray passed on to Old Park, and spent the month of August with the Whartons. From this place he went to stay with Lord Strathmore at Hetton, in Durham, and towards the beginning of September set out with his host and Major Lyon, |