lected, and at no time attracted much curiosity; yet it is a notable production in its way. It was an attempt to crystallize the philosophy of Locke, for which Gray entertained the customary reverence of his age, in Lucretian hexameters. How the Soul begins to Know; by what primary Notions. Mnemosyne opens her succession of thoughts, and her slender chain of ideas; how Reason contrives to augment her slow empire in the natural breast of man; and how anger, sorrow, fear and anxious care are implanted there, of these things he applies himself to sing; and do not thou disdain the singer, thou glory, thou unquestioned second luminary of the English race, thou unnamed spirit of John Locke. With the exception of one episode in which he compares the human mind in reverie to a Hamadryad who wanders in the woodland, and is startled to find herself mirrored in a pool, the plan of this poem left no scope for fancy or fine imagery; the theme is treated with a certain rhetorical dignity, but the poet has been so much occupied with the matter in hand, that his ideas have suffered some congestion. Nevertheless he is himself, and not Virgil or Ovid or Lucretius, and this alone is no small praise for a writer of modern Latin verse.

If the De Principiis Cogitandi had been published when it was written, it is probable that it would have won some measure of instant celebrity for its author, but the undiluted conclusions of Locke were no longer interesting in a second hand form in 1774, when they had already been subjected to the expansions of Hume and the criticisms of Leibnitz. Nor was Gray at all on the wave of philosophical thought; he seems no less indifferent to Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge than he is unaware of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, which had been printed in 1739, soon after Gray left England. This Latin

epic was a distinct false start, but he did not totally abandon the hope of completing it until 1746.

In August 1740 the friends went over to Bologna for a week, and on their return had the mortification to learn that a Pope, Benedict XIV., had been elected while they were within four days' journey of Rome. They began to think of home; there were talks of taking a felucca over from Leghorn to Marseilles, or of crossing through Germany by Venice and the Tyrol. Florence they began to find, "one of the dullest cities in Italy," and there is no doubt that they began to be on very strained and uncomfortable terms with one another. They had the grace, however, absolutely to conceal it from other people, and to the very last each of them wrote to West without the least hint of want of confidence in the other. On the 24th of April, 1741, Gray and Walpole set off from Florence, and spent a few days in Bologna to - hear La Viscontina sing; from Bologna they proceeded to Reggio, and there occurred the famous quarrel which has perhaps been more often discussed than any other fact in Gray's life. It has been said that he discovered Walpole opening a letter addressed to Gray, or perhaps written by him, to see if anything unpleasant about himself were said in it, and that he broke away from him with scathing anger and scorn, casting Walpole off for ever, and at once continuing his journey to Venice alone. But this is really little more than conjecture. Both the friends were very careful to keep their counsel, and within three years the breach was healed. Walpole was the offender. Mason was writing his life, fact should be stated, although he very reasonably declined to go into particulars for the public. He wrote a

One thing is certain, that When Gray was dead and Walpole insisted that this

little paragraph for Mason, taking the blame upon himself, but added for the biographer's private information a longer and more intelligible account, saying that "while one is living, it is not pleasant to read one's private quarrels discussed in magazines and newspapers," but desiring that Mason would preserve this particular account, that it might be given to posterity. But Walpole lived on until 1797, and by a singular coincidence Mason, who was so much younger, only survived him a few days. Accordingly there was a delay in giving this passage to the world, and though it is known to students of Horace Walpole's Correspondence, it has never taken the authoritative place it deserves in Gray's life. It is all we possess in the way of direct evidence, and it does great credit no less to Walpole's candour than to his experience of the human heart. He wrote to Mason (March 2, 1773):

I am conscious that in the beginning of the differences between Gray and me the fault was mine. I was too young, too fond of my own diversions, nay, I do not doubt, too much intoxicated by indulgence, vanity, and the insolence of my situation as Prime Minister's son, not to have been inattentive and insensible to the feelings of one I thought below me; of one, I blush to say it, that I knew was obliged to me; of one whom presumption and folly, perhaps, made me deem not my superior then in parts, though I have since felt my infinite inferiority to him. I treated him insolently; he loved me, and I did not think he did. I reproached him with the difference between us, when he acted from convictions of knowing he was my superior. I often disregarded his wishes of seeing places, which I would not quit other amusements to visit, though I offered to send him to them without me. Forgive me, if I say that his temper was not conciliating; at the same time that I will confess to you that he acted a more friendly part, had I had the sense to take

advantage of it, he freely told me of my faults. I declared I did not desire to hear them, nor would correct them. You will not wonder that with the dignity of his spirit, and the obstinate carelessness of mine, the breach must have grown wider till we became incompatible.

This is the last word on the subject of the quarrel, and after a statement so generous, frank and lucid, it only remains to remind the reader that these were lads of twenty-three and twenty-four respectively, that they had been thrown far too exclusively and too long on one another for entertainment, and that probably Walpole is too hard upon himself in desiring to defend Gray. There is not the slightest trace in his letters or in Gray's of any rudeness on Walpole's part. The main point is that the quarrel was made up in 1744, and that after some coldness on Gray's side, they became as intimate as ever for the remainder of their lives.

Walpole stayed at Reggio, and Gray's heart would have stirred with remorse had he known that his old friend was even then sickening for a quinsy, of which he might have died, if the excellent Joseph Spence, Oxford professor of Poetry and the friend of Pope, had not happened to be passing through Reggio with Lord Lincoln, and had not given up his whole time to nursing him. Meanwhile the unconscious Gray, sore with pride, passed on to Venice, where he spent two months, in the company of a Mr. Whithead and a Mr. Chute. In July he hired a courier, passed leisurely through the north of Italy, visiting Padua and Verona, reached Turin on the 15th of August, and began to cross the Alps next day. He stayed once more at the Grande Chartreuse, and inscribed in the Album of the Fathers his famous Alcaic Ode, beginning "Oh Tu, severi Religio loci," which is

the best known and practically the last of his Latin poems. In this little piece of twenty lines we first recognize that nicety of expression, that delicate lapidary style, that touch of subdued romantic sentiment, which distinguish the English poetry of Gray; while it is perhaps not fantastic to detect in its closing lines the first dawn of those ideas which he afterwards expanded into the Elegy in a Country Churchyard. The original MS. in the album became an object of great interest to visitors to the hospice after Gray's death, and was highly prized by the fathers. It exists, however, no longer; it was destroyed by a rabble from Grenoble during the French Revolution. Gray reached Lyons on the 25th of August, and returned to London on the 1st of September, 1741, after an absence from England of exactly two years and five months. Walpole, being cured of his complaint, arrived in England ten days later. To a good-natured letter from Henry Conway, suggesting a renewal of intimacy between the friends, Gray returned an answer of the coldest civility, and Horace Walpole now disappears from our narrative for three years.