more vital spirit, had practically retreated already upon his laurels, and was presently to die, without again addressing the public except in the luckless tragedy of Sophonisba, bequeathing, however, to posterity the treasure of his Castle of Indolence. Samuel Johnson had published London, a nine days' wonder, and had subsided into temporary oblivion. Collins, just twenty-one years of age, had brought out a pamphlet of Persian Eclogues without attracting the smallest notice from anybody. Among the lesser stars, Allan Ramsay and Ambrose Philips were retired old men, now a long while silent, who remembered the days of Addison; Armstrong had flashed into unenviable distinction with a poem more clever than decorous; Dyer, one of the lazy men who grew fat too soon, was buried in his own Fleece; Shenstone and Akenside, much younger men, were beginning to be talked about in the circle of their friends, but had as yet done little. The stage, therefore, upon which Gray proceeded very gingerly to step, was not a crowded one, and before he actually ventured to appear in print, it was stripped of its most notable adornments. Yet this apparent advantage was in reality a great disadvantage; as Mr. Matthew Arnold admirably says, "born in the same year with Milton, Gray would have been another born in the same year with Burns, he would have been another man." As it was, his genius pined away for want of movement in the atmosphere; the wells of poetry were stagnant, and there was no angel to strike the waters. man; The amiable dispute as to the merits of Agrippina led the friends on to a wider theme, the peculiar qualities of the style of Shakespeare. How low the standard of eriticism had fallen in that generation, may be estimated when we consider that Theobald, himself the editor and annotator of Shakespeare, in palming off his forgery of The Double Falsehood, which contains such writing as this, Fond Echo, forego the light strain, And heedfully hear a lost Maid; How deeply his vows have betrayed, as a genuine work by the author of Hamlet, had ventured to appeal to the style as giving the best evidence of the truth of his pretensions. Gray had a more delicate sense of literary flavour than this, and his remarks about the vigour and pictorial richness of Elizabethan drama, since which "our language has greatly degenerated," are highly interesting even to a modern reader. Through April and May he kept up a brisk correspondence, chiefly on books, with West at Popes, and on the 5th of the latter month he received from his friend an Ode to May, beginning Dear Gray, that always in my heart which is decidedly the most finished of West's producSome of the stanzas of this ode possess much tions. suavity and grace : Awake, in all thy glories drest, Recall the zephyrs from the west; At mine and Nature's call, arise! Great Nature's self upbraids thy stay And misses her accustomed May. This is almost in the later style of Gray himself, and the poem received from him commendation as being "light and genteel," a phrase that sounds curiously oldfashioned nowadays. Gray meanwhile is busy translating Propertius, and shows no sign of application to legal studies. On the contrary, he has spent the month of April in studying the Peloponnesian War, the greater part of Pliny and Martial, Anacreon, Petrarch and Aulus Gellius, a range of reading which must have entirely excluded Coke upon Lyttelton. West's last letter is dated May 11, 1742, and is very cheerfully written, but closes with words that afterwards took a solemn meaning, "Vale, et vive paulisper cum vivis." On the 27th of the same month Gray wrote a very long letter to West, in which he shows no consciousness whatever of his friend's desperate condition; this epistle contains an interesting reference to his own health : Mine, you are to know, is a white Melancholy, or rather Leucocholy, for the most part; which, though it seldom laughs or dances, nor ever amounts to what one calls Joy or Pleasure, yet is a good easy sort of a state, and ça ne laisse que de s'amuser. The only fault is its vapidity, which is apt now and then to give a sort of Ennui, which makes one form certain little wishes that signify nothing. But there is another sort, black indeed, which I have now and then felt, that has somewhat in it like Tertullian's rule of faith, Credo quia impossibile est; for it believes, nay, is sure of everything that is unlikely, so it be but frightful; and on the other hand excludes and shuts its eyes to the most possible hopes, and everything that is pleasurable; from this the Lord deliver us! for none but He and sunshiny weather can do it. Grimly enough, while he was thus analysing his feelings, his friend lay at the point of death. Five days after this letter was written West breathed his last, on the 1st of June, 1742, in the twenty-sixth year of his age, and was buried in the chancel of Hatfield Church. Probably on the same day that West died, Gray went down into Buckinghamshire to visit his uncle and aunt Rogers at Stoke-Pogis, a village which his name has immortalized, and of which it may now be convenient to say a few words. The manor of Stoke Pogis or Poges is first mentioned in a deed of 1291, and passed through the hands of a variety of eminent personages down to the great Earl of Huntingdon in the reign of Henry VIII. The village, if such it can be called, is sparsely scattered over a wide extent of country. The church, a very picturesque structure of the fourteenth century, with a wooden spire, is believed to have been built by Sir John Molines about 1340. It stands on a little level space about four miles north of the Thames at Eton. From the neighbourhood of the church no vestige of hamlet or village is visible, and the aspect of the place is slightly artificial, like a rustic church in a park on the stage. The traveller almost expects to see the grateful peasantry of an opera, cheerfully habited, make their appearance, dancing on the greensward. As he faces the church from the south, the white building, extravagantly Palladian, which lies across the meadows on his left hand, is Stoke Park, begun under the direction of Alexander Nasmyth, the landscape-painter, in 1789, and finished by James Wyatt, R.A., for the Hon. Thomas Penn, who bought the manor from the representatives of Gray's friend Lady Cobham. At the back of the visitor, stands a heavy and hideous mausoleum, bearing a eulogistic inscription to Gray, and this also is due to the taste of Wyatt and was erected in 1799. If we still remain on the south side of the churchyard, the chimneys seen through the thick umbrageous foliage on our right hand, and behind the church, are those of the ancient Manor House, celebrated by Gray in the Long Story, and built by the Earl of Huntingdon in 1555. The road from Farnham Royal Although passes close to it, but there is little to be seen. in Gray's time it seems to have been in perfect preservation as an exquisite specimen of Tudor architecture, with its high gables, projecting windows and stacks of clustered chimney-shafts, it did not suit the corrupt Georgian taste of the Penns, and was pulled down in 1789. Wyatt refused to have anything to say to it, and remarked that "the style of the edifice was deficient in those excellencies which might have pleaded for restoration." Of the historical building in which Sir Christopher Hatton lived and Sir Edward Coke died nothing is left but the fantastic chimneys, and a rough shell which is used as a stable. This latter was for some time fitted up as a studio for Sir Edwin Landseer, and he was working here in 1852, when he suddenly became deranged. This old ruin, so full of memories, is only one of a number of ancient and curious buildings within the boundaries of the parish of Stoke Pogis. When Gray came to Stoke in 1742, the Manor House was inhabited by the ranger of Windsor Forest, Viscount Cobham, who died in 1749. It was his widow who, as we shall presently see, became the intimate friend of Gray and inspired his remarkable poem of the Long Story. The house of Mrs Rogers, to which Gray and his mother now proceeded, was situated at West End, in the northern part of the parish. It was reached from the church by a path across the meadows, alongside the hospital, a fine brick building of the sixteenth century, and so by the lane leading out into Stoke Common. Just at the end of this lane, on the left-hand side, looking southwards, with the common at its back, stood West |