to friendship. They probably met nearly every day, Middleton being University Librarian; there was much that Gray would find sympathetic in the broad theology of Middleton, who had won his spurs by attacking the deists from ground almost as sceptical as their own, yet strictly within the pale of orthodoxy; nor would the irony and free thought of a champion of the Church of England be shocking to Gray, whose own tenets were at this time no less broad than his hatred of an open profession of deism was pronounced. Gray's feeling in religion seems to have been one of high and dry objection to enthusiasm, or change, or subversion. He was willing to admit a certain breadth of conjecture, so long as the forms of orthodoxy were preserved, but he objected excessively to any attempt to tamper with those forms, collecting Shaftesbury, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Hume under one general category of abhorrence. As he says in a cancelled stanza of one of his poems :

No more, with reason and thyself at strife,

Give anxious cares and endless wishes room;
But through the cool sequester'd vale of life
Pursue the silent tenour of thy doom,

an attitude which would not preclude a good deal of sympathy with the curious speculations of Conyers Middleton.

There is no doubt, however, that, in spite of a few companions of this class, most of them, like Middleton, much older than himself, he found Cambridge exceedingly dreary. He talks in one of his letters of "the strong attachment, or rather allegiance, which I and all here owe to our sovereign lady and mistress, the president of presidents, and head of heads (if I may be permitted to pronounce her name, that ineffable Octogrammaton), the

power of Laziness. You must know that she has been pleased to appoint me (in preference to so many old servants of hers, who had spent their whole lives in qualifying themselves for the office) Grand Picker of Straws and Push-Pin Player in ordinary to her Supinity." This in 1744, and the same note had been struck two years earlier in his curiously splenetic Hymn to Ignorance:

Hail, horrors, hail! ye ever gloomy bowers,
Ye Gothic fanes, and antiquated towers,
Where rushy Camus' slowly-winding flood
Perpetual draws his humid train of mud:
Glad I revisit thy neglected reign,

O take me to thy peaceful shade again.

This atmosphere of apathy and ignorance was by no means favourable to the composition of poetry. It was, indeed absolutely fatal to it, and being at liberty to write odes any hour of any day completely took away from the poet the inclination to compose them at all. The flow of verse which had been so full and constant in 1742 ceased abruptly and entirely, and his thoughts turned in a wholly fresh direction. He gave himself up almost exclusively for the first four or five years to a consecutive study of the whole existing literature of ancient Greece. If he had seen cause to lament the deadness of classical enterprise at Cambridge when he was an undergraduate, this lethargy had become still more universal since the death of Bentley and Snape. Gray insisted, almost in solitude, on the necessity of persistence in the cultivation of Greek literature, and he forms the link between the school of humanity which flourished in Cambridge in the beginning of the eighteenth century, and that of which Porson was to be the representative.

One of Gray's earliest schemes was a critical text

of Strabo, an tory edition.

author of whom he knew no satisfacAmong the Pembroke MSS. may still be found his painstaking and copious notes collected for this purpose, and Mason possessed in Gray's handwriting "a great number of geographical disquisitions, particularly with respect to that part of Asia which comprehends Persia and India; concerning the ancient and modern names and divisions of which extensive countries his notes are very copious." This edition of Strabo never came to the birth, and the same has to be said of his projected Plato, the notes for every section of which were in existence when Mason came to examine his papers. Another labour over which he toiled in vain was a text of the Greek Anthology, with translations of each separate epigram into Latin elegiac verse, a task on which he wasted months of valuable time, and which he then abandoned. His MS., however, of this last-mentioned work, came into his executors' hands, copied out as if for the press, with the addition, even, of a very full index, and it is a little surprising that Mason should not have hastened to oblige the world of classical students with a work which would have had a value at that time that it could not be said to possess now-a-days. Lord Chesterfield confidently "recommends the Greek epigrams to the supreme contempt " of his precious son, and in so doing gauged rightly enough the taste of the age. It would seem that Gray had the good sense to enjoy the delicious little poems of Meleager and his fellow-singers, but had not moral energy enough to insist on forcing them upon the attention of the world. He lamented, too, the neglect into which Aristotle had fallen, and determined to restore him to the notice of English scholars. As in the previous cases, however, his intentions remained unfulfilled, and

we turn with pleasure from the consideration of all this melancholy waste of energy and learning. It is hard to conceive of a sadder irony on the career of a scholar of Gray's genius and accomplishment than is given by the dismal contents of the so-called second volume of his Works, published by Mathias in 1814, fragments and jottings which bear the same relation to literature that dough bears to bread.

The unfortunate difference with Horace Walpole came to a close in the winter of 1744. A lady, probably Mrs. Conyers Middleton, made peace between the friends. Walpole expressed a desire that Gray would write to him, and as Gray was passing through London on his way from Cambridge to Stoke in the early part of November, a meeting came off. The poet wrote Walpole a note as soon as he arrived," and immediately received a very civil answer." Horace Walpole was then living in the ministerial neighbourhood of Arlington Street, and thither on the following evening Gray went to visit him. Gray's account to Wharton of the interview is entertaining: "I was somewhat abashed at his confidence; he came to meet me, kissed me on both sides with all the ease of one who receives an acquaintance just come out of the country, squatted me into a fauteuil, began to talk of the town, and this and that and t'other, and continued with little interruption for three hours, when I took my leave very indifferently pleased, but treated with monstrous good breeding. I supped with him next night, as he desired. Ashton was there, whose formalities tickled me inwardly, for he, I found, was to be angry about the letter I had wrote him. However, in going home together our hackney-coach jumbled us up into a sort of reconciliation. . . Next morning I breakfasted alone with Mr. Walpole; when we

had all the éclaircissement I ever expected, and I left him much better satisfied than I had been hitherto." Gray's pride we see struggling against a very hearty desire in Walpole to let bygones be bygones; the stately little poet, however, was not able to hold out against so many courteous seductions, and he gradually returned to his old intimacy and affection for Walpole. It is nevertheless doubtful whether he ever became so fond of the latter as Walpole was of him. He accepted the homage, however, to the end of his days, and was more admired perhaps, by Horace Walpole, and for a longer period, than any other person.

Perhaps in consequence of the "éclaircissement" with Walpole, Gray began at this time a correspondence with Mr. Chute and Mr. Whithead, the gentlemen with whom he had spent some months in Venice. Chute was a Hampshire squire, a dozen years senior to Gray and Walpole, but a great admirer of them both, and they both wrote to him some of their brightest letters. Chute was

what our Elizabethan forefathers called "Italianate ;" he sympathized with Gray's tastes in music and statuary, vowed that life was not worth living north of the Alps, and spent the greater part of his time in Casa Ambrosio, Sir Horace Mann's house in Florence. He was an accomplished person, who played and sang, and turned a neat copy of verses, and altogether was a very agreeable exception among country gentlemen. He lived on until 1776, carefully preserving the letters he had interchanged with his sprightly friends.

About this time (May 30, 1744) Pope had died, and both Gray and Walpole refer frequently to the circumstance in their letters. It seems that Gray had had at least one interview with the great poet