engagement advanced him a sum of money; but happening soon afterwards to receive a legacy of £2000 from his maternal uncle, Colonel Martin, he repaid the debt and abandoned the translation. His life in London was mainly occupied in amusements: he haunted literary coffee-houses, where his company and opinion were much in request; and having made Garrick's acquaintance he became a frequent and critical attendant at the theatres. In 1746 he published Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects almost at the same time that Joseph Warton was producing his Odes on various Subjects. The latter were fairly popular, and reached a second edition; Collins' volume, on the contrary, was neglected, and this indifference of the public moved him to such just indignation that he burned with his own hands the copies of the edition that remained unsold.

Besides the poems that appeared in this volume he printed in 1749 his Ode occasioned by the Death of Mr. Thomson and his Dirge in Cymbeline, which first appeared in The Gentleman's Magazine for October of that year. In the following year it seems, from a letter written by him to Dr. William Hayes, Professor of Music at Oxford, that he had completed an Ode on the Music of the Grecian Theatre, the disappearance of which constitutes a genuine loss to English poetry. A dreadful mental calamity soon afterwards overwhelmed him, destroying all his enjoyment of life, and blasting his productive powers, so that for nearly nine years before his death poetical invention seems to have deserted him. He was not, however, altogether deprived of understanding, and in his last illness he was able to show Joseph and Thomas Warton the long Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands, composed in 1749, and, in the opinion of these critics, superior to anything he had previously written. He died on the 15th of June 1759, and was buried in the Church of St. Andrew's, Chichester.

The life and fortunes of Gray were of an entirely different character. He was the fifth son (and the only child who survived beyond infancy) of Philip Gray, a

scrivener of London, and was born in Cornhill on the 26th of November 1716. His father, a man of violent, capricious, and jealous temper, ill-used his wife, Dorothy Antrobus, who seems in 1735 to have vainly attempted to obtain a separation from him. She had a small income of her own, derived from a shop which she kept with one of her sisters, and by means of which she contrived, in a truly valiant spirit, to support herself and to provide for her son's education, towards which his father contributed nothing. In 1727 the boy was sent to Eton, where he became a member of what was called "the quadruple alliance," consisting of Gray himself, Horace Walpole, Thomas Ashton, and Richard West, the subject of Gray's well-known sonnet. Three of the friends afterwards went to Cambridge: the fourth, West, who was to Gray what Charles Deodati was to Milton, diverged from the alliance and entered Christ Church, Oxford. He died in 1742. Gray was admitted to Peterhouse, as a pensioner, in 1734, and continued to reside at Cambridge as an undergraduate for about five years, ill-contented with the mathematical studies of the place, but making himself master of Latin, Greek, and Italian.

In 1739 Horace Walpole, who had been appointed by his father to more than one lucrative sinecure post, proposed to Gray that they should make the "Grand Tour" in company. The latter consented, and spent two enjoyable years on the Continent, but at Reggio in Italy the friends quarrelled, and returned to England by different routes. Soon after his arrival in September 1741 Gray's father died, leaving his widow in narrow circumstances, who found it expedient to part with her London business, and to keep house with two sisters at Stoke Pogis. Gray himself for a short time made one of the family here, but finding that his presence was a burden on their limited resources, he resolved to return to Peterhouse, with a view to complete his study of the law. Having once resumed his life at Cambridge (where he soon afterwards took the degree of B.C.L.), he continued it, with only a few intervals, till his death, resembling in this respect his

contemporary, Thomas Warton, who lived and died at Oxford.

He found indeed little pleasure in the society of his College, being on ill terms with most of the common room, and in 1756 he removed from Peterhouse to Pembroke Hall, where, however, he suffered almost equal discomforts from the mischief of the undergraduates. All this tended to confirm in him his natural tendency to live as a recluse among his books. On the death of Cibber an offer was made to him of the Laureateship, which was declined, and, in spite of his dislike of University society, he seems to have made up his mind to endure it, for in 1762 he applied to Lord Bute for the then vacant Professorship of Modern History. His application was unsuccessful, the appointment being given to one Brockett, tutor of Sir James Lowther. For a short time in 1759 he took lodgings in London near the British Museum, for the sake of using the reading-room in that institution, then lately opened; and he occasionally left Cambridge on visits to a few intimate friends, such as Horace Walpole; otherwise the only considerable intervals of absence from Cambridge seem to have been his journey to Scotland in 1765, and his visit to Westmoreland and Cumberland in 1769. In 1768, on the death of Brockett by a fall from his horse, Gray was appointed by the Duke of Grafton, without any solicitation on his part, to the Professorship of Modern History, and retained it till his death on the 30th of July 1771. He was buried at Stoke Pogis.

His poetical works in English were produced in the following order. The fragment Agrippina, discontinued after the criticism of his friend West, was written in 1742, and in the same year he composed his Odes to Spring, To Adversity, and On the Prospect of Eton College. His ode On the Death of Mr. Walpole's Cat was written in 1747, and published, together with that On the Prospect of Eton College, in the same year. The Elegy appeared first in 1751, being shortly afterwards followed by the Long Story. In 1753 all that he had hitherto written was

The Pro

printed in a volume, with designs by Bentley. gress of Poetry and The Bard (which in 1759 were parodied in Lloyd's and Colman's Odes to Obscurity and Oblivion) appeared in 1757; and The Fatal Sisters; The Descent of Odin; The Triumphs of Owen; The Death of Hoel, Caradoc, and Conan—written in 1761-in 1767.

In the lyrical poetry of Collins and Gray several points of great historical interest present themselves for consideration. Of these the most important are-I. The reasons for the dislike of their odes entertained by a considerable portion of contemporary English society, represented by such critics as Johnson and Goldsmith : II. The particular character of their lyrical poetry viewed in mutual relation: III. Their place in English poetry, as determined by their relation to the movement of the Renaissance, on the one hand, and to the Romantic movement, on the other.

I. Johnson's judgment on Collins' poetical style is as follows:

His diction was often harsh, unskilfully laboured, and injudiciously selected. He affected the obsolete when it was not worthy of revival; and he put his words out of the common order, seeming to think, with some later candidates for fame,1 that not to write prose is certainly to write poetry. His lines commonly are of slow motion, clogged and impeded with clusters of consonants.2

Of Gray's Progress of Poesy and Bard he says :

These odes are marked by glittering accumulations of ungraceful ornaments; they strike rather than please; the images are magnified by affectation; the language is laboured into harshness. The mind of the writer seems to work with unnatural violence. "Double, double, toil and trouble." He has a kind of strutting dignity, and is tall by walking upon tiptoe. His art and his struggle are too visible, and there is too little appearance of ease and nature.3

Goldsmith, criticising the same poems, says :

1 Evidently meaning Gray.

2 Lives of the Poets: Collins.

3 Ibid. Gray.

These two odes, it must be confessed, breathe much of the spirit of Pindar: but then they have caught the seeming obscurity, the sudden transition, and the hazardous epithet of his mighty master; all which, though evidently intended for beauties, will probably be regarded as blemishes by the majority of readers. In short they are in some measure a representation of what Pindar now appears to be; though perhaps not what he appeared to the States of Greece, when they rivalled each other in his applause, and when Pan himself was often seen dancing to his melody.1

Criticism of this sort is now often put aside as being the product of prejudice, even of envy, and it need not be denied that these distorting influences had their effect on the judgment both of Johnson and Goldsmith. But those who have followed the course of this history will probably be of opinion that the censures are due in a much greater degree to a genuine, if misapplied, artistic perception. In the view of both Johnson and Goldsmith, poetry ought to be the reflection of some active moral principle in the life of society. They thought that Pope was right, when he "stooped to truth and moralised his song." They hated anything in the shape of revivalism, because to them it savoured of affectation, which they held, and justly, to be the deadliest of artistic sins. For the same reason they disapproved of the form of poetic diction adopted by Collins and Gray, holding, with the Attic writers, Horace, and Castiglione,2 that the true basis of metrical composition was the colloquial idiom of living society, refined by literary practice. As may be seen from Goldsmith's panegyric on Parnell, already cited, they regarded the couplet in its traditional development as the true vehicle for classical simplicity of expression, and they were displeased with the more purely literary forms of diction evolved out of the imitation of Pindar. Johnson has applied his critical principle to Gray's individual phrases in such a way as to appear captious and bigoted; the principle itself, however, is intelligible enough.

II. As to the superiority of Gray or Collins, when compared with each other, the judgment of Hazlitt may 1 Monthly Review, September 1757. 2 See vol. ii. pp. 19-20.