it happens that the older tombs preserve around the immediate vicinity of the building a scene which harmonises with the verse of Gray because it can have changed but little since his time. It is just such a scene as most imaginations would have pictured. Each object is easily recognised by the poet's description, and yet no one object is so sharp in outline as to remove it altogether from the

sphere of imagination. The only probable exception is the "ivy-mantled tower." The tower

itself is in perfect harmony with the

STOKE POGES CHURCHYARD

"Elegy," and its thickly clustered ivy still provides a secret bower for the descendants of the poet's "moping owl;" but the wooden spire which rises from its battlements seems to strike a note of discord. For the rest, all is as it should be. Each picture in the poem has its faithful counterpart; the eyewitnesses to the fidelity with which the poet has caught the inner likeness of the mute objects which sat for the models of his immortal canvas. To the south a line of "rugged elms" stands

guard by the churchyard wall, and in the summer sun their shadows mingle with the yew-tree's shade, beneath which,

"Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,

The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep."

If the fates were unkind to Gray in the father they gave him, the balance was generously readjusted in the person of his mother. Philip Gray, the father of the poet, is not to be credited with any share in his famous son's achievements; all that we have to thank him for is a portrait of that son in his thirteenth year. He was a man of violent temper, extravagant in his habits, wholly wanting in his duty to his family, and so inhuman in his behaviour to his wife that that lady was actually dependent during the whole of her married life upon the labour of her own hands. The darkness of the father's character serves as an excellent foil to throw that of the mother into relief. In a double sense Gray owed his life to her, for when he was still an infant she, finding the child in a fit, resorted to the desperate remedy of opening one of his veins with a pair of scissors, and so saved him from the early grave which her other eleven children found. Through all the following years she watched with tender solicitude the life of the one child who was the sole harvest

of her travail, and when he was sent to Eton it was at her expense and not that of his father.

To his mother, too, Gray owed his acquaintance with that lovely English county from which he was to gather the sweet pastoral images of his most famous poem. Although when Miss Dorothy Antrobus became the wife of Philip Gray she was keeping a milliner's shop in Cornhill, London, in partnership with her sister Mary, she still retained an affectionate connection with Buckinghamshire, the county of her birth, one of her sisters being married to a prosperous lawyer who lived at Burnham. In the house of this uncle Gray spent his vacations from Eton, and thus began his acquaintance with the neighbouring parish of Stoke Poges and with that churchyard which was to have such a profound influence on his verse. Here also he discovered that forest of Arden which, by the name of Burnham Beeches, is now famous among all English-speaking people. "I have," he wrote in a vacation letter to Horace Walpole, "at the distance of half a mile, through a green lane, a forest (the vulgar call it a common) all my own, at least, as good as, for I spy no human thing in it but myself. It is a little chaos of mountains and precipices, -mountains, it is true, that do not ascend

much above the clouds, nor are the declivities quite so amazing as Dover Cliff, but just such hills as people who love their necks as much as I do may venture to climb, and crags that give the eye as much pleasure as if they were most dangerous. Both vale and hill are covered with venerable beeches, and other very reverend vegetables, that, like most other ancient people, are always dreaming out their old stories to the winds. At the foot of one of these squats Me (il penseroso) and there I grow to the trunk for a whole morning."

Death was the chief cause of Gray becoming more intimately acquainted with Stoke Poges than had been possible during his Eton vacations. When Philip Gray died in 1741, Dorothy Gray and her sister Mary doubtless realised that one of the strongest ties which held them to the metropolis had snapped, and when, about a year later, their sister in Buckinghamshire became a widow, the three ladies apparently resolved to end their days together in the county of their birth. Henceforward, that is, from October, 1742,- Gray had no home in London, but there was always open to him the peaceful haven which his mother and her two sisters had shaped for themselves at Stoke Poges. The house was