LIFE OF GEAY. * THOMAS GRAY, the subject of the present caPPEINE, was the fifth child of Mr. Falls Grat. & cues and money-scrivener of London Hamadather w do a merchant in good repite the same place. The maiden name of his mother was Dorothy Antebra Thomas Gray was born in Cort on the 26th December, 1716, and was the only one of twelve dilldren who survived, the rest dying in their infancy, and be owed his life entirely to the tenderness and courage of his mober, who, we are told, removed the paroxysms that attacked him by opening a vein with her own hand. Of the character of his father it is painful to speak: a long and unrestrained indulgence in the violent passions of his temper seems at last to have perverted the natural feelings of the heart, and ended in that malignity of disposition, that made the parent and husband the enemy of his own family. Such was the cruelty of his treatment * Gray's father, Mr. Cole tells us, in his MS. Collection, had been an Exchange-broker; but the fortune he had acquired of about £10,000 was greatly hurt by the fire in Cornhill; so that Mr. Gray, many years ago, sunk a good part of what was left, and purchased an annuity, to have a fuller income. He also says that Gray's property amounted at his death to about £7000. In a copy of Gray's Poems which was Sir James Mackintosh's, and subsequently mine, he had calculated, in a blank leaf, the amount of Gray's property, and made it nearly about the sum above-mentioned. "His income, he writes, about £700 per annum, which (more than 40 years ago,) at College, was no inconsiderable sum.” |