which it had been made. But though the strictures

were certainly not well founded, and failed to convince his judgment, they were yet sufficient to remove that complacence which is absolutely necessary to successful composition; and this was probably one cause that a work of so fair a promise was never finished. Besides this, Mr. Gray sent, for the perusal of his friend, a translation of Propertius, a Greek Epigram, and an Heroic Epistle in the manner of Ovid, from Sophonisba to Massanissa. In return for them he received some Latin lines to a Cough, and a beautiful Invocation to Spring. The former of these was written by Mr. West, in one of the very paroxysms which were destroying the shattered wreck of his frame. And in this little fact there is something so deeply affecting, so like the fable of the Swan dying in Music, that it must have sunk deeply into the heart of a friend so affectionate as his. It may indeed be doubted, whether Mr. Gray anticipated so rapid a decline as that which Mr. West was undergoing, or whether he disguised his apprehensions even from himself; but leaving town, at the commencement of June, he despatched from Stoke the Ode to Spring, which he had then just written, and which stands first in the order of his printed poems. The letter which contained it was sent back unopened, as he to whom it was addressed had ceased to struggle with the trou

bles and the pains of mortality, and was removed far beyond even the call of friendship. Mr. West died on the first of June, only twenty days after he had concluded a letter to Mr. Gray with the words " vale et vive paulisper cum vivis." "So little," observes Mr. Mason, 66 was this amiable youth then aware of the short time that he himself should be numbered

amongst the living."

There is, as Mr. Mason farther observes, a kind of presentiment in that pathetic piece which Mr. Gray enclosed too late to his beloved friend, and the anecdote itself throws a "melancholy grace" over the Ode on the Prospect of Eton College, and on that to Adversity; both of them written in the August following: "for as both poems abound with pathos, those who have feeling hearts will feel this excellence the more strongly, when they know the cause whence it arose; and the unfeeling will, perhaps, learn to respect what they cannot taste, when they are prevented from imputing to a splenetic melancholy, what in fact sprung from the most benevolent of all sensations."" The first impulse of his sorrow for the death of his friend gave birth to a very tender Sonnet, in English, on the Petrarchian model; and also to a sublime apostrophe, in hexameters, written in the genuine strain of classical majesty, with which he intended to begin one of his books, De Principiis Cogitandi."

b.

chronology, on which he bestowed much time and application, augmenting the fruits of his own research from the labours of Marsham, Bentley, and Dodwell. The plan on which he went, was to range in separate columns, of which there were nine in each page, the Olympiads, the names of the archons at Athens, the public affairs of Greece, and the philosophers, poets, and orators; thus forming an historical epitome from the 30th to the 113th Olympiad, a period of 332 years.

These engagements were, as he himself expresses it, cruelly interrupted early in the year 1748, by the destruction of his house in Cornhill by fire, a loss which seriously affected his slender income, notwithstanding that the property was insured. It also prevented him from paying a long promised visit to his friend Dr. Wharton, at Durham.

In one respect the event might have a favourable effect, in breaking in upon the settled routine of those pursuits, by which he was so much engrossed; for in August, in this same year, we find his poetical powers once more in action; and the result was his fine philosophical fragment on the Alliance of Education and Government. His object, he says, was to show that they must necessarily concur, in order to produce great and good men. And had the design been completed, we may agree with Mr. Mason in his assertion, that it would have been one of the

"to in

most capital poems in our own or any other language. "I am not able," says that author, form the reader how many essays he meant to write upon the subject; nor do I believe he ever so far settled his plan as to determine that point: but since his theme was as extensive as human nature, (an ob→ servation he himself makes in a subsequent letter on the Esprit des Loix,') it is plain the whole work would have been considerable in point of size. He was busily employed in it at the time when M. de Montesquieu's book was first published: on reading it, he said the Baron had forestalled some of his best thoughts; and yet the reader will find, from the small fragment he has left, that the two writers differ a little in one very material point, viz. the influence of soil and climate on national manners. Some time after he had thoughts of resuming his plan, and of dedicating it, by an introductory Ode, to M. de Montesquieu; but that great man's death, which happened in 1755, made him drop his design finally."

When the fragment was first written, Mr. Gray was anxious that, in its unfinished state, it should be seen only by his most particular friends, and of the number of these were Mr. Wharton and Mr. Stone

f See L'Esprit des Loix, Liv. xiv. ch. 2, &c.

hewer. It is probable also that Mr. Mason was himself one to whom the manuscript was early shown, as Mr. Gray had made his acquaintance more than a year previous to this time. The origin of their intimacy was in Mr. Gray's revising, at the request of a friend, the Monody on the Death of Pope, and other juvenile pieces, written in imitation of Milton, and being struck with Mr. Mason's amiable simplicity of manners, as much as by his poetical merits, he used his influence to procure his election to a fellowship at Pembroke Hall. His efforts were indeed met by many obstacles, but after a suspense of some years were ultimately successful.

In the year 1749, Mr. Gray heard of the death of his aunt, Mrs. Mary Antrobus, and in the grateful remembrance of much kindness he had received from her, he deeply lamented her loss, but he seems to have felt more keenly the effect such a stroke would have upon his mother; and tenderly did he apply the purest and most soothing topics of consolation. It is impossible to say whether the event itself had any influence in hastening to its conclusion the Elegy in a Country Churchyard; but certain it is, that he sent it in a finished state to Mr. Walpole, and in consequence of that gentleman's high approval, the manuscript was handed about so extensively, that, at last, it fell into the hands of some persons conducting the Magazine of Magazines. By