accordingly, the latter end of the subsequent year went to Cambridge, to take his Bachelor's degree in Civil Law.

But the narrowness of his circumstances was not the only thing that distressed him at this period. He had, as we have seen, lost the friendship of Mr. Walpole abroad: he had also lost much time in his travels; a loss which application could not easily retrieve, when so severe and laborious a study as that of the common law was to be the object of it; and he well knew that, whatever improvement he might have made in this interval, either in taste or science, such improvement would stand him in little stead with regard to his present situation and exigencies. This was not all: his other friend, Mr. West, he found, on his return, oppressed by sickness and a load of family misfortunes; which, were I fully acquainted with them, it would not be my inclination here to dwell upon. These the sympathizing heart of Mr. Gray made his own. He did all in his power (for he was now with him in London) to soothe the sorrows of his friend, and to try to alleviate them by every office of the purest and most perfect affection: but his cares were vain. The distresses of Mr. West's mind had already too far affected a body, from the first, weak and delicate. His health declined daily, and therefore he left town in March, 1742, and, for the benefit of

the air, went to David Mitchell's, Esq. at Popes, near Hatfield, Hertfordshire."

For the tristia vitæ, by which he was encompassed, Mr. Gray sought a solace in his muse, and during the winter commenced his first English composition, the Death of Agrippina. The choice of this subject and his mode of dramatizing it, is traced by Mr. Mason to the impression produced on his mind by the Britannicus of M. Racine, as he saw it acted in Paris. It certainly is constructed on the model of French tragedy, and as such, perhaps, possesses hardly sufficient interest for English representation. The observations, indeed, of the author himself upon it, may, with some deduction, be considered as just, that" it talks all in figures and mere poetry, instead of nature and the language of real passion." If, however, in this view, we are led to subscribe to the harsh judgment of Dr. Johnson, and deem it "no loss to the English stage, that Agrippina was never finished," we must be convinced that it was a great loss to the closet, and one which the Author's studious application to other pursuits has not compensated.

When he sent what he had written to Mr. West, in Hertfordshire, he received from him some free and friendly criticisms on the length of the speeches, and also on the language. The first objection was obviated by dividing the speech of Agrippina, and the second Mr. Gray answered in the same spirit in

b

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 renove 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 só 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 66 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.

From his education at Eton, Mr. Gray became early attached to Latin composition, and, for a long time after this, preferred his own poetry in that language, to what he had written in English. This, however, was the last of his productions in Latin, and, perhaps, the most laboured of all his poems. The considerations which induced him to lay aside the design, were, according to Mr. Mason, the little popularity acquired by the Cardinal de Polignac's Anti-Lucretius ; a poem which had the honour of being revised by Boileau and Louis XIV. Mr. Mitford, however, rather attributes the ill success of this latter work to its length, as it consisted of thirteen thousand lines, and to the want of sufficient variety and digression in the composition. It is probable that the Elegy in a Country Churchyard was begun about this time, and the tone of melancholy which pervades it had its origin, doubtless, in that same deep regret which had not yet subsided in the mind of the author, and which, the remaining years of his life were insufficient to efface.

In the autumn of this year, 1742, Mr. Gray went up to Cambridge, as has been already noticed, to take the degree of Bachelor in Civil Law. And notwithstanding the early prejudices he had taken against that University, and that these prejudices were rather augmented than diminished by his long absence, he yet made that place his residence for the