In these poems a pensive melancholy is expressed in most melodious verse. In the Ode to Spring,' after describing the gay insects glancing in the bright sunbeams,

he says:

To Contemplation's sober eye

Such is the race of Man :

And they that creep, and they that fly,

Shall end where they began.

Alike the Busy and the Gay

But flutter through life's little day,

In Fortune's varying colours dress'd:
Brushed by the hand of rough Mischance,
Or chill'd by Age, their airy dance

They leave, in dust to rest.

Gray now returned to Cambridge and made it his home, living first at Peterhouse, and moving in 1756 to Pembroke College, but ever at holiday-time he would return to his mother's and aunt's house at Stoke Pogis. He was now reconciled to Walpole, and he enclosed in a letter to him in 1747 the charming little poem 'On the death of a favourite cat.'

In 1750, during his summer visit to Stoke, he put the last touches to the 'Elegy,' and sent it to Walpole, who was delighted with it and foresaw its instant success. It was passed from hand to hand in manuscript, and found its way into the magazines. Early in 1751 it was published, and it went through four editions in two months, and innumerable editions followed. Even the surly Johnson, who did not love Gray, says of the 'Elegy,' 'Had Gray written often thus, it had been vain to blame and useless to praise him.'

From a poem so well known it is scarcely needful to give extracts, but a stanza which the fastidious taste of

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the poet finally led him to omit may be given on account of its beauty.

There scatter'd oft, the earliest of the year,

By hands unseen are showers of violets found;
The redbreast loves to build and warble there,
And little footsteps lightly print the ground.

In the early editions this stood immediately before the epitaph, but Gray omitted it because he thought it was too long a parenthesis in this place. Byron's comment on it is, 'As fine a stanza as any in his "Elegy." I wonder that he could have the heart to omit it.'

Among others into whose hands the manuscript of the 'Elegy' came was Lady Cobham, who lived close by in the Manor House at Stoke, and who now greatly wished to know the poet. She therefore prevailed upon her guest Lady Schaub, who was a friend of a friend of Gray's, to accompany her niece Miss Speed in a morning call upon the poet. Gray had gone out for a walk, but the incident led to a warm and lasting friendship, and it was commemorated in the liveliest of all Gray's poems, The Long Story,' from which a few stanzas may be given.

The heroines undertook the task,

Through lanes unknown, o'er stiles they ventured;
Rapp'd at the door, nor staid to ask,

But bounce into the parlour enter'd.

The trembling family they daunt;

They flirt, they sing, they laugh, they tattle,
Rummage his mother, pinch his aunt,

And upstairs in a whirlwind rattle.

Each hole and cupboard they explore,
Each creek and cranny of his chamber,

Run hurry-skurry round the floor,

And o'er the bed and tester clamber;

Into the drawers and china pry,

Papers and books, a huge imbroglio!
Under a tea-cup he might lie,

Or creased, like dog's-ears in a folio.

A few years later Gray finished the first of his Pindaric odes, The Progress of Poesy,' and sent it to a friend with the remark

If this be as tedious to you as it has grown to me, I shall be sorry that I sent it you. I desire you would by no means suffer it to be copied, nor even show it unless to very few.

Some of the best judges have expressed high admiration for this poem, but it can never become popular like the Elegy.' The following extract from The Progress of Poesy' is Gray's noble celebration of the three great masters of English song.

Far from the sun and summer gale

In thy green lap was Nature's Darling laid,
What time, where lucid Avon stray'd,

To him the mighty mother did unveil

Her awful face: the dauntless child

Stretched forth his little arms and smiled.

This pencil take (she said), whose colours clear

Richly paint the vernal year:

Thine too these golden keys, immortal Boy!

This can unlock the gates of joy;

Of horror that, and thrilling fears,

Or ope the sacred source of sympathetic tears.
Nor second He, that rode sublime
Upon the seraph wings of Ecstasy,

The secrets of the abyss to spy:

He pass'd the flaming bounds of place and time;

The living throne, the sapphire blaze,

Where angels tremble while they gaze,

He saw; but, blasted with excess of light,
Closed his eyes in endless night.

Behold where Dryden's less presumptuous car

Wide o'er the fields of glory bear

Two coursers of etherial race,

With necks in thunder clothed, and long-resounding pace.

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His second Pindaric ode, ' The Bard,' was finished in 1757, and a few other odes, The Fatal Sisters,' The Descent of Odin,' 'The Triumphs of Owen,' and the 'Death of Hoel,' followed in later years, and were the fruits of Gray's researches into early Scandinavian and Welsh literature.

During 1759 and the two following years he lived in London, in Bloomsbury, in order to avail himself of the antiquarian treasures of the newly opened British Museum. He was preparing materials for a history of English poetry, but failing health and spirits caused him to abandon a plan which he was so admirably fitted to execute, and his collections passed into the hands of Warton. And it may be well to quote here an extract from a tribute of praise, which was published soon after Gray's death by the Rev. W. Temple, a friend who knew him well.

Perhaps Mr. Gray was the most learned man in Europe; he was equally acquainted with the elegant and profound parts of Science, and not superficially but thoroughly. He knew every branch of history, both natural and civil; had read all the original historians of England, France, and Italy, and was a great antiquarian. Criticism, metaphysics, morals, politics, made a principal part of his plan of study. Voyages and travels of all sorts were his favourite amusement, and he had a fine taste in painting, prints, architecture, and gardening.

The last seven years of Gray's life were passed at Cambridge, and as his mother and aunts were dead, he spent his summer holidays with various friends in travels to the South and West of England, to Cumberland and

to the Highlands. His letters, especially those from the Lake District, are delightful, and Dr. Johnson says:

He that reads his epistolary narration wishes that to travel and to tell his travels had been more of his employment.

Gray died at Cambridge in July 1771.

THE NOVELISTS

THE Georgian age, with its low aims and ideals of life, could produce no great masterpiece in poetry, but in the humbler field of prose romance great things were achieved, and 'Tom Jones' and 'Clarissa Harlowe'stand unrivalled still.

The first of the great novelists was Daniel Defoe, who was born in 1661, and who, till he was nearly sixty, spent his busy life in pamphleteering, using his pen sometimes for one party and sometimes for another, but always for liberty and progress. The Essay on Projects,' The True-Born Englishman,' and the ironical Shortest Way with the Dissenters,' are some of his chief political works.

Defoe possessed the power of rendering a narrative wonderfully real and lifelike by the addition of little circumstantial touches, and this is well shown in his 'Journal of the Plague Year,' and in the Account of the Great Storm of 1703.'

His masterpiece, Robinson Crusoe,' was written in 1719, and it was based upon the real adventures of the Scotch mariner Alexander Selkirk. The book was a