a peculiar pathos to recommend it, and, at the same time, a true inscriptive simplicity.

IN THE VAULT BENEATH ARE DEPOSITED,

IN HOPE OF A JOYFUL RESURRECTION,
THE REMAINS OF

MARY ANTROBUS.

SHE DIED, UNMARRIED, NOV. V. MDCCXLIX.

IN THE SAME PIOUS CONFIDENCE,

BESIDE HER FRIEND AND SISTER,
HERE SLEEP THE REMAINS OF

DOROTHY GRAY,

WIDOW, THE CAREFUL TENDER MOTHER
OF MANY CHILDREN, ONE OF WHOM ALONE
HAD THE MISFORTUNE TO SURVIVE HER.

SHE DIED MARCH XI. MDCCLIII.

AGED LXVII.

XVIII. MR. GRAY TO MR. MASON.

Durham, Dec. 26, 1753.

A LITTLE While before I received your melancholy letter, I had been informed by Mr. Charles Avison of one of the sad events you mention.* I know what it is to lose persons that one's eyes and heart have long been used to; and I never desire to part with the remembrance of that loss, nor would wish you should. It is something that you had a little time to acquaint yourself with the idea beforehand; and that your father suffered but little pain, the only thing that makes death terrible. After I have said this, I cannot help expressing my surprise at the disposition he has made of his affairs. I must (if

*The death of my father, and of Dr. Marmaduke Pricket, a young physician of my own age, with whom I was brought up from my infancy, who died of the same infectious fever.

you will suffer me to say so) call it great weakness; and yet perhaps your affliction for him is heightened by that very weakness; for I know it is possible to feel an additional sorrow for the faults of those we have loved, even where that fault has been greatly injurious to ourselves. Let me desire you not to expose yourself to any further danger in the midst of that scene of sickness and death; but withdraw as soon as possible to some place at a little distance in the country: for I do not, in the least, like the situation you are in. I do not attempt to console you on the situation your fortune is left in; if it were far worse, the good opinion I have of you tells me, you will never the sooner do any thing mean or unworthy of yourself; and consequently I cannot pity you on this account, but I sincerely do the new loss you have had of a good and friendly man, whose memory honour. I have seen the scene you describe, and know how dreadful it is; I know too I am the better for it, We are all idle and thoughtless things, and have no sense, no use in the world any longer than that sad impression lasts; the deeper it is engraved the better.

I

XIX. MR. GRAY TO DR. WHARTON.

Stoke, Sept. 18, 1754.

I AM glad you enter into the spirit of Strawberry-castle; it has a purity and propriety of gothicism in it (with very few exceptions) that I have not seen elsewhere. My Lord Radnor's vagaries, I see, did not keep you from doing justice to his situation, which far surpasses every thing near it; and I do not know a more laughing scene than that about Twickenham and Richmond. Dr. Akenside, I perceive, is no conjurer in architecture; especially when he talks of the ruins of Persepolis, which are no more gothic than they are Chinese. The Egyptian style (see Dr. Pococke, not his discourses, but his prints)

was apparently the mother of the Greek; and there is such a similitude between the Egyptian and those Persian ruins, as gave Diodorus room to affirm, that the old buildings of Persia were certainly performed by Egyptian artists: as to the other part of your friend's opinion, that the gothic manner is the Saracen or Moorish, he has a great authority to support him, that of Sir Christopher Wren; and yet I cannot help thinking it undoubtedly wrong. The palaces in Spain I never saw but in description, which gives us little or no idea of things; but the Doge's palace at Venice I have seen, which is in the Arabesque manner: and the houses of Barbary you may see in Dr. Shaw's book, not to mention abundance of other Eastern buildings in Turkey, Persia, &c. that we have views of; and they seem plainly to be corruptions of the Greek architecture, broke into little parts indeed, and covered with little ornaments, but in a taste very distinguishable from that which we call gothic. There is one thing that runs through the Moorish buildings that an imitator would certainly have been' first struck with, and would have tried to copy; and that is the cupolas which cover every thing, baths, apartments, and even kitchens; yet who ever saw a gothic cupola? It is a thing plainly of Greek original. I do not see any thing but the slender spires that serve for steeples, which may perhaps be borrowed from the Saracen minarets on their mosques.

I take it ill you should say any thing against the Mole, it is a reflection I see cast at the Thames. Do you think that rivers, which have lived in London and its neighbourhood all their days, will run roaring and tumbling about like your tramontane torrents in the North? No, they only glide and whisper.

MR. GRAY TO DR. WHARTON.

Cambridge, March 9, 1755. I Do not pretend to humble any one's pride; I love my own too well to attempt it. As to mortifying their vanity, it is too easy and too mean a task for me to delight in. You are very good in shewing so much sensibility on my account: but be assured my taste for praise is not like that of children for fruit; if there were nothing but medlars and black-berries in the world, I could be very well content to go without any at all. I dare say that Mason, though some years younger than I, was as little elevated with the approbation of Lord * and Lord *, as I am mortified by their silence.

护

With regard to publishing, I am not so much against the thing itself, as of publishing this Ode alone.† I have two or three ideas more in my head; what is to come of them? must they too come out in the shape of little sixpenny flams, dropping one after another till Mr. Dodsley thinks fit to collect them with Mr. This's Song, and Mr. Tother's Epigram, into a pretty volume? I am sure Mason must be sensible of this, and therefore cannot mean what he says; neither am I quite of your opinion with regard to strophe and antistrophe; setting aside the difficulty of execution, methinks it has little or no effect on the ear, which scarce perceives the regular

His ode on the Progress of Poetry.

He often made the same remark to me in conversation, which led me to form the last ode of Caractacus in shorter stanzas: but we must not imagine that he thought the regular Pindaric method without its use; though, as he justly says, when formed in long stanzas, it does not fully succeed in point of effect on the ear: for there was nothing which he more disliked than that chain of irregular stanzas which Cowley introduced, and falsely called Pindaric; and which from the extreme facility of execution produced a number of miserable imitators. Had the regular return of strophe, antistrophe, and epode no other merit than that of extreme difficulty, it ought, on this very account, to be valued; because we well know that "easy writing is no easy reading." It is also to be remarked, that Mr. Congreve, who (though without any lyrical powers) first introduced the regular Pindaric form into the English language, made use of the short stanzas which Mr. Gray here recommends.

See his Ode to the Queen: Works, vol. III. p. 438, Ed. Birm.

Mr. Gray intimates, in the foregoing letter, that he had two or three more lyrical ideas in his head: one of these was the BARD, the exordium of which was at this time finished; I say finished, because his conceptions, as well as his manner of disposing them, were so singularly exact, that he had seldom occasion to make many, except verbal emendations, after he had first committed his lines to paper. It was never his method to sketch his general design in careless verse, he always finished as he proceeded; this, though it made his execution slow, made his compositions more perfect. I think, however, that this method wasonly calculated to produce

* I have many of his critical letters by me on my own compositions: letters which, though they would not much amuse the public in general, contain excellent lessons for young poets: from one of these I extract the following passage, which seems to explain this matter more fully : "Extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical, is one of the grand beauties of lyric poetry: this I have always aimed at, and could never attain. The necessity of rhyming is one great obstacle to it: another, and perhaps a stronger, is that way you have chosen, of casting down your first thoughts carelessly and at large, and then clipping them here and there at leisure. This method, after all possible pains, will leave behind it a laxity, a diffuseness. The frame of a thought (otherwise well-invented, wellturned, and well-placed) is often weakened by it. Do I talk nonsense? or do you understand me? I am persuaded what I say is true in my head, whatever it may be in prose; for I do not pretend to write prose." Nothing can be more just than this remark yet, as I say above, it is a mode of writing, which is only calculated for smaller compositions: but Mr. Gray, though he applied it here to an ode, was apt to think it a general rule. Now if an epic or dramatic poet was to resolve to finish every part of his work as highly as we have seen Mr. Gray laboured his first scene of Agrippina, I am apt to think he would tire of it as soon as our Author did; for in the course of so multifarious a work, he would find himself obliged to expunge some of the best written parts, in order to preserve the unity of the whole. I know only one way to prevent this, and that was the method which Racine fol. lowed, who (as his son tells us, in that amusing life, though much zested with bigotry, which he has given us of his father) when he began a drama, disposed every part of it accurately in prose; and when he had connected all the scenes together, used to say, "Ma tragedie est faite." (See La Vie de Jean Racine, p. 117. See also his son's other works, tom. zd, for a specimen in the first act of the Iphigenia in Tauris.) M. Racine, it seems, was an easy versifier in a language in which, they say, it is more difficult than in ours to versify. It certainly is so, with regard to dramatic compositions. I am on this account persuaded, that if the great poet had written in English, he would have drawn out his first sketches, not in prose, but in careless blank verse; yet this I give as mere matter of opinion.