we owe it that we can now think and speak as we choose. Contemptible he may have been in more ways than one, but at any rate we owe him that, and it is surely something. In what is called the elegant literature of our own tongue (to speak only of the most eminent), it gave us Addison and Steele, who together made a man of genius; Pope, whose vivid genius almost persuaded wit to renounce its proper nature and become poetry; Thomson, who sought inspiration in nature, though in her least imaginative side; Fielding, still in some respects our greatest novelist; Richardson, the only author who ever made long-windedness seem a benefaction; Sterne, the most subtle humorist since Shakespeare; Goldsmith, in whom the sweet humanity of Chaucer finds its nearest parallel; Cowper, the poet of Nature in her more domestic and familiar moods ; Johnson, whose brawny rectitude of mind more than atones for coarseness of fibre. Toward the middle of the century, also, two books were published which made an epoch in æsthetics, Dodsley's "Old Plays" (1744) and Percy's" Ballads" (1765). These gave the first impulse to the romantic reaction against a miscalled classicism, and were the seed of the literary renaissance.

The temper of the times and the comfortable conditions on which life was held by the educated

1 That Thomson was a man of true poetic sensibility is shown, I think, more agreeably in The Castle of Indolence than in The Seasons. In these, when he buckles the buskins of Milton on the feet of his natural sermo pedestris, the effect too often suggests the unwieldy gait of a dismounted trooper in his jack-boots.

class were sure to produce a large crop of dilettanteism, of delight in art and the things belonging to it as an elegant occupation of the mind without taxing its faculties too severely. If the dilettante in his eagerness to escape ennui sometimes become a bore himself, especially to the professional artist, he is not without his use in keeping alive the traditions of good taste and transmitting the counsels of experience. In proportion as his critical faculty grows sensitive, he becomes incapable of production himself. For indeed his eye is too often trained rather to detect faults than excellences, and he can tell you where and how a thing differs for the worse from established precedent, but not where it differs for the better. This habit of mind would make him distrustful of himself and sterile in original production, for his consciousness of how much can be said against whatever is done and even well done reacts upon him and makes him timid. It is the rarest thing to find genius and dilettanteism united in the same person (as for a time they were in Goethe), for genius implies always a certain fanaticism of temperament, which, if sometimes it seem fitful, is yet capable of intense energy on occasion, while the main characteristic of the dilettante is that sort of impartiality which springs from inertia of mind, admirable for observation, incapable of turning it to practical account. Yet we have, I think, an example of this rare combination of qualities in Gray, and it accounts both for the kind of excellence to which he attained, and for the way in which he disappointed expectation, his own,

I suspect, first of all. He is especially interesting as an artist in words and phrases, a literary type far less common among writers of English, than it is in France or Italy, where perhaps the traditions of Latin culture were never wholly lost, or, even if they were, continued to be operative by inheritance through the form they had impressed upon the mind. Born in 1716, he died in his 55th year, leaving behind him hardly fourteen hundred verses. Dante was one year older, Shakespeare, three years younger when he died. It seems a slender monument, yet it has endured and is likely to endure, so close-grained is the material and so perfect the workmanship. When so many have written too much, we shall the more readily pardon the rare man who has written too little or just enough.

The incidents of Gray's life are few and unimportant. Educated at Eton and diseducated, as he seemed to think, at Cambridge, in his twenty-third year he was invited by Horace Walpole to be his companion in a journey to Italy. At the end of two years they quarrelled, and Gray returned to England. Dr. Johnson has explained the causes of this rupture, with his usual sturdy good sense and knowledge of human nature: "Mr. Walpole," he says, "is now content to have it told that it was by his fault. If we look, however, without prejudice on the world, we shall find that men whose consciousness of their own merit sets them above the compliances of servility, are apt enough in their association with superiors to watch their own dignity with troublesome and punctilious jealousy, and in