No doubt Gray could have written more "if he had set himself doggedly about it," as Johnson had recommended in such cases, but he never did, and I suspect that it was this neglect rather than that of his lectures that irked him. The words "because I like myself better when I do" seem to point in that direction. Bonstetten, who knew him a year later than the date of this letter, says: "The poetical genius of Gray was so extinguished in the gloomy residence of Cambridge that the recollection of his poems was hateful to him. He never permitted me to speak to him about them. When I quoted some of his verses to him, he held his tongue like an obstinate child. I said to him sometimes, Will you not answer me, then?' but no word came from his lips. I saw him every evening from five o'clock till midnight. We read Shakespeare, whom he adored, Dryden, Pope, Milton, etc., and our conversations, like those of friendship, knew no end. I told Gray about my life and my life was shut from me. Never did he speak of himself. There was in Gray between the present and the past an impassable abyss. When I would have approached it, gloomy clouds began to cover it. I believe that Gray had never loved; this was the key to the riddle.”

country, but all his own

One cannot help wishing that Bonstetten had Boswellized some of these endless conversations,

for the talk of Gray was, on the testimony of all who heard it, admirable for fulness of knowledge, point, and originality of thought. SainteBeuve, commenting on the words of Bonstetten, says, with his usual quick insight and graceful cleverness: "Je ne sais si Bonstetten avait deviné juste et si le secret de la mélancolie de Gray était dans ce manque d'amour; je le chercherais plutôt dans la stérilité d'un talent poétique si distingué, si rare, mais si avare. Oh! comme je le comprends mieux, dans ce sens-là, le silence obstiné et boudeur des poëtes profonds, arrivés à un certain âge et taris, cette rancune encore aimante envers ce qu'on a tant aimé et qui ne reviendra plus, cette douleur d'une âme orphéline de poésie et qui ne veut pas être consolée!"

But Sainte-Beuve was thinking rather of the author of a certain volume of French poetry published under the pseudonym of Joseph Delorme than of Gray. Gray had been a successful poet, if ever there was one, for he had pleased both the few and the many. There is a great difference between I could if I would and I would if I could in their effect on the mind. Sainte-Beuve is perhaps partly right, but it may be fairly surmised that the remorse for intellectual indolence should have had some share in making Gray unwilling to recall the time. when he was better employed than in filling in

coats-of-arms on the margin of Dugdale and correcting the Latin of Linnæus. I suspect that his botany, his heraldry, and his weathercalendars were mere expedients to make himself believe he was doing something, and that he might have an excuse ready when conscience reproached him with not doing something he could do better. He speaks of “his natural indolence and indisposition to act," in a letter to Wharton. Temple tells us that he wished rather to be looked on as a gentleman than as a man of letters, and this may have been partly true at a time when authorship was still lodged in Grub Street and in many cases deserved no better. Gray had the admirable art of making himself respected by beginning first himself. He always treated Thomas Gray with the distinguished consideration he deserved. Perhaps neither Bonstetten nor Sainte-Beuve was precisely the man to understand the more than English reserve of Gray, the reserve of a man as proud as he was sensitive. And Gray's pride was not, as it sometimes is, allied to vanity; it was personal rather than social, if I may attempt a distinction which I feel but can hardly define. After he became famous, one of the several Lords Gray claimed kindred with him, perhaps I should say was willing that he should claim it, on the ground of a similarity of arms. Gray preferred his own private distinction, and would not admit their

lordships to any partnership in it. Michael Angelo, who fancied himself a proud man, was in haste to believe a purely imaginary pedigree that derived him from the Counts of Canossa.

That I am right in saying that Gray's melancholy was in part remorse at (if I may not say the waste) the abeyance of his powers, may be read between the lines (I think) in more than one of his letters. His constant endeavor was to occupy himself in whatever would save him from the reflection of how he might occupy himself better."To find one's self business," he says, "(I am persuaded), is the great art of life. . Some spirit, some genius (more than common) is required to teach a man how to employ himself." And elsewhere, " to be employed is to be happy," which was a saying he borrowed of Swift, another self-dissatisfied man. Bonstetten says in French that "his mind was gay and his character melancholy." In German he substitutes "soul" for "character." He was cheerful, that is, in any company but his own, and this, it may be guessed, because faculties were called into play which he had not the innate force to rouse into more profitable activity. Gray's melancholy was that of Richard II. :—

"I wasted time, and now doth time waste me,

For now hath time made me his numbering-clock.” Whatever the cause, it began about the time when he had finally got his two great odes off

his hands. At first it took the form of resignation, as when he writes to Mason in 1757: "I can only tell you that one who has far more reason than you, I hope, will ever have to look on life with something worse than indifference, is yet no enemy to it, but can look backward on many bitter moments, partly with satisfaction, and partly with patience, and forward, too, on a scene not very promising, with some hope and some expectation of a better day."

But it is only fair to give his own explanation of his unproductiveness. He writes to Wharton, who had asked him for an epitaph on a child just lost: "I by no means pretend to inspiration, but yet I affirm that the faculty in question is by no means voluntary. It is the result, I suppose, of a certain disposition of mind which does not depend on one's self, and which I have not felt this long time."

In spite of this, however, it should be remembered that the motive power always becomes sluggish in men who too easily admit the supremacy of moods. But an age of common sense would very greatly help such a man as Gray to distrust himself.

If Gray ceased to write poetry, let us be thankful that he continued to write letters. Cowper, the poet, a competent judge, for he wrote excellent letters himself, and therefore had studied the art, says, writing to Hill in 1777: “I once