No More Learning

His rearrangement, when compared with the
earlier text, is a symptom of the loose construction and redundancy
of the original, which made such drastic treatment possible.
Thomson's friend Murdoch appears to have set his face against the
application of a similar process to The Seasons ; but it must be
owned that, even after all the revision which it underwent from
the author himself, The Seasons is not without a considerable
amount of repetition, which testifies to the limitations of Thomson's
material
Although Liberty was a failure, Thomson evidently intended
to try his fortune once more with a patriotic poem. The ominous
promise, recorded in The Castle of Indolence, was not fulfilled,
for a reason which must be found in The Castle of Indolence itself.
The elaboration of this short poem occupied many years, and, even
in its final condition, bears signs of incompleteness. Each of the
two cantos ends abruptly with a homely realistic simile which forms
an inappropriate conclusion to a romantic allegory. The poem
might, indeed, have been extended to an indefinite length : its
merit lies, not in the story which it contains, but in the polish of
its style and the success with which Thomson, following a fixed
model, contrived to display in it his own best qualities.
This poem (says the advertisement prefixed to it) being writ in the manner
of Spenser, the obsolete words, and a simplicity of diction in some of the lines,
which borders on the ludicrous, were necessary to make the imitation more
perfect. And the stile of that admirable poet, as well as the measure in
which he wrote, are, as it were, appropriated by Custom to all allegorical
Poems writ in our language; just as in French the stile of Marot, who lived
under Francis i, has been used in tales, and familiar epistles, by the politest
writers of the age of Louis xiv.
Already, in 1742, Shenstone had attempted, in The School-Mistress,
to imitate Spenser's
language, his simplicity, his manner of description, and a peculiar tenderness
of sentiment remarkable throughout his works.
Thomson's poem, however, had been conceived at an earlier date
than Shenstone's. It shows, not merely an admiration of the
external qualities of Spenser's verse, but some intimacy with his
methods of description and personification. At the same time, the
use of the Spenserian stanza, of obsolete words and of a studied
simplicity of diction, could not repress the characteristic tastes of
the poet of The Seasons. In the habit of poetical inversion Milton
stood between Spenser and Thomson; and Thomson had assimilated
this habit so thoroughly that The Castle of Indolence could hardly
· The Castle of Indolence, canto I, st. 32.


## p. 106 (#132) ############################################

106 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
6
fail to be leavened with it. With Spenser, the employment of
obsolete words, if, primarily, an affectation, became an essential
feature of his poetry. With Thomson, it was purely a quaint
imitation of Spenser : his old-fashioned words were dragged in as
a necessity, and the poem would lose none of its attractiveness
without them.
The point at which Thomson most closely approaches Spenser
is in the deliberate movement and varied melody of his stanza.
Otherwise, it may fairly be claimed that his resemblance to his
model is of the most general kind. The landscape with which the
poem opens is his highest achievement in that type of description,
combining soft colour with suggestions of perfume and sound, with
which The Seasons has made us familiar. There is little emphasis
on small details : effects of colour, of light and shadow, are
conveyed in such general and inclusive phrases as
gay castles in the clouds that pass,
For ever flushing round a summer-skyl.
If, in such passages, the luxurious beauty of Spenser's descriptions
is reflected, it is rather in their form than in their contents. Here,
once more, the influence of Milton in poetry, of 'savage Rosa' and
learned Poussin' in painting, are too strong to make insistence
on detail possible. In his personifications, Thomson comes nearer
to Spenser. The incidental persons, the comely full-spread porter? '
and his 'little roguish pages,' the diseases of body and mind in the
dungeon of the castle', 'the fiery-footed boy, benempt Dispatch','
who is page to the Knight of Arts and Industry, are portraits which
have Spenser's power of giving individual being to abstract qualities.
On the other hand, the chief portraits of The Castle of Indolence,
the sketches of the friends of the poet as inhabitants or visitors of
the castle, suggested though they may have been by Spenser's
habit of interweaving traits of his contemporaries with his per-
sonified abstractions, were drawn with a personal feeling which
owed little to imitation. Written by one who has himself fallen under
the dominion of the enchanter, the poem has a note of confession
and complaint which gives its contents a special interest, apart
from questions of derived form and style.
The slightness of The Castle of Indolence and its allegory do
not bear comparison with the sustained complication of the fable
which Spenser made the vehicle of his high philosophy. Thomson's
imagination was unrefined by exalted philosophical thought, and
>
6
>
.
1 The Castle of Indolence, canto 1, st. 6. 2 Ibid. st. 24. 3 Ibid. st. 25.
4 Ibid, st. 73 seg.
5 Ibid. canto II, st. 32. & Ibid. canto 1, st. 57 seq.


## p. 107 (#133) ############################################

6
The Castle of Indolence
107
his poem is certainly not improved by excursions into conventional
moralising. The eleven stanzas of perverted morality, which are
sung with an energy foreign to his character by Indolence as he
sits at the gate of his castle', do not add anything to the allegory,
but simply mark a breathing-space between the opening descrip-
tion and the admirable remainder of the first canto. With the
appearance, in the second canto, of the 'generous imp of fame? '
whose vigorous accomplishments are to be fatal to the wizard's
abode, Thomson was easily betrayed into paths which his muse had
trodden bare. After a life passed in varied climes, the Knight of
Arts and Industry has at length found his proper home in Britain,
encircled by the protection of Britannia's thunder on the main,
and aided in his efforts by Liberty, 'th' Eternal Patronº,' who
handsomely atones for her overpowering egoism in an earlier poem
by allowing him to encroach upon her extensive functions. The
mechanic arts, the learning, the constitution of Britain, meet with
due compliment. Threatened by the minions of Indolence, they
are protected by the knight, who sets out to overthrow the castle.
The song of the bard Philomelus, tuned to the British harp, stands
in contrast to the song of Indolence, and proceeds through its
fifteen stanzas with equal smoothness and fluency? . Supreme
Perfection is invoked from the point of view which, in the con-
cluding hymn of The Seasons, sees 'life rising still on life, in
higher tone' to absorption with deity. The examples of Greece
and Rome and of the great poets are cited to encourage the energy
which is the antithesis to slothful repose. A contrast is drawn
between health and disease, and a final exhortation to the use
of godlike reason has the desired effect of stirring the knight's
followers to the attack. While these sentiments are polished with
.
the care which distinguishes the whole poem, they are drawn from
a stock-in-trade which Thomson and his contemporaries had well-
nigh exhausted, and their commonplace nobility is at the very
opposite pole to the grave philosophy of Spenser or to Milton's
lofty morality.
Thomson's dramatic work consists of five tragedies and the
masque of Alfred, written in conjunction with Mallet. He had no
special talent for the stage, and, at a period when rhetoric was the
chief ambition of the dramatist, Thomson's rhetoric has no dis-
tinguishing excellence. His dramas are devoid of characterisation;
his characters are vehicles of lofty sentiment, the prevailing tone
1 The Castle of Indolence, canto 1, st. 9 seq.
3 Ibid. st. 23.
4 Ibid. st. 47 seg.
? Ibid. canto 11, st. 4.


## p. 108 (#134) ############################################

108 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
of which is the belligerent patriotism of the party to which
Thomson was sincerely devoted. Sophonisba, however, the earliest
of the tragedies, is without noticeable political bias. It is simply
a classical drama of the conventional type. Its subject, to be sure,
is patriotic, and its choice of a queen who died for her country
may have been intended to spur the queen, to whom it was
dedicated, to free herself from an influence to which Thomson's
associates were bitterly opposed. There can be no question as to
the meaning of the later plays. Between Sophonisba and the
production of Agamemnon, there was an interval of nine years.
It is easy to read into the characters of Clytemnestra and Egisthus
the queen and the minister whom the prince's coterie was bent on
deposing. The Orestes of Agamemnon was flattered more openly
in Alfred, which was played before the prince and princess at
Cliveden in 1740; while the application of Edward and Eleonora
was so obvious that it was rejected for the stage. Agamemnon
and Edward were published with dedications to the princess of
Wales; the last of the political plays, Tancred and Sigismunda,
was inscribed to the prince himself. Coriolanus, posthumously
produced, is a return to pure tragedy without party bias. It may
fairly be said that not one of these plays has the least dramatic
interest. Their blank verse, however, is, as might be expected,
easy and fluent. Thomson, possibly in imitation of the constant
habit of the later Jacobean and Caroline dramatists, permitted
himself a free use of weak endings to his lines, a practice which
may promote ease in delivery, but becomes monotonous to the
reader. His rhetoric is respectable; but the nobility of sentiment
which it clothes is not above the ordinary level of the conventional
sentiment of the classical drama of his day, and provokes no striking
bursts of eloquence. His subjects do not afford scope for his gift
of natural description, and there is only an occasional touch to
remind us that his true genius lay in his appreciation of natural
atmosphere and colour. His philosophy, on the other hand, is
frequently introduced, but without any material addition to the
contents of the passages in which its vague principles had been
embodied in The Seasons. On the whole, the main interest of
the plays is the debt which they owe directly to Greek tragedy,
and not merely to the antique drama through the medium of the
French stage. This virtue may, to some extent, be claimed for
Agamemnon ; it cannot be denied to Edward and Eleonora,
where the self-sacrifice of Eleanor of Castile is imitated at first
hand from the devotion of Alcestis, and the famous description of


## p. 109 (#135) ############################################

Influence of Thomson. .
Somerville
109
the Cretan queen's farewell to life is almost translated in the
narrative given by Daraxa to the earl of Gloster. Otherwise, the
dramas fail to offer any special feature that raises them above the
ordinary competence of their time; they are deficient in action,
and their division into five acts is a theatrical convention which
only emphasises the poverty of their construction. The masque of
Alfred, the greater part of which, in its first form, seems to have
been supplied by Mallet, was afterwards rewritten by Thomson, and
the music, 'excepting two or three things which being particularly
Favourites at Cliefdon, are retained by Desire,' was ‘new-composed'
by Arne'. Among the lyrics to which Arne provided new music
for the edition of 1753 was Rule, Britannia, the sentiments of
which embody Thomson's enthusiasm for his country and liberty in
its most compact form.
a
The influence of Thomson was strongly felt by the younger
generation of poets : by Collins, who dedicated a beautiful Ode to
his memory, and by Gray, in whose work reminiscences of the
elder poet are frequent. The vogue of The Seasons was followed
by a period in which blank verse, such as Thomson had employed,
was used with some fluency and skill for the treatment of rural
subjects. Milton was the original model on which this type of
verse was founded, and the example of John Philips, 'Pomona's
bard,' was felt in the choice both of metre and of subject.
Somerville, in his preface to The Chace, defends his blank verse
against ‘the gentlemen, who are fond of a gingle at the close of
every verse. '
For my own part (he adds), I shall not be ashamed to follow the example
of Milton, Philips, Thomson, and all our best tragic writers.
William Somerville, born in 1675, was a year older than Philips
and twenty-five years older than Thomson; but it was not until 1735
that he published The Chace, by virtue of which his name survives.
He was educated at Winchester and New college, Oxford, and was
elected fellow of New college. On succeeding to the family estate
of Edstone, near Henley-in-Arden, he settled down to a life in
which the ordinary occupations of a country gentleman were
varied by the study and composition of poetry. Much of his
verse is poor doggerel in the form of fables and tales, dull and
coarse after the usual manner of such productions. But Somer-
ville was a scholar and something of a critic. His Occasional
1 Title-page of the 1753 edition of Alfred.


## p. 110 (#136) ############################################

110 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
Poems (1727) contain appreciative verses addressed to Addison
and Pope; he enjoyed the friendship of Allan Ramsay, and
criticised the 'rude notes' of the youthful Jago. In a set of
couplets, he welcomed the first edition of The Seasons in a tone of
patronage which, if justified by his age, was hardly warranted by
his own poetry. Prophesying a great future for the young poet,
he regretted that his muse should want the reforming toilet's
daily care,' and urged him to abandon novelties of diction which,
dangerous in southern poets, became all the more so 'when minted
on the other side of Tweed. '
Read Philips much, consider Milton more;
But from their dross extract the parer orel.
Somerville himself had nothing to teach Thomson ; and his
Chace, when it appeared, shows the influence of the verse of The
Seasons, or, at any rate, a strong inclination to come into line with
it. The poet's “hoarse-sounding horn' invited the prince of Wales,
the friend of Lyttelton and the patron of Thomson,
to the Chace, the sport of kings;
Image of war, without its guilt2.
After a short sketch of the history of hunting from the rude but
thorough methods of Nimrod to the days of William the conqueror,
,
and a compliment to Britain, the 'fair land of liberty,' as the
true home of horse and hound, the country gentlemen of Britain
are summoned to hear the poet's instructions upon his favourite
sport. He discusses at length, and with much practical knowledge
and good sense, the position and proper design of the kennels,
with the advice, not inapplicable to a day when Palladian symmetry
was being pursued to excess by the architects of country houses
and their out-buildings, 'Let no Corinthian pillars prop the domes'
The habits of hounds, the best breeds—a subject which gives
Somerville the true hunter's opportunity to express his contempt
for coursing and the mysteries of scent conclude the first book.
Hare-hunting is the main subject of the second and fox-hunting of
the third ; but Somerville was not a mere sportsman, and his lite-
rary digressions and allusions to the great Mogul's battue of wild
beasts 'taken from Monsieur Bernier, and the history of Gengiscan
the Great<,' and to the story of the tribute of wolves' heads imposed
1 Epistle to Mr Thomson, on the first edition of his Seasons.
2 The Chace, bk 1, ll. 13-15. 3 Ibid. 1. 143.
4 Ibid. ll. 227-30.
5 Argument to The Chace, bk 11. The Voyage of François Bernier (1625—88), who
had been for & time physician to Aurungzebe the great, was published in 1699.


## p. 111 (#137) ############################################

Somerville's Chace and other Poems
III
6
by Edgar, show that he followed his own advice and spent days on
which sport was impossible in improving converse with his books.
From one of these digressions upon oriental methods of hunting,
his devious muse' is recalled, with an appropriate reference to
Denham's Cooper's Hill and a flattering eulogy of the royal
family, to Windsor and the king's buckhounds; and the third
book ends with an example of royal clemency to the stag and a
compliment to the throne. The concluding book contains instruc-
tions upon breeding and the art of training puppies, from which
a transition is made to the diseases of hounds and the fatal effect
of bites. Otter-hunting concludes the series of descriptions, and
is followed by a final congratulation, in the spirit of Vergil's
O fortunatos nimium, on the felicities of the hunter in his un-
ambitious country life.
The Chace was followed a few years later by the short poem
entitled Rural Sports, also dedicated to the prince of Wales.
Hobbinol, a burlesque narrative in blank verse, dedicated to
Hogarth, was inspired by Philips's Splendid Shilling, and is a
lively account of the quarrelsome May games of some rustics in
the vale of Evesham. In his preface, as in that to The Chace,
Somerville indulged in a short critical explanation of his chosen
form of verse, and defined his burlesque as 'a satire against the
luxury, the pride, the wantonness, and quarrelsome temper, of the
middling sort of people,' which he condemned as responsible for
the decline in trade and the depressed condition of the rural
districts. These poems do not add anything to the qualities dis-
played in The Chace, and the mock heroics of Hobbinol are unduly
prolonged into three cantos. Somerville, however, was always
lively in description; he knew his subject, whether he wrote of
sport, or of the amusements of the Gloucestershire rustic 'from
Kiftsgate to remotest Henbury',' and he had a genuine feeling
for classical poetry. Philips appears to have been his favourite
English author, appealing to his rural tastes and to his particular
vein of somewhat coarse humour. Natural description is purely
incidental to his verse; but the scene and atmosphere of the
various forms of sport which he described are suggested in
adequate general terms? Where he approaches detail, as in his
description of unfavourable weather for hunting, the resemblance
1 Hobbinol, canto 1, 1. 246.
2 It may be mentioned that The Chace was a favourite of Mr Jorrocks in the
sporting novel Handley Cross, where several quotations from it occur which have
become familiar to readers who know nothing about Somerville's poem.


## p. 112 (#138) ############################################

112 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
of his methods to those of Thomson is noticeable. Like Thomson,
he was fond, as has been noticed, of oriental and of patriotic
digressions. His tendency to moralising is slight when compared
with Thomson's, and from quasi-religious rhapsody he was as
entirely free as he was from Thomson's sympathy with the victims
of the chase. His poems are in no sense dull reading; but his
blank verse, suave and regular, is somewhat monotonous, and is
seldom broken by any variation of accent, such as that frequent
employment of a trochee in the first foot of a line which gives
variety of movement to the verse of The Seasons.
In the Edge-Hill of Richard Jago, a strong taste for moralising
was combined with appreciation of 'Britannia’s rural charms, and
tranquil scenes? ' Warwickshire, a fertile nurse of poets, was his
native county and provided him with his subject. His father,
a member of a Cornish family, was rector of Beaudesert near
Henley-in-Arden, where Jago was born in 1715. Somerville, whose
estate Edstone lay some three miles distant, was a friend of his
boyhood? At Solihull, where he went to school, he made the
friendship of Shenstone, a year his senior, which he continued to
share at Oxford and long afterwards. He entered University
college as a servitor, and, about 1739, took holy orders and became
curate of Snitterfield near Stratford-on-Avon. In 1746, he was
presented to the vicarage of Harbury, with which he held the
perpetual curacy of the neighbouring church of Chesterton. To
these, he added, in 1754, the vicarage of Snitterfield; and, in
1771, resigning Harbury vicarage, he was presented to the rectory
of Kimcote near Lutterworth. He retained his three livings until
his death in 1781. He was buried at Snitterfield.
His poems consist of a few miscellaneous pieces, an oratorio
called Adama canto from Paradise Lost intended to combine
the passages of that poem most suitable for music—and Edge-
Hill. The design of the last poem is very simple. In four books,
he describes the prospect of Warwickshire as seen at various
times in the day from the famous ridge which separates the vale
of the Cherwell from the plain through which the Avon flows to
meet the Severn. At morning, he looks westward over the vale of
Red Horse to Stratford and Alcester. At noon, afternoon and
evening, from different standpoints on the hill, his eye, to some
Edge-Hill, bk 1, 1. 1.
2 Ibid. II. 365—70.
3 See ibid. bk ni, 11. 355 seq. , and the stanzas To William Shenstone, esq. on
receiving a gilt pocket-book, 1751, and The Goldfinches, an elegy. To William
Shenstone, esq.


## p. 113 (#139) ############################################

Jago's Edge-Hill
113
6
extent aided by imagination, roams over other portions of the
county and dwells upon its principal towns and gentlemen's seats.
These comprehensive panoramas are broken up by a large amount
of digressive morality; and a large portion of the third book is
a scientific discourse on the theory of sight, addressed to Lord
Clarendon, and pointed by an extremely long, if appropriate, anec-
dote of a blind youth restored to sight by the help of a gentle
friend named Lydia. When the fourth book has run a third of
its course, and the survey of Warwickshire has been completed by
compliments to the owners of Arbury and Packington, Jago turns
the sober evening hour to account by reviewing the scene with
moral eye,' and descants upon the instability of human affairs.
This is well illustrated by the death of the seventh earl of
Northampton, the master of Compton Wynyates—an allusion
which shows that this part of the poem, at any rate, was written
in 1763; and the local calamity introduces the chief memory of
the place, the battle of Edge-bill and the lessons and warnings to
be derived from it. Jago's moralising has a distinctly religious
end. His master was Milton, whose phraseology he copies closely
and
even borrows, although, in such lines as
Nature herself bids us be serious),
his ear can hardly be said to have caught the charm of Milton's
verse. His topography is conscientious : he mentions every
country seat of any importance in the county, and adds footnotes
with the owners' names. In such passages, he may have felt the
influence of Thomson ; but his catalogues have little picturesque-
ness or colour; while his verse, although it is not without the
accent of local association, is typical, as a whole, of the decadence
of the Miltonic method of natural description in the eighteenth
century. Every group of trees is a grove, every country house a
dome, and every hill a precipice. The classicism of the renascence
has degenerated into a fixed and stilted phraseology.
As he looks from Edge-hill to the distant Cotswolds, Jago
refers to the Monody written by George Lyttelton in 1747 to the
memory of his wife, Lucy Fortescue, whose home was at Ebring-
ton near Chipping Campden. Lyttelton, the son of Sir Thomas
Lyttelton of Hagley, Worcestershire, was the friend of Pope,
Thomson and Shenstone, and his house at Hagley was a favourite
resort of men of letters. His life was largely political. Born in
1709, and educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, he made
1 Edge-Hill, bk iv, 1. 254,
E. L. X
CH, V.
8


## p. 114 (#140) ############################################

114 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
the usual grand tour, and entered parliament as member for Oke-
hampton in 1735. He was a prominent supporter of the ‘patriotic'
party against Walpole, and, after Walpole's fall, became a lord of
the treasury. In 1751, he succeeded to his father's baronetcy,
and, in 1756, after his retirement from a short tenure of the
chancellorship of the exchequer, was created baron Lyttelton of
Frankley. He died in 1773.
His later years saw the publication
of Dialogues of the Dead and of his History of the Life of
Henry II. But at no season of his life was literature entirely
neglected. He wrote poetry at Eton and Oxford ; on his foreign
tour, he addressed epistles in couplets to his friends at home; and,
soon after his return, he appears to have composed the four
eclogues called The Progress of Love. His poems include some
songs and stanzas, of which the best are those addressed to his
wife. His affection for her is a pleasing trait in a character
which excited genuine devotion in his friends ; and his Monody,
composed in irregular stanzas, with a motto taken from Vergil's
description of the lament of Orpheus for Eurydice', is written
with some depth of feeling, although its reminiscences of Lycidas
invite a comparison which it cannot sustain. The influence of
French literature presides over his imaginative prose works : the
very titles of the satiric Persian Letters, written in his youth, and
the more mature but less sprightly Dialogues of the Dead, are
copied from Montesquieu and Fénelon, their contents suffering
from the usual inferiority of imitations. The graver tone of his
later work, as distinguished from his licence of thought and ex-
pression in the letters of the Persian Selim from England to
Mirza and Ibrahim Mollac at Ispahan, is due to his change of
opinion from deism to Christianity. He flattered himself that his
Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of St Paul,
which took the form of a letter to Gilbert West, translator of
Pindar, brought about the conversion of Thomson on his death-
bed. However this may have been, the mutual attachment
.
between himself and Thomson calls for some mention of him in
this place. He is said to have supplied the stanza which charac-
terises the poet in The Castle of Indolence? ; he wrote the
prologue, recited by Quin, to the posthumous Coriolanus, and,
as we have seen, he put a liberal interpretation upon his duties
as Thomson's executor. In this connection, it is interesting to
1 Ipse, cava solans, etc. (Georgic iv, 464-6).
2 The Castle of Indolence, canto 1, st. 68. The first line, 'A bard here dwelt, more
fat than bard beseems,' is Thomson's own.


## p. 115 (#141) ############################################

Lyttelton
I15
remember the criticism of Thomson which Lyttelton introduced
in the most valuable of the Dialogues of the Dead. In answer to
a question by Boileau, Pope says:
Your description points out Thomson. He painted nature exactly, and
with great strength of pencil. His imagination was rich, extensive, and
sublime: his diction bold and glowing, but sometimes obscure and affected.
Nor did he always know when to stop, or what to reject. . . . Not only in his
plays, but all his other works, there is the purest morality, animated by piety,
and rendered more touching by the fine and delicate sentiments of a most
tender and benevolent heart1.
Lyttelton's early poems show him to have followed in the
footsteps of Pope, and the letters written to his father from France
and Italy are mainly concerned with foreign politics ; the only
prolonged passage of description in them is a formal account in
French of his journey across Mont-Cenis. In 1756, he wrote two
letters to the historian Archibald Bower, describing a journey
in north Wales. The master of Hagley, by this time, had de-
veloped a strong taste for scenery. His descriptions are excellent
and accurate, and he visited the castles of Wales with the
enthusiasm of a historian, although he fell into the error of
imagining that the ruins of Rhuddlan were those of a castle built
by Henry II. The beauty of the valleys charmed him; the
situation of Powis castle, the vales of Festiniog and Clwyd, the
wooded shores of the Menai straits and the view of the Dee valley
from Wynnstay, excited him to enthusiasm. Bala seemed to him
an oasis in the desert of Merionethshire, 'a solitude fit for Despair
to inhabit. ' Snowdon filled him with 'religious awe' rather than
admiration, and its rocks excited the idea of Burnet, of their
being the fragment of a demolished world. It is characteristic of
'
the taste of his day that the magnificent prospect of the Carnarvon-
shire mountains from Baron hill above Beaumaris, on which
Suckling had looked more than a century before, seemed to
Lyttelton inferior to the view of Plymouth sound and Dartmoor
from mount Edgcumbe. The love of nature in her wilder moods
was not yet part of English literature. 'Nature,' said Lyttelton
of the Berwyn mountains, 'is in all her majesty there; but it is the
majesty of a tyrant, frowning over the ruins and desolation of a
country. '
1 Dialogues of the Dead, XIV.
8-2


## p. 116 (#142) ############################################

CHAPTER VI
GRAY
THOMAS GRAY, a poet whose influence upon subsequent
literature was largely in excess of the volume of his published
works, was born in Cornhill, 26 December 1716. His father,
Philip Gray, was an exchange broker, but seems to have combined
with this other and more hazardous pursuits. He was a selfish,
despotic, ill-tempered man, passionate even to the verge of lunacy.
He owned the house in which the poet was born, and, about the
year 1706, let it, and the shop connected with it, to two sisters,
Mary and Dorothy Antrobus, milliners. At the same date,
approximately, he married Dorothy and came to live with her and
Mary. Thomas Gray was the fifth and only surviving child of this
marriage; the rest, to the number of seven, died in infancy; and
his own life was saved by the prompt courage of his mother, who
opened one of his veins with her own hand.
Dorothy Gray had two brothers, Robert and William Antrobus.
Robert was a fellow of Peterhouse, and had a considerable reputa-
a
tion at Cambridge. He was Gray's first teacher, not only in
classical knowledge, but, also, in the study of natural history,
especially botany, and imbued his nephew with a life-long passion
for scientific observation of the minutest kind in almost every
department of vegetable and animal life. Robert Antrobus was
sometime assistant master at Eton, but had probably resigned
before Gray entered the school in 1727. The poet's tutor there
was William, Robert's younger brother.
During the earlier part of his stay at Eton, Gray, probably,
was housed with his uncle Robert, then residing in retirement
either in the town or in the college precincts. As an oppidan, the
delicate boy had not to endure the hardships of the colleger, and
the horrors of Long Chamber. His chief friend there, in the
first instance, was Horace, son of Sir Robert Walpole, the prime


## p. 117 (#143) ############################################

School and College
117
minister, of whose wife his cousin Dorothy was a humble
intimate. Another of his Eton contemporaries was Richard West,
son of the lord chancellor of Ireland, and grandson of bishop
Burnet. At Eton, West was accounted the most brilliant of the
little coterie formed by the three and Ashton, afterwards fellow
of King's and of Eton, and called the quadruple alliance. A scholar,
with a thin vein of poetry, West was absent-minded, with a tendency
to melancholy, to some extent resembling Gray's own, and he died
prematurely in 1742.
The year 1734 brought a dislocation of the alliance. Gray
went for a time to Pembroke college, Cambridge', pending his
admission to Peterhouse in July. In March 1735, West went to
Christ Church, Oxford, whence he wrote to Gray, 14 November
1735 :
Consider me very seriously here in a strange country inhabited by things
that call themselves doctors and masters of arts; a country flowing with
syllogisms and ale, where Horace and Virgil are equally unknown.
But, as a matter of fact, all these young Etonians exhibit a petu-
lance for which youth is the only excuse; and Gray himself writes
'It is very possible that two and two make four, but I would not
give four farthings to demonstrate this ever so clearly. ' Then
follows the splenetic outburst:
Surely it was of this place, now Cambridge, but formerly known as
Babylon, that the prophet spoke when he said 'the wild beasts of the desert
shall dwell there, and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures, and owls
shall build there, and satyrs shall dance there; their forts and towers shall be
a den for ever, a joy of wild asses; there shall the great owl make her nest,
and lay and batch and gather under her shadow; it shall be a court of
dragons; the screech owl also shall nest there, and find for herself a place of
rest. '
But he was saved from the temptation to dilettantism, which beset
his friends, by the scientific bias which his uncle Robert had given
him, and which would have found quick recognition and encourage-
ment in the Cambridge of another day. Late in life, he regretted
his early neglect of mathematics, and dreamt even then of pursuing
it, while he lamented that it was generally laid aside at Cambridge
so soon as it had served to get men a degree.
His vacations were chiefly spent at Burnham, where, at Cant's
hall, he stayed with his uncle Rogers, his mother's brother-in-law,
a solicitor fond of sport, or of the habits of sport. Gray, however,
had some little literary companionship :
1 From this brief sojourn we may probably date the beginning of his friendship with
Thomas Wharton (dear, dear? Wharton).


## p. 118 (#144) ############################################

118
Gray
We have old Mr Southern, at a gentleman's house a little way off, who
often comes to see us; he is now seventy-seven years old, and has almost
wholly lost his memory; but is as agreeable as an old man can be, at least
I persuade myself so when I look at him, and think of Isabella and Oroonoko.
This interesting letter serves also to explain to us the lines towards
the conclusion of the Elegy. He writes:
My comfort amidst all this is that I have at the distance of half-a-mile,
through a green lane, a forest (the vulgar call it a common) all my own, at
least as good as so, for I spy no human thing in it but myself. It is a little
chaos of mountains and precipices; mountains, it is true, that do not ascend
much above the clouds, nor are the declivities quite so amazing as Dover cliff;
but just such hills as people who love their necks as well as I do may venture
to climb, and craggs that give the eye as much pleasure as if they were
dangerous: Both vale and hill are covered with the most venerable beeches,
and other very reverend vegetables, that, like most other ancient people, are
always dreaming out their old stories to the winds,
And as they bow their hoary tops relate,
In murmuring sounds, the dark decrees of fate;
While visions, as poetic eyes avow,
Cling to each leaf, and swarm on every bowl.
At the foot of one of these squats Me I (il penseroso) and there grow to the
trunk for a whole morning.
It seems that Gray's first destination, so far as it was definite,
was the law (as was also West's); for, so early as December 1736, he
writes to his friend: “You must know that I do not take degrees? '
He lingered at Cambridge, somewhat aimlessly. However, this
inertia was dispelled by a journey abroad which he undertook in
company with Walpole. His first extant letter from Amiens is
written to his mother and tells how, on 29 March N. S. 1739, the
friends left Dover. At Paris, Walpole goes out to supper with his
cousin Lord Conway; but Gray, though invited too, stops at home
and writes to West. He was, however, delighted to dine ‘at my
Lord Holdernesse's' with the abbé Prévost, whom he knows as
the author of L'Histoire de M. Cleveland, fils naturel de
Cromwel, while omitting to mention Manon Lescaut. He saw
in tragedy MacGaussin who had been Voltaire's Zaïre; saw, also,
with Walpole, Racine’s Britannicus, and, in 1747, reminded him
of the grand simplicity of diction and the undercurrent of design
а
Miller
1 If Gray's own, these are the earliest of his original English verses which we
possess. The last two lines are frequently quoted by Hazlitt.
2 In June 1738, he begins a sapphic ode to West (Favonius)
Barbaras aedes aditure mecum,
Quas Eris semper fovet inquieta,
Lis ubi latè sonat, et togatum
Æstuat agmen.


## p. 119 (#145) ############################################

Travels with Walpole
119
which they had admired in the work. His own fragmentary
Agrippina (1747 c. ) is, structurally, borrowed from this tragedy?
From Paris, the travellers went to Rheims. Gray's grand tour
is illustrated by him in a double set of notes, sometimes 'bones
exceeding dry' of quotations from Caesar in France, or Livy on
the Alps; he draws less frequently than Addison from Latin poets,
but still frequently enough ; and records his impressions of archi-
tecture, and especially of painting ; and we note among other
evidences of his independence of judgment that he finds Andrea
del Sarto anything but 'the faultless painter. ' In this adverse
judgment, he is seconded by Walpole, who comes nearer to Gray
in artistic than in any other tastes.
On their way into Piedmont, Gray received, from his first view of
mountain scenery, impressions which, on his return to England,
remained for a while dormant, but had been wakened again when
he wrote in The Progress of Poesy of scenes
Where each old poetic mountain
Inspiration breath'd around.
On 24 April 1741, the pair set out from Florence, intending to
go together to Venice, there to see the doge wed the Adriatic on
ascension day. At Reggio, they quarrelled. It would seem that the
discrepancy in their tastes became more and more a trial to both;
and they were alike open in their comments on one another to their
common friend Ashton, who disclosed Gray's to Walpole. Ashton
did not display any particular displeasure with Gray at the time,
but was put up by Walpole, in the interview at which a reconcilia-
tion was at last brought about, to affect that Gray's letter had roused
his anger. Walpole was left at Reggio, and would have died there of
quinsy but for the kind aid of Spence, the friend of Pope. Gray
went with two new friends, made at Florence, to Venice, and thence
took his homeward way. He paid a second visit to the Grande
Chartreuse, and it was probably on this occasion that he left in
the album of the fathers the beautiful alcaic ode O tu severi
Religio loci, of which a fine English version has been composed by
R E. E. Warburton?
1 Compare, with the union of Junia and Britannicus (Racine), that of Otho and
Poppaea (Gray), Nero's passion being the obstacle in both cases. Nero overhears a
conversation in both Racine and Gray; the place of Burrhus is taken by Seneca; the
false Narcissus reappears in Anicetus, Agrippina's confidante Albina in Acevonia.
2 The later story of Gray's alcaics is curious. Mitford sought the original in vain
at the monastery. He says that collectors who followed in the wake of the French
revolutionary armies made away with it. But we find that a certain Mrs Bigg, when
resident in France, was arrested in the reign of terror, and a copy of Gray was found
in her possession. The opening line, O tu severi Religio loci, suggested to the Jacobin
investigators the comment: Apparemment ce livre est quelque chose de fanatique.
a


## p. 120 (#146) ############################################

I 20
Gray
On 7 September 1741, we find Gray in London, causing a
sensation among the street boys 'by the depth of his Ruffles, the
immensity of his Bagg, and the length of his sword. ' He was still
in town in April 1742, maintaining a correspondence with West,
then ruralising in quest of health at Pope's house near Hatfield in
Hertfordshire, on Tacitus and on the fourth Dunciad, which had
just appeared. The yawn of Dulness at the end Gray describes as
among the finest things Pope has written; and this young unknown
critic here sounds the first note of discriminating praise, which has
since been repeated by all good judges, from Johnson to Thackeray.
In the same letter, he enclosed the first example of English verse
which we certainly know to be his, a fragment of Agrippina,
a tragedy never completed, of which Mason discovered the general
design among Gray's papers. As has been already seen, it is manifest
that, in Agrippina, Racine's Britannicus was to have been copied
with almost Chinese exactness, just as Gray's details, like Racine's,
are often Tacitus versified. The dignity of style to be discovered
in these disjecta membra still impresses us. But, more important
than any question of their merits, is the friendly criticism which
they occasioned. Few known passages in critical literature furnish
more instructive details as to English poetic diction than these
unpretending sentences in a letter to West of April 1742:
As to matter of stile, I have this to say: The language of the age is never
the language of poetry except among the French, whose verse, where the
thought or image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose. Our
poetry, on the contrary, has a language peculiar to itself; to which almost
every one, that has written, has added something by enriching it with foreign
idioms and derivatives: nay sometimes words of their own composition or
invention. Shakespear and Milton have been great creators in this and
no one more licentious than Pope or Dryden, who perpetually borrow
expressions from the mer. Let me give you some instances from Dryden,
whom every body reckons a great master of our poetic tongue. -Full of
museful mopeings-unlike the trim of love-a pleasant beverage--a roundelay
of love-stood silent in his mood-with knots and knares deformed-his ireful
mood-in proud array-his boon was granted--and disarray and shameful
rout-wayward but wise-furbished for the field-the foiled doddered oaks-
disherited-smouldering flames-retchlessl of laws-crones old and ugly-the
beldam at his side-the grandam-hag-villanize his Father's fame.
Gray goes on to admit that expressions in his play—'silken son of
dalliance,' 'drowsier pretensions,’ ‘wrinkled beldam,' 'arched the
hearer's brow and riveted his eyes in fearful extasie'-may be
faulty ; though why they should be thought so, in view of his own
theory, must remain a mystery. To take but two examples, he
has compounded ‘silken son of dalliance' from that ‘New Dunciad'
way:
1 Palamon and Arcite. The form traces back to Piers Plowman.


## p. 121 (#147) ############################################

>
Correspondence with West I 21
which he has just been reading, and from Shakespeare's Henry V1;
and he gets his 'arched brow' from Pope? More generally, it is
a testimony to the great transformation of literary tastes which
Gray ultimately helped to bring about, that words so familiar even
in our everyday speech as ‘mood,' 'smouldering,” beverage,' 'array,'
boon' and 'wayward' were, in 1742, thought by some to be too
fantastic even for poetry. While this correspondence, sometimes
little more than a pretty dilettantism and strenuous idleness, was
passing between them, Gray was lulled into a false security about his
friend West. In April, he writes: 'I trust to the country, and that
easy indolence you say you enjoy there, to restore your health and
spirits. ' On the 8th, he has received a poem on the tardy spring
and 'rejoices to see you (West) putting up your prayers to the
May: she cannot choose but come at such a call. ' Pretty verses
enough3; but chiefly interesting because they are the last poetic
effort of that young and sorrow-stricken spirit to whom Gray sent
the Ode on the Spring, which he first called 'Noon-tide, an ode,' and
has left transcribed in his commonplace-book with the note ‘at
Stoke, the beginning of June 1742, sent to Fav[-onius, West]: not
knowing he was then Dead. ' In fact, West died on the first of June.
It was strange that the same theme of the opening year should
have been respectively the first and the last efforts of the devoted
friends, and that the month which silenced one young voice for ever
should have wakened the survivor into an unwonted luxuriance of
song
A very brief period of efflorescence in verse preceded
Gray's return to Cambridge. From Stoke, to which, after the
death of his father in 1741, his mother and his aunt Mary Antrobus
had gone to live with their widowed sister Mrs Rogers, he had
sent (early in June 1742) the Ode on the Spring; he wrote there
in August his Sonnet on the Death of Richard West, bis cento
the Hymn to Adversity, his Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton
College and a very splenetic Hymn to Ignorance (which, happily,
remains a fragment), on his projected return to Cambridge. But
1
And silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies. '
Henry V, 11, chor. 1, 2.
To where the Seine, obsequious as she runs
Pours at great Bourbon's feet her silken sons. '
Dunciad iv.
"Whom have I hurt? has poet yet, or peer
Lost the arch'd eyebrow, or Parnassian sneer? '
Ep. to Arbuthnot, 1735.
s They may be read in the volume Gray and his Friends (Cambridge, 1890), in
which all West's remains are collected.


## p. 122 (#148) ############################################

I 22
Gray
we must refer to the same date the most touching of all his
tributes to the memory of West, in which the sad thoughts of his
English poems on the same theme are combined and concealed in
a Latin dress. His ambitious fragment De Principiis Cogitandi,
begun at Florence in 1740, and dubbed by him ‘Tommy Lucretius'
is, after all, so far as it goes, only a résumé of Locke; but, in June,
so soon as he heard of his loss, he added, apparently without effort,
a lament prompted by the keen stimulus of grief, which seems to be
more spontaneous than his sonnet or the Eton Ode, and is, in fact,
the first source of these familiar verses. It will bear comparison
with Milton's Epitaphium Damonis—Charles Diodati, the friend-
ship between whom and Milton, in many ways, is an exact
counterpart to that between West and Gray. Nor can it be
denied that Gray's effort is without a certain artificiality, which,
pace Masson, renders Milton's poem more passionless, and more
self-centred and discursive.
From his letters, we see that, for the first two years after his
return to Cambridge, now as a fellow-commoner of his college,
Gray was idle, so far as he could be for one still in statu pupillari.
He must have had arrears of lectures and disputations to make up,
in order to qualify for the degree of LL. B. , an easy task for him,
though he writes ironically to Wharton,
by my own indefatigable Application for these ten years past and by the
Care and Vigilance of that worthy magistrate The Man-in-Blew%, (who I'll
assure you has not spared his Labour, nor could have done more for his own
Son) I am got half-way to the Top of Jurisprudence.
But he had previously spoken of his allegiance to our sovereign
Lady and Mistress the President of Presidents, and Head of Heads
(if I may be permitted to pronounce her name, that ineffable Octo-
grammaton) the power of Laziness. ' Nevertheless, though the
poetic impulse of 1742 had spent its force, his interest in current
literature is as keen as ever. He criticises Akenside's Pleasures
of Imagination and at once put his finger on that young poet's
chief blemish; it is infected, he says, with the jargon of Hutcheson,
the disciple of Shaftesbury. It is the fault which he noted later
in certain verses of Mason; there was a craze for Shaftesbury
among the young men of his time, and beauty and morality
were as identical for them as truth and beauty were to Keats
at a later date.
1 For the rest, a close comparison between Milton's Latin poems and Gray's would
show how much Gray owed to Milton in this department alone.
3 The vice-chancellor's servant.


## p. 123 (#149) ############################################

An Elegy in a Country Churchyard 123
In 1745, Gray and Walpole were reconciled. Of this consum-
mation, Gray wrote a satirical account to Wharton, in which his
contempt for Ashton was clearly enough expressed. After this
strange pronouncement, the irony of fate brought it about that
Gray's next poetic effort was his Ode on the Death of a Favourite
Cat, which has been discussed with a solemnity worthy of an
epic. Walpole had two favourite cats; and has not told Gray
which of these was drowned. One of them was a tortoiseshell,
the other a tabby.
During the whole of the next four years, Gray seems to have
relapsed into his normal state of facile and amusing gossip and
criticism. He is 'a chiel taking notes,' but with no intention of
printing them : yet we also discover that he is a real power in the
society that he pretends to despise, using his influence to get
fellowships for his friends, including Mason; interesting himself
in the wild and reckless Christopher Smart, then a fellow of Pem-
broke, and deploring the loss of the veteran Middleton, with whose
views he was in sympathy, and whose house was the only one in
which he felt at his ease. At the same time, his studies were
remarkably various, and his curiosity about foreign, and especially
French, literature, intense, as is particularly illustrated by his
welcome of Montesquieu's Esprit des Lois, which forestalled some
of the best thoughts in the fragmentary Alliance of Education and
Government (1748). At length, 12 June 1750, he sends from Stoke
to Walpole ‘a thing with an end to it'-a merit that most of his
writings have wanted—and one whose beginning Walpole has seen
long ago? This is the famous Elegy, and Walpole appears to have
circulated it somewhat freely in manuscript, with the result that
the magazines got hold of it; and Gray, to protect himself, makes
Walpole send it to Dodsley for immediate printing. Between The
Magazine of Magazines and Dodsley, the Elegy, on its first publi-
cation, fared but badly : 'Nurse Dodsley,' Gray says, 'has given it
a pinch or two in its cradle that I doubt it will bear the marks of
as long as it lives ’; and, together, these publishers, licensed and
unlicensed, achieved some curious readings. The moping owl
complained of those who wandered near her 'sacred bow'r': the
young man went ‘frowning,' not ‘smiling' as in scorn : the rustic's
'harrow' oft the stubborn glebe had broke; and bis frail memorial
was decked with uncouth rhymes and shapeless "culture. ' And
the mangled poet writes, “I humbly purpose for the benefit of
1 Probably in 1745 or 1746. See Gray's Poems (Cambridge, 1898), p. 130. Mason's
statement that the Elegy was begun in 1742 is possibly true of the epitaph at the end.


## p. 124 (#150) ############################################

I 24
Gray
Mr Dodsley and his matrons, that take awake for a verb, that
they should read asleep, and all will be right? '
In contrast with this incuria, so far as the public is concerned,
was the pains which he took, as evidenced by the MS preserved at
the lodge at Pembroke college, to set down what he did write
beyond the possibility of mistake.
The quatrain of ten syllables in which the Elegy was written
had been used before, but never, perhaps, with conspicuous success,
except in Dryden's Annus Mirabilis. In Gray's hands, it acquired
a new beauty, and a music of its own. It does not appear that
either the form or the diction of the poem struck the general
reader as novel. The prevalent taste was for a sort of gentle
melancholy and the mild and tranquil surroundings which minister
to the reflective spirit. There is a little truth under the gross
exaggeration with which the poet declared that he would have
been just as successful if he had written in the prose of Hervey's
Meditations among the tombs. Certain it is that Young's Night
Thoughts, completed five years before the Elegy, was, for the time
being, almost as popular. In Young's work, the sentiment is every-
thing; hence, perhaps, its vogue on the continent, where discrimi-
nating judgments on our literature were few and far between.
The Elegy seems to us simple in expression, and by no means
abstruse, and we have said that there was in it nothing that struck
even Gray's contemporaries as revolutionary. Perhaps it was
Johnson who first scented the battle from afar. He parodied, in a
version of a chorus of Medea, the style, as he conceived it, of the
Elegy, in which adjectives follow their substantives, old words are
revived, epithets are doubled and hyphenated, while subject and
object are inverted. Contrasted with this was Johnson's own
serious rendering of the same passage, in which the language was
the current language of the day, with scarcely a word in it that
was distinctly poetical? The eccentricities which he noted still
remain pitfalls. In the line ‘And all the air a solemn stillness
holds,' stillness, in spite of commentators, is the nominative, and we
almost invariably quote, with so careful a reader as Conington,
Await alike the inevitable hour,
although Gray wrote ‘Awaits,' and 'hour' is subject not object.
(The thought is that of Horace, 'One night awaits us all'; we should
a
1
the voice of Nature cries
Awake, and faithful to her wonted fires. '
(As if awake' were an imperative. )
2 Cf. Gray to West, April 1742, quoted supra.


## p. 125 (#151) ############################################

Characteristics of the Elegy 125
be less absorbed in our ambitions if we kept death in mind. )
Again, Gray wrote “The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,'
where not only is the plural suggestive of a line of cattle, but
some of these are pictured as returning from the pasture and others
from the plough. Once more, he wrote
The paths of glory lead but to the grave
meaning that whatever the path chosen, the terminus is the same
The Elegy may be looked upon as the climax of a whole series
of poems, dating from 1745, which had evening for their theme.