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Et. 29.

"humbled by any applause in the present age, than by hosts "of such critics as Dean Milles."* He was very steady in his fondness for Gray (though Gray appears never to have quite thrown aside the recollection of their early disagreement t), because there was that real indifference to popular influences in the poet, which the wit and fine gentleman was anxious to have credit for. This liking he proclaimed on all occasions; had written the short advertisement which prefaced the first edition of the Elegy; had himself taken the risk of publishing, four years before, "a fine edition of "six poems of Mr. Gray, with prints from designs of Mr. R. Bentley ;" and when he heard, in the July of this year, that Gray had left his Cambridge retreat for a visit to Dodsley the bookseller, he managed, as he says himself, to “snatch" away the new Odes to confer grace on the newly started types at Strawberry-hill. § These were the Bard

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*Coll. Lett. v. 323.

+ For Walpole's account of their difference when travelling on the continent together in their youth, see Coll. Lett. v. 340, 341; but Mr. Mitford, in his edition of Gray, has explained the matter differently, on the authority of Mr. Isaac Reed. From this it would seem that the quarrel arose out of a suspicion on Walpole's part that Gray had spoken ill of him to some friends in England, which impelled him to open clandestinely, and reseal, one of Gray's letters. This was discovered and resented. Works, ii. 175, note. It is right to add, however, that this account is not borne out by what Gray said to Nichols, on the latter questioning him about the quarrel. "Walpole," replied Gray, "was son of the first minister, "and you may easily conceive that on this account he might assume an air of "superiority, or do or say something which perhaps I did not bear as well as I "ought." Works, v. 48. This, substantially, would bear out Walpole, who takes all that kind of blame frankly to himself.

See his own Short Notes of his life, Letters to Mann (1843, 1844, concluding series), iv. 343. See also his brief Memoir of Gray, and the letters to Brown and Mason, in Mitford's Correspondence of Gray and Mason (1853) xxxiii, 89, and 92. § "I snatched them out of Dodsley's hands, and they are to be the first fruits "of my press." Coll. Lett. iii. 304. "Odes by Mr. Gray. Printed at Strawberry "Hill, for R. and J. Dodsley in Pall Mall. 1757. 4to." The publishing price was a shilling. "I yet reflect with pain," wrote Wharton to Mason in 1781, when their friend had been ten years in the grave, upon the cool reception "which those noble odes, The Progress of Poetry and The Bard, met with at their “first publication; it appeared that there were not twenty people in England who

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and the Progress of Poesy; two noble productions, it must surely be admitted, whatever of cavil can be urged against Et. 29. them for the want of clearness or ease: though not to be admired after the manner of Walpole, who never praises without showing his dislike of others, much more than his love of Gray. "You are very particular, I can tell you," he says to Montague, "in liking Gray's Odes: but you "must remember that the age likes Akenside, and did like "Thomson! can the same people like both? Milton was "forced to wait till the world had done admiring Quarles."* It was a habit of depreciation too much the manner of the time. Even the enchanting genius of Collins struck no responsive chord in Gray himself; nor had the Elegies of Shenstone, the Imagination of Akenside, or even the Castle of Indolence itself, given always grateful addition to the learned idleness of the poet of Pembroke-hall.†

But Goldsmith, for the present, was not to this manner born; and though he might perhaps more freely have acknowledged the splendour of Gray's imagination and the deep humanity of his feeling, his exquisite pathos, the melancholy grandeur of his tone, his touching thoughts and most delicately chosen words,-yet was he at least not "liked them." Correspondence of Gray and Mason, 465. Nevertheless it would seem, from passages in the same correspondence (89, 101) that Dodsley had had the courage to print 2000 copies; and he told Gray, in little more than a month after the publication, that "about 12 or 1300 were gone." The formal assignment, dated 29th June 1757, and showing the sum received by the poet to have been forty guineas for the two odes, brought eight guineas at a public sale nearly twenty years ago (Times of Dec. 23, 1835). *Coll. Lett. iii. 313.

Nothing surprises me so much as these little heterodoxies in Gray, whose taste for poetry was in other respects exquisite,-always generous, almost always right. To Shenstone, Akenside, and Thomson, he makes objection indeed only as to special poems, admitting the beauties of others; but Collins he classes generally with Thomas Warton, as "both writers of odes ;" and continues, "it is odd enough, "but each is the half of a considerable man, and one the counterpart of the other... "They both deserve to last some years, but will not." Gray to Wharton, Dec. 1746. Works, iii. 28-9.

1757. disposed, when Mr. Griffiths laid Messrs. Dodsley's shilEt. 29. ling quarto before him, to any comparison or test less fair than his own feeling of the objects and aims of poetry. And this he stated with a strength and plainness which marks with personal interest what was said of Gray. Portions of a poem he had himself already written, fragments of exquisite simplicity; and in what the tone of this criticism exhibits, we see what will one day give unity and aim to those poetical attempts, and raise them into enduring structures. We observe the gradual development of settled views; the better defined thoughts which the rude beginnings of literature are breeding in him; the rich upturning of the soil of his mind, as Mr. Griffiths passes with his harrow. The toils and sufferings of the past are now not only yielding fruit to him, but teaching him how it may be gathered.

The lesson is very simple, but of inappreciable value, and the reverse of Horace Walpole's. It is to study the people, whom Walpole would disregard; to address those popular sympathies, which he affected to despise; to speak the language of the heart, of which he knew not much; and before all things study, what so little came within the range of his experience, the joys and the sorrows of the poor. It is the lesson which Roger Ascham would have taught two hundred and fifty years before-to think as a wise man, but to speak as the common people. "We cannot without "some regret," Goldsmith wrote, "behold talents so capable "of giving pleasure to all, exerted in efforts that at best can "amuse only the few: we cannot behold this rising Poet

seeking fame among the learned, without hinting to him. "the same advice that Isocrates used to give his Scholars, "Study the People. This study it is that has conducted the great Masters of antiquity up to immortality. Pindar

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himself, of whom our modern Lyrist is an imitator, appears entirely guided by it. He adapted his works Et. 29. "exactly to the dispositions of his countrymen. Irregular, enthusiastic, and quick in transition, he wrote for a "people inconstant, of warm imaginations, and exquisite "sensibility. He chose the most popular subjects, and all "his allusions are to customs well-known, in his days, to "the meanest person."

Admirable rebuke to those who seize the form, but not the spirit, of an elder time; and mistake the phrase which passes in a century, for the heart which is young for ever. The poetical genius of which Goldsmith is already conscious, was in its essential character of a lower grade than that of Gray: but the exquisite uses to which he will direct it, and the wise and earnest purpose which will shape and control it, are to be read, as it seems to me, in this excellent piece. of criticism.

Mr. Gray, continued Goldsmith, wants the Greek writer's advantages." He speaks to a people not easily impressed "with new ideas; extremely tenacious of the old; with

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difficulty warmed; and as slowly cooling again. How "unsuited, then, to our national character is that species "of poetry which rises upon us with unexpected flights; "where we must hastily catch the thought, or it flies from "us; and the reader must largely partake of the poet's "enthusiasm, in order to taste his beauties!... Mr. Gray's "Odes, it must be confessed, breathe much of the spirit of "Pindar; but then they have caught the seeming obscurity, "the sudden transition, and hazardous epithet of his mighty "master; all which, though evidently intended for beauties, "will probably be regarded as blemishes by the generality "of his Readers. In short, they are in some measure

1757.

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a representation of what Pindar now appears to be,

though perhaps not what he appeared to the States of "Greece, when they rivalled each other in his applause, "and when Pan himself was seen dancing to his melody."* Nothing could be happier than this last allusion.

Of the capabilities of Gray's genius, misdirected as he thus believed it to be, it is satisfactory to mark Goldsmith's strong appreciation. He speaks of him, in the emphatic line of the Country Elegy, as one whom the muse had marked for her own. He grieves that "such a genius" should not do justice to itself, by trusting more implicitly to its own powers; and quotes passages from the Bard to support his belief that they are as great "as anything of "that species of composition which has hitherto appeared "in our language, the Odes of Dryden himself not excepted." Certainly to the two exceptions which, while Goldsmith wrote, Gray was describing to Hurd ("my friends tell me "that the Odes do not succeed, and write me many topics of "consolation on that head: I have heard of nobody but an "actor and a doctor of divinity that profess their esteem for them"), might with some reason have been added the poor monthly critic of The Dunciad. I wish I could say, that, in later and more successful days, he resisted with equal good taste and good sense the influence of Johnson's habitual and strange dislike to one of the most amiable men and delightful writers to be met with in our English literature.