tour to that then little known and most enchanting region.  In 1770, he visited Wales; but owing probably to poor health, has left no notes of his journey.  In May the next year, his health became worse, his spirits more depressed, an incurable cough preyed on his lungs; he resigned his Professorship, and shortly after removed to London.  There he rallied a little, and returned to Cambridge, where, on the 24th of July, he was seized with a severe attack of gout in the stomach.  Of this he expired on the 30th, in the 55th year of his age, without any apparent fear of death.  He was buried by the side of his mother, in the churchyard of Stoke.  A monument was erected by Mason to his memory, in Westminster Abbey.

Gray was a brilliant bookworm.  In private he was a quiet, abstracted, dreaming scholar, although in the company of a few friends he could become convivial and witty.  His heart, however, was always in his study.  His portrait gives you the impression of great fastidiousness, and almost feminine delicacy of face, as well as of considerable self-esteem.  His face has more of the critic than of the poet.  His learning and accomplishments have been equalled perhaps by no poet since Milton.  He knew the Classics, the Northern Scalds, the Italian poets and historians, the French novelists, Architecture, Zoology, Painting, Sculpture, Botany, Music, and Antiquities.  But he liked better, he said, to read than to write.  You figure him always lounging with a volume in his hand, on a sofa, and crying out, “Be mine to read eternal novels of Marivaux and Crebillon.”  Against his moral character there exists no imputation; and notwithstanding a sneering hint of Walpole’s, his religious creed seems to have been orthodox.

With all his learning and genius, he has done little.  His letters and poems remind you of a few scattered leaves, surviving the conflagration of the Alexandrian library.  The very popularity of the scraps which such a writer leaves, secures the torments of Tantalus to his numerous admirers in all after ages.  His letters, in their grace, freedom, minuteness of detail, occasional playfulness, delicious asides of gossip, and easy vigour of description, are more worthy of his powers, as a whole, than his poetry.  The poetic fragments he has left are rarely of such merit as to excite any wish that they had been finished.  His genius, although true and exquisite, was limited in its range, and hidebound in its movements.  You see his genius, like a child, always casting a look of terror round on its older companion and guardian—­his taste.  Like Campbell, “he often spreads his wings grandly, but shrinks back timidly to his perch again, and seems afraid of the shadow of his own fame.”  Within his own range, however, he is as strong as he is delicate and refined.  His two principal Odes have, as we hinted, divided much the opinion of critics.  Dr Johnson has assailed them in his worst style of captious and word-catching criticism.  Now, that there is much smoke around their fire, we grant.  But we argue that there is genuine fire amidst their smoke,—­first, from the fact that so many of their lines, such as,