“Save where the beetle wheels his drony flight.”

Has anybody observed upon this difference, which surely is worthy of a Note?  I cannot find that the circumstance has been remarked upon, but, as I said, I am here without the means of consulting the best authorities.  The Elegy, I presume, must have been first separately printed, and from thence transferred to Dodsley’s Collection; and I wish to be informed by some person who has the earliest impression, how the line is there given?  I do not know any one to whom I can appeal on such a point with greater confidence than to MR. PETER CUNNINGHAM, who, I know, has a large assemblage of the first editions of our most celebrated poets from the reign of Anne downwards, and is so well able to make use of them.  It would be extraordinary, if drony were the epithet first adopted by Gray, and subsequently altered by him to “droning,” that no notice should have been taken of the substitution by any of the poet’s editors.  I presume, therefore, that it has been mentioned, and I wish to know where?

Now, a word or two on Dodsley’s Collection of Poems, in the fourth volume of which, as I have {265} stated, Gray’s-Elegy comes first.  Dodsley’s is a popular and well-known work, and yet I cannot find that anybody has given the dates connected with it accurately.  If Gray’s Elegy appeared in it for the first time (which I do not suppose), it came out in 1755 which is the date of vol. iv. of Dodsley’s Collection, and not in 1757, which is the date of the Strawberry Hill edition of Gray’s Odes.  The Rev. J. Mitford (Aldine edit. xxxiii.) informs us that “Dodsley published three volumes of this Collection in 1752; the fourth volume was published in 1755 and the fifth and sixth volumes, which completed the Collection, in 1758.”  I am writing with the title-pages of the work open before me, and I find that the first three volumes were published, not in 1752, but in 1748, and that even this was the second edition so that there must have been an edition of the first three volumes, either anterior to 1748, or earlier in that year.  The sale of the work encouraged Dodsley to add a fourth volume in 1755, and two others in 1758 and the plate of Apollo and the Muses was re-engraved for vols. v. and vi., because the original copper, which had served for vols. i., ii., iii., and iv., was so much worn.

This matter will not seem of such trifling importance to those who bear in mind, that if Gray’s Elegy did not originally come out in this Collection in 1755, various other poems of great merit and considerable popularity did then make their earliest appearance.

THE HERMIT OF HOLYPORT.

Sept. 1850.

P.S.  My attention has been directed to the subject of Gray’s Poems, and particularly to his Elegy, by a recent pilgrimage I made to Stoke Poges, which is only five or six miles from this neighbourhood.  The church and the poet’s monument to his mother are worth a much longer walk; but the mausoleum to Gray, in the immediate vicinity, is a preposterous edifice.  The residence of Lady Cobham has been lamentably modernised.