altered the sub-title of his “Isis” (written in 1748) from “An Elegy” to “A Monologue,” because it was “not written in alternate rimes, which since Mr. Gray’s exquisite ‘Elegy in the Country Church-yard’ has generally obtained, and seems to be more suited to that species of poem."[33] Mason’s “Elegy written in a Church-yard in South Wales” (1787) is, of course, in Gray’s stanza and, equally of course, introduces a tribute to the master: 

    “Yes, had he paced this church-way path along,
      Or leaned like me against this ivied wall,
    How sadly sweet had flowed his Dorian song,
      Then sweetest when it flowed at Nature’s call."[34]

It became almost de rigueur for a young poet to try his hand at a churchyard piece.  Thus Richard Cumberland, the dramatist, in his “Memoirs,” records the fact that when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge in 1752 he made his “first small offering to the press, following the steps of Gray with another church-yard elegy, written on St. Mark’s Eve, when, according to rural tradition, the ghost of those who are to die within the year ensuing are seen to walk at midnight across the churchyard."[35] Goldsmith testifies to the prevalence of the fashion when, in his “Life of Parnell,” he says of that poet’s “Night Piece on Death"[36] that, “with very little amendment,” it “might be made to surpass all those night-pieces and church-yard scenes that have since appeared.”  But in this opinion Johnson, who says that Parnell’s poem “is indirectly preferred by Goldsmith to Gray’s ‘Churchyard,’” does not agree; nor did the public.[37]

Gray’s correspondence affords a record of the progress of romantic taste for an entire generation.  He set out with classical prepossessions—­forming his verse, as he declared, after Dryden—­and ended with translations from Welsh and Norse hero-legends, and with an admiration for Ossian and Scotch ballads.  In 1739 he went to France and Italy with Horace Walpole.  He was abroad three years, though in 1741 he quarreled with Walpole at Florence, separated from him and made his way home alone in a leisurely manner.  Gray is one of the first of modern travelers to speak appreciatively of Gothic architecture, and of the scenery of the Alps, and to note those strange and characteristic aspects of foreign life which we now call picturesque, and to which every itinerary and guidebook draws attention.  Addison, who was on his travels forty years before, was quite blind to such matters.  Not that he was without the feeling of the sublime:  he finds, e.g., an “agreeable horror” in the prospect of a storm at sea.[38] But he wrote of his passage through Switzerland as a disagreeable and even frightful experience; “a very troublesome journey over the Alps.  My head is still giddy with mountains and precipices; and you can’t imagine how much I am pleased with the sight of a plain.”