“Let any one reflect,” says the Spectator,[39] “on the disposition of mind he finds in himself at his first entrance into the Pantheon at Rome, and how his imagination is filled with something great and amazing; and, at the same time, consider how little, in proportion, he is affected with the inside of a Gothic cathedral, though it be five times larger than the other; which can arise from nothing else but the greatness of the manner in the one, the meanness in the other."[40]

Gray describes the cathedral at Rheims as “a vast Gothic building of a surprising beauty and lightness, all covered over with a profusion of little statues and other ornaments”; and the cathedral at Siena, which Addison had characterized as “barbarous,” and as an instance of “false beauties and affected ornaments,” Gray commends as “labored with a Gothic niceness and delicacy in the old-fashioned way.”  It must be acknowledged that these are rather cold praises, but Gray was continually advancing in his knowledge of Gothic and his liking for it.  Later in life he became something of an antiquarian and virtuoso.  He corresponded with Rev. Thomas Wharton, about stained glass and paper hangings, which Wharton, who was refitting his house in the Gothic taste, had commissioned Gray to buy for him of London dealers.  He describes, for Wharton’s benefit, Walpole’s new bedroom at Strawberry Hill as “in the best taste of anything he has yet done, and in your own Gothic way”; and he advises his correspondent as to the selection of patterns for staircases and arcade work.  There was evidently a great stir of curiosity concerning Strawberry Hill in Gray’s coterie, and a determination to be Gothic at all hazards; and the poet felt obliged to warn his friends that zeal should not outrun discretion.  He writes to Wharton in 1754:  “I rejoice to find you at last settled to your heart’s content, and delight to hear you talk of giving your house some Gothic ornaments already.  If you project anything, I hope it will be entirely within doors; and don’t let me (when I come gaping into Coleman Street) be directed to the gentlemen at the ten pinnacles, or with the church porch at his door.”  Again, to the same (1761):  “It is mere pedantry in Gothicism to stick to nothing but altars and tombs, and there is no end to it, if we are to sit upon nothing but coronation chairs, nor drink out of nothing but chalices or flagons.”  Writing to Mason in 1758 about certain incongruities in one of the latter’s odes, he gives the following Doresque illustration of his point.  “If you should lead me into a superb Gothic building, with a thousand clustered pillars, each of them half a mile high, the walls all covered with fret-work, and the windows full of red and blue saints that had neither head nor tail, and I should find the Venus de Medici in person perked up in a long niche over the high altar, as naked as she was born, do you think it would raise or damp my devotions?"[41] He made it a favorite occupation to visit and take drawings from celebrated ruins and the great English cathedrals, particularly those in the Cambridge fens, Ely and Peterboro’.  These studies he utilized in a short essay on Norman architecture, first published by Mitford in 1814, and incorrectly entitled “Architectura Gothica.”