I should conceive that Collins had a much greater poetical genius than Gray:  he had more of that fine madness which is inseparable from it, of its turbid effervescence, of all that pushes it to the verge of agony or rapture.  Gray’s Pindaric Odes are, I believe, generally given up at present:  they are stately and pedantic, a kind of methodical borrowed phrenzy.  But I cannot so easily give up, nor will the world be in any haste to part with his Elegy in a Country Church-yard:  it is one of the most classical productions that ever was penned by a refined and thoughtful mind, moralising on human life.  Mr. Coleridge (in his Literary Life) says, that his friend Mr. Wordsworth had undertaken to shew that the language of the Elegy is unintelligible:  it has, however, been understood!  The Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College is more mechanical and common-place; but it touches on certain strings about the heart, that vibrate in unison with it to our latest breath.  No one ever passes by Windsor’s “stately heights,” or sees the distant spires of Eton College below, without thinking of Gray.  He deserves that we should think of him; for he thought of others, and turned a trembling, ever-watchful ear to “the still sad music of humanity.”—­His Letters are inimitably fine.  If his poems are sometimes finical and pedantic, his prose is quite free from affectation.  He pours his thoughts out upon paper as they arise in his mind; and they arise in his mind without pretence, or constraint, from the pure impulse of learned leisure and contemplative indolence.  He is not here on stilts or in buckram; but smiles in his easy chair, as he moralises through the loopholes of retreat, on the bustle and raree-show of the world, or on “those reverend bedlams, colleges and schools!” He had nothing to do but to read and to think, and to tell his friends what he read and thought.  His life was a luxurious, thoughtful dream.  “Be mine,” he says in one of his Letters, “to read eternal new romances of Marivaux and Crebillon.”  And in another, to shew his contempt for action and the turmoils of ambition, he says to someone, “Don’t you remember Lords ------ and ------, who are now great statesmen, little dirty boys playing at cricket?  For my part, I do not feel a bit wiser, or bigger, or older than I did then.”  What an equivalent for not being wise or great, to be always young!  What a happiness never to lose or gain any thing in the game of human life, by being never any thing more than a looker-on!

How different from Shenstone, who only wanted to be looked at:  who withdrew from the world to be followed by the crowd, and courted popularity by affecting privacy!  His Letters shew him to have lived in a continual fever of petty vanity, and to have been a finished literary coquet.  He seems always to say, “You will find nothing in the world so amiable as Nature and me:  come, and admire us.”  His poems are indifferent and tasteless, except his Pastoral Ballad, his Lines on Jemmy Dawson, and his School-mistress, which last is a perfect piece of writing.