as the
prevailing vice of modern poetry. For whereas the modern poet thrusts
his private feelings into prominence, and finds a luxury in the
confession of his sorrows, Gray's references to himself are
introduced on public grounds, or, in other words, with a view to
poetical effect. He, like our own bards, is 'condemned to groan,' but
for different reasons--

  'The tender for _another's_ pain,
     The unfeeling for his own.'

"We have already remarked on the public character of the 'Ode on Eton
College;' but the second stanza of this poem is a pure expression of
individual feeling:

  'Ah, happy hills! ah, pleasing shade!
     Ah, fields belov'd in vain!
   Where once my careless childhood play'd,
     A stranger yet to pain!
   I feel the gales that from ye blow
   A momentary bliss bestow,
     As waving fresh their gladsome wing,
   My weary soul they seem to soothe,
   And, redolent of joy and youth,
     To breathe a second spring.'

Every one will perceive the art which enforces the truth of the
general reflections that follow by the personal experience of the
speaker. Again, the 'Progress of Poesy' closes with a personal
allusion which, as it is a climax, might, if ill-managed, have
appeared arrogant, but which is, in fact, a masterpiece of oratory.
After confessing his own inferiority to Pindar, the poet proceeds:

  'Yet oft before his infant eyes would run
     Such forms as glitter in the Muse's ray,
   With orient hues, unborrow'd of the sun;
     Yet shall he mount, and keep his distant way,
   Beyond the limits of a vulgar fate,
   Beneath the Good how far--but far above the Great!'

There is something very noble in the elevated manner in which the
self-complacent triumph of genius, expressed by so many poets from
Ennius downwards, is at once justified and chastened by the
reflection in these lines. We see in them that the poet alludes to
himself in the third person, and he repeats this style in the
'Elegy,' where, after the fourth line, the first personal pronoun is
never again used. How just and beautiful is the turn where, after
contemplating the general lot of the lowly society he is celebrating,
he proceeds to identify his own fate with theirs:

  'For _thee_, who, mindful of th' unhonour'd dead,
     Dost in these lines their artless tale relate,
   If, chance, by lonely contemplation led,
     Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate,

  'Haply some hoary-headed swain may say,' etc.

"The two great characteristics of Gray's poetry that we have
noticed--his self-suppression and his sense of form and dignity--are
best described by the word 'classical.' What we particularly admire
in the great authors of Greece and Rome is their public spirit. Their
writings are full of patriotism, good-breeding, and common-sense, and
have that happy mixture of art and nature which is only acquired by
men who have learned from liberty how to discipline individual
instincts by social refinement. Their style is masculine, clear, and
moderate; they seem, as it were, never to lose the sense of being
before an audience, and, like orators who know that they are always
exposed to the judgment of their intellectual equals, they aim at
putting intelligible thoughts into the most natural and forcible
words. Precisely the same qualities are observable in all the best
English writers of the eighteenth century. Addison, Pope, and
Goldsmith are perhaps the most shining examples, but the rest are
'classical' in the sense which we have just indicated; and we can
hardly be wrong in ascribing this common rhetorical instinct to the
intimate connection between the men of thought and the men of action,
which existed both in the free states of antiquity, and in England
under the rule of the aristocracy. With the advance of the eighteenth
century the instinct in English literature seems to grow weaker; the
style of our authors becomes more formal and constrained, and
symptoms of that dislike of society encouraged by the philosophy of
Rousseau more frequently betray themselves. As the poetry of Cowper
shows less social instinct than that of Gray, so Gray himself is
inferior in this respect to Pope and Goldsmith. But his style has the
same lofty public spirit that distinguishes his favourite models, and
no worthier form could be imagined to express the ardour excited in
the heart of a patriotic poet by the rising fortunes of his native
country. We feel that it is in every way fitting that the author of
the 'Elegy' should have been the favourite of Wolfe and the
countryman of Chatham."




[Illustration: CLIO, THE MUSE OF HISTORY.]




INDEX OF WORDS EXPLAINED.


Жolian, 109.

afield, 86.

amain, 110.

antic, 111.

Arvon, 125.

Attic warbler, 95.


Berkeley, 126.

boar (of Richard III.), 130.

broke (=broken), 86.

buskined, 132.

buxom, 104.


Cadwallo, 125.

Caernarvon, 125.

captive (proleptic), 104.

chance (adverb), 91.

cheer, 104.

churchway, 92.

curfew, 83.

customed, 92.

Cytherea, 111.


Delphi, 114.


fond (=foolish), 111, 132.

fretted, 87.


glister, 99.

Gloster, 124.

Gorgon, 137.

graved, 93.

grisly, 105, 126.

grove (=graved), 93.


haggard, 124.

hauberk, 123.

Helicon, 109.

Hoel, 124.

honied, 96.

Horж, 94.

Hyperion, 112.


Idalia, 110.

Ilissus, 114.


jet, 99.


leaden (eye), 136.

lion-port, 132.

little (=petty), 89.

Llewellyn, 124.

long-expecting, 95.


Mжander, 114.

margent, 104.

Modred, 125.

Mortimer, 124.

murther, 129.

murtherous, 105.


nightly (=nocturnal), 123.


parting (=departing), 83.

pious (=_pius_), 90.

Plinlimmon, 125.

provoke (=_provocare_), 87.

purple, 95, 111, 135.


rage, 88.

repair, 132.

repeat, 113.

rose (of snow), 130.

rushy, 96.


shaggy, 123.

shell (=lyre), 110.

slow-consuming, 105.

Snowdon, 123.

solemn-breathing, 110.

summer friend, 136.


tabby, 99.

Taliessin, 132.

tempered, 110.

Thracia, 110.

Tyrian, 99.


upland, 91.

Urien, 125.


velvet-green, 110.


woeful-wan, 92.


ye (accusative), 103.