Select Poems of Thomas Gray

EDITED, WITH NOTES, BY
FORMERLY HEAD MASTER OF THE HIGH SCHOOL, CAMBRIDGE, MASS.
WITH ENGRAVINGS .
NEW YORK: HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE. 1883.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1876, by HARPER & BROTHERS, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
Many editions of Gray have been published in the last fifty years, some of them very elegant, and some showing considerable editorial labor, but not one, so far as I am aware, critically exact either in text or in notes. No editor since Mathias (A.D. 1814) has given the 2d line of the Elegy as Gray wrote and printed it; while Mathias's mispunctuation of the 123d line has been copied by his successors, almost without exception. Other variations from the early editions are mentioned in the notes.
It is a curious fact that the most accurate edition of Gray's collected poems is the editio princeps of 1768, printed under his own supervision. The first edition of the two Pindaric odes, The Progress of Poesy and The Bard (Strawberry-Hill, 1757), was printed with equal care, and the proofs were probably read by the poet. The text of the present edition has been collated, line by line, with that of these early editions, and in no instance have I adopted a later reading. All the MS. variations, and the various readings I have noted in the modern editions, are given in the notes.
Of former editions of Gray, the only one very fully annotated is Mitford's (Pickering, 1835), already mentioned. I have drawn freely from that, correcting many errors, and also from Wakefield's and Mason's editions, and from Hales's notes ( Longer English Poems , London, 1872) on the Elegy and the Pindaric odes. To all this material many original notes and illustrations have been added.
1 Since writing the above to-day, I have found by the merest chance in my own library another bit of evidence in the case, which fully confirms my surmise that the Elegy was printed in The Magazine of Magazines before it appeared in the Grand Magazine of Magazines . Chambers's Book of Days (vol. ii. p. 146), in an article on Gray and his Elegy, says: