In another corner an ill-judged and irrelevant remark by Euclid, touching the dimensions of a point, brings down upon him the scorn both of Swift and Boileau, who clamour for the unconditional suppression of mathematics. (If there be nothing else, this in itself is almost sufficient to fix the authorship of the paper with Gray, whose hatred of mathematics was only equalled by that of Goldsmith.) Then a pert exclamation from a self-sufficient Vade Mecum provokes the owner of the library to so hearty an outburst of merriment that the startled tones at once shrink back into 'uncommunicating muteness.' Laughter, it would seem, is as fatal to books as it was of old to the Coquecigrues.
Whether Gray's library ever again broke silence, his biographers have not related. But if his books were pressed for space while in his possession, they have since enjoyed ample opportunities for change of air and scene. When he died he left them, with his manuscripts, to Mason, who in turn bequeathed them to the poet's friend Stonehewer, from whom they passed, in part, to a relative, Mr. Bright of Skeffington Hall. At Mr. Bright's death, being family property, they were sold by auction. In August, 1851, they were again offered for sale; and three years later a number of them, which had apparently been reserved or bought in, once more came under the hammer at Sotheby and Wilkinson's. We have before us the catalogue of the second sale, which is naturally much fuller than that of 1854. What strikes one first is the care with which the majority of the volumes had been preserved by their later possessors. Many of the Note-Books were cushioned on velvet in special cases, while the more precious manuscripts had been skilfully inlaid, and bound in olive morocco with leather joints and linings of crimson silk. Like Prior, Gray must have preserved almost everything, 'e'en from his boyish days.' Among the books is 'Plutarch's Lives,' with Dacier's notes, and the inscription, 'E libris Thomæ Gray, Scholæ Eton: Alumn. Januar. 22, 1733'—a year before he left for Cambridge; there is also his copy of Pope's 'Iliad,' with autograph date a year earlier; there is a still more youthful (though perhaps more suspicious) possession—namely, three volumes of Dryden's 'Virgil,' which were said to have actually belonged to Pope. 'Ex libris A. Pope, 1710,' was written at the back of the portrait, and the same inscription recurred in each volume, though in the others some Vandal, probably a classmate, by adding a tail to the 'P' and an 'r' at the end, had turned the 'Pope' into 'Roper.' Another of Gray's Eton books was a Waller, acquired in 1729, in which favourite poems and passages were underlined.
Of the classics he must have been a most unwearied and sedulous student. Euripides he read in the great folio of Joshua Barnes (Cantab. 1694), which is marked throughout by a special system of stars, inverted commas, and lines in red crayon; and his note-books bristle with extracts, neatly 'arranged and digested,' from all the best Greek authors—Sophocles, Thucydides, Xenophon, and even that Isocrates whom Goldsmith, from the critical altitudes of the 'Monthly Review,' recommended him to study. At other 'classics' he worked with equal diligence. His 'Decameron'—the London quarto of 1725—was filled with marginalia identifying Boccaccio's sources of inspiration and principal imitators, while his Milton—the two-volume duodecimo of 1730-8—was interleaved,and annotated profusely with parallel passages drawn from the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, and 'the ancients.'' He had crowded Dugdale's 'Baronage' with corrections and additions; he had largely 'commented' the four folio volumes of Clarendon's 'Rebellion;' and he had followed everywhere, with remorseless rectifications, the vagrant utterances of gossiping Gilbert Burnet. His patience, accuracy, research, were not less extraordinary than his odd, out-of-the-way knowledge. In the 'Voyages de Bergeron' (quarto) that author says: 'Mango Cham fut noie.' No, comments Gray, decisively, 'Muncacâ or Mangu-Khanw was not drowned, but in reality slain in China at the siege of Hochew in 1258.' Which of us could oblige an inquisitive examiner with the biography of this Eastern potentate! Which of us would not be reduced to 'combining our information' (like the ingenious writer on Chinese Metaphysics) as to 'mangoes' and 'great Chams'!
But the two most interesting items of the Catalogue are yet unmentioned. One is the laborious collection of Manuscript Music that Gray compiled in Italy while frivolous Horace Walpole was eating iced fruits in a domino to the sound of a guitar. Zamperelli, Pergolesi, Arrigoni, Galuppi—he has ransacked them all, noting the school of the composer and the source of the piece selected—copying out religiously even the 'Regole per l'Accompagnamento.' The other, which we who write have seen, is the famous Linnaeus exhibited at Cambridge in 1885 by Mr. Ruskin. It is an interleaved copy of the 'Systema Naturae,' two volumes in three, covered as to their margins and added pages with wonderful minute notes in Latin, and illustrated by Gray himself with delicately finished pen-and-ink drawings of birds and insects. During the later part of his life these volumes, we are told, were continually on his table, and his absorbing love for natural history is everywhere manifested in his journals and pocket-books. When he is in the country, he classes the plants; when in town, he notes the skins of birds in shops; and when he eats whitebait at Greenwich, he straightway describes that dainty in the language of Tacitus. Nullus odor nisi Piscis; farina respersus, frixusque editur.
Among the manuscripts proper of this collection, the place of honour belongs to one which Mason had labelled 'Original Copy of the Elegy in a Country Church Yard.' In addition to other variations from the printed text, erased words in this MS. showed that Cato stood originally for Hampden, and Tully and Cæsar for Milton and Cromwell:
'Some mute inglorious Tully here may rest,
Some Cæsar guiltless of his country's blood.'
Here, too, were found those well-known but rejected 'additional' stanzas:
'The thoughtless World to Majesty may bow,
Exalt the brave, and idolize Success;