[39.] Fond. Foolish. This is the original meaning of the word, and is so used by the older poets.
[40.] he repairs. So Milton:
"Sinks the day-star in the ocean bed,
And yet anon repairs his drooping head."
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.
Thomas Gray was born in Cornhill, London, December 26th, 1716. Through the help of his mother's brother, who was Assistant-Master at that famous school, he received his primary education at Eton, and in 1735 entered St. Peter's College, Cambridge. In 1738 he left the University without taking a degree, intending to study law at the Inner Temple. Soon afterwards, however, he accompanied Horace Walpole on a tour through France and Italy, and spent the greater part of two years in Paris, Rome, and Florence. Upon his return to England, finding himself possessed of a life-long competency, he resolved to give up the law and devote himself entirely to self-culture. He settled at Cambridge, and gave all his time to study and to the cultivation of his mind. The first of his poems to appear in print was the "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College," published in 1747. His "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" was not published until 1750, although it had been written and handed about in manuscript several years before. The post of Poet-Laureate was offered him in 1757, on the death of Colley Cibber; but he did not accept it. In 1768 he was appointed Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, but the state of his health was such that he was never permitted to lecture. He died, July 29th, 1771, at the age of fifty-four.
"He was certainly the most accomplished man of his time," says Hales, "and was something much more than accomplished. His learning was not only wide but deep; his taste, if perhaps too fastidious, was pure and thorough; his genius was of no mean degree or order; his affections were of the truest and sincerest. . . . His poems are works of refinement rather than of passion; but yet they are inspired with genuine sentiment. They are no doubt extremely artificial in form; the weight of their author's reading somewhat depresses their originality; he can with difficulty escape from his books to himself; but yet there is in him a genuine poetical spirit. His poetry, however elaborated, is sincere and truthful. If the exterior is what Horace might have called over-filed and polished, the thought is mostly of the simplest and naturalest."
Matthew Arnold says: "Gray's production was scanty, and scanty it could not but be. Even what he produced was not always pure in diction, true in evolution. Still, with whatever drawbacks, he is alone or almost alone in his age. Gray said himself that the style he aimed at was 'extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical.' Compared, not with the work of the great masters of the golden ages of poetry, but with the poetry of his own contemporaries in general, Gray may be said to have reached, in his style, the excellence at which he aimed."
Cowper writes, "I have been reading Gray's works, and think him the only poet since Shakespeare entitled to the character of sublime."
Lowell says: "Gray, if we may believe the commentators, has not an idea, scarcely an epithet, that he can call his own, and yet he is, in the best sense, one of the classics of English literature."
And Sir James Mackintosh says: "Of all English poets he was the most finished artist. He attained the highest degree of splendor of which poetic style seemed to be capable. It may be added that he deserves the comparatively trifling praise of having been the most learned poet since Milton."