I NOW LEAVE YOU TO MAKE AS MUCH NOISE AS YOU PLEASE.
When Gray produced his famous Ode for the installation of his patron, the late Duke of Grafton, a production, it is observed, which would have been more admired, had it “not been surpassed by his two masterpieces, the Bard, and the Progress of Poetry,” being possessed of a very accurate taste for music, which he had formed on the Italian model, he weighed every note of the composer’s music, (the learned Cambridge professor, Dr. Randall,) with the most critical exactness, and kept the composer in attendance upon him, says Dyer, in his Supplement, for three months. Gray was, indeed, a thorough disciple of the Italian school of music, whilst the professor was an ardent admirer of the sublime compositions of Handel, whose noise, it is stated, Gray could not bear; but after the professor had implicitly followed his views till he came to the chorus, Gray exclaimed, “I have now done, and leave you to make as much noise as you please.” This fine composition is still in MS. in the hands of the Doctor’s son, Mr. Edward Randall, of the town of Cambridge.
THE MAD PETER-HOUSE POET.
Gray was not the only modern poet of deserved celebrity, which Peter-House had the honour to foster in her cloisters. A late Fellow of that Society, named Kendal, “a person of a wild and deranged state of mind,” says Dyer, but, it must be confessed, with much method in his madness, during his residence in Cambridge, “occasionally poured out, extemporaneously, the most beautiful effusions,” but the paucity of the number preserved have almost left him without a name, though meriting a niche in Fame’s temple. I therefore venture to repeat the following, with his name, that his genius may live with it:—
The town have found out different ways,
To praise its different Lears:
To Barry it gives loud huzzas,
To Garrick only tears.
He afterwards added this exquisite effusion:—
A king,—aye, every inch a king,—
Such Barry doth appear;
But Garrick’s quite another thing,
He’s every inch King Lear.