Farther on in the same essay, Mitford remarks: "The skill of Gray is, I think, eminently shown in the superior distinctness with which he has marked those parts of his prophecies which are speedily to be accomplished; and in the gradations by which, as he descends, he has insensibly melted the more remote into the deeper and deeper shadowings of general language. The first prophecy is the fate of Edward the Second. In that the Bard has pointed out the very night in which he is to be destroyed; has named the river that flowed around his prison, and the castle that was the scene of his sufferings:
| 'Be thine despair, and sceptred care; When Severn shall re-echo with affright The shrieks of death thro' Berkeley's roofs that ring, Shrieks of an agonizing king.' |
How different is the imagery when Richard the Second is described; and how indistinctly is the luxurious monarch marked out in the form of the morning, and his country in the figure of the vessel!
| 'The swarm that in thy noontide beam were born? Gone to salute the rising morn. Fair laughs the morn,' etc. |
The last prophecy is that of the civil wars, and of the death of the two young princes. No place, no name is now noted: and all is seen through the dimness of figurative expression:
| 'Above, below, the rose of snow, Twin'd with her blushing foe, we spread: The bristled boar in infant gore Wallows beneath the thorny shade.'" |
Hales remarks: "It is perhaps scarcely now necessary to say that the tradition on which The Bard is founded is wholly groundless. Edward I. never did massacre Welsh bards. Their name is legion in the beginning of the 14th century. Miss Williams, the latest historian of Wales, does not even mention the old story."1
1 The Saturday Review, for June 19, 1875, in the article from which we have elsewhere quoted (see [above], foot-note), refers to this point as follows:
"Gray was one of the first writers to show that earlier parts of English history were not only worth attending to, but were capable of poetic treatment. We can almost forgive him for dressing up in his splendid verse a foul and baseless calumny against Edward the First, when we remember that to most of Gray's contemporaries Edward the First must have seemed a person almost mythical, a benighted Popish savage, of whom there was very little to know, and that little hardly worth knowing. Our feeling towards Gray in this matter is much the same as our feeling towards Mitford in the matter of Greek history. We are angry with Mitford for misrepresenting Demosthenes and a crowd of other Athenian worthies, but we do not forget that he was the first to deal with Demosthenes and his fellows, neither as mere names nor as demi-gods, but as real living men like ourselves. It was a pity to misrepresent Demosthenes, but even the misrepresentation was something; it showed that Demosthenes could be made the subject of human feeling one way or another. It is unpleasant to hear the King whose praise it was that
'Velox est ad veniam, ad vindictam tardus,'
spoken of as 'ruthless,' and the rest of it. But Gray at least felt that Edward was a real man, while to most of his contemporaries he could have been little more than 'the figure of an old Gothic king,' such as Sir Roger de Coverley looked when he sat in Edward's own chair."