[223] In the Aldine edition, ed. Thomas (1901) these personified abstractions are not invested with a capital letter.
[224] “Biographia Literaria” (ed. Shawcross, 1907), p. 12; cf. also “Table Talk” (October 23, 1833), ed. H. N. Coleridge (1858), p. 340. “Gray’s personifications,” he said, “were mere printer’s devil’s personifications,” etc.
[225] Two of Gray’s mechanical figures were marked down for special censure by Dr. Johnson (“Lives,” Gray, ed. Birbeck Hill, Vol. III, p. 440), whose criticism was endorsed by Walpole (“Letters,” Vol. III, p. 98), who likened “Fell Thirst and Famine” to the devils in “The Tempest” who whisk away the banquets from the shipwrecked Dukes.
[226] “Letters” (December 19, 1786), Tovey, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 322.
[227] In this connexion mention may be made of “William Blake’s Designs for Gray’s Poems,” recently published for the first time with a valuable introduction by H. J. C. Grierson (Oxford, 1922). “Blake’s imagination,” says Professor Grierson, “communicates an intenser life to Gray’s half-conventional personifications” (Intro., p. 17).
[228] Canto I: LXXIV-LXXV.
[229] Cp. also the detailed personification of “Thrift,” given by Mickle in his “Syr Martyn” (1787).—“Poets of Great Britain” (1794), Vol. XI, p. 645.
[230] Cf. “Paradise Lost,” VI, 3; and Pope’s “Iliad,” V, 297.
[231] “Works” ed. Ellis and Yeats, Vol. I, Pref., x.
[232] July 6, 1803, “Letters,” ed. A. G. B. Russell (1906), p. 121.