[35] From "Tristram Shandy."
[36] From "Tristram Shandy."
THOMAS GRAY
Born in 1716, died in 1771; educated at Eton, where he began a lifelong friendship with Horace Walpole; traveled on the Continent with Walpole in 1739; settled in Cambridge in 1741, where in 1768 he was made professor of Modern History; refused the laureateship in 1757; published his "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" in 1751; his poems and letters collected by Mason in 1775.
I
WARWICK CASTLE[37]
I have been at Warwick, which is a place worth seeing. The town is on an eminence surrounded every way with a fine cultivated valley, through which the Avon winds, and at the distance of five or six miles, a circle of hills, well wooded, and with various objects crowning them, that close the prospect. Out of the town on one side of it, rises a rock that might remind one of your rocks at Durham, but that it is not so savage, or so lofty, and that the river, which, washes its foot, is perfectly clear, and so gentle, that its current is hardly visible. Upon it stands the castle, the noble old residence of the Beauchamps and Nevilles, and now of Earl Brooke. He has sash'd the great apartment that's to be sure (I can't help these things), and being since told, that square sash-windows were not Gothic, he has put certain whim-whams within side the glass, which appearing through are to look like fret-work. Then he has scooped out a little burrow in the massy walls of the place for his little self and his children, which is hung with paper and printed linen, and carved chimney-pieces, in the exact manner of Berkley Square or Argyle buildings. What in short can a lord do nowadays, that is lost in a great old solitary castle, but skulk about, and get into the first hole he finds, as a rat would do in like case.