How jocund did they drive their team a-field,
How bent the woods beneath their sturdy stroke.”
“This stanza is made up of various pieces inlaid. ‘Stubborn glebe’ is from Gay; ‘drive a-field’ from Milton; ‘sturdy stroke’ from Spencer.”[[14]] Now, there is not one of these expressions which does not here fall very properly into its place; and a writer familiar with poetic diction would make use of them without any reference to the authors from whom they might have been, in the first place, received. Indeed, it would be quite impossible for any one to compose in this mosaic fashion; nor is there any end to the charges of plagiarism that might, on this principle, be brought. If such expressions as “sturdy stroke,” and “drive a-field,” are to be traced to the ownership of some predecessor, one does not see how one is to move at all. The language of the country, like its arable land, is all appropriated. In the passage here commented on, the critic needed not have stopped where he did. “How jocund,” he might have added, is from Fletcher, and “how bent the woods,” from Dryden; and then only consider if these three lines were composed after such a fashion, what a wonderful piece of workmanship they must be! Whilst we are as hostile as any to laborious, conscious artifice, or the mere repetition of traditional phrases and images, we must deprecate a species of criticism which would shut out the poet from his legitimate resources, deter him from the careful study of his predecessors, and either drive him into a poor, timid, barren style of composition, or else induce him to seek the praise of originality by coining new words and fantastical expressions.
We must now address ourselves to the work before us, The Correspondence of Gray and Mason, as here presented to us by the careful editorship of Mr Mitford.
Mr Mitford has by his editorial offices for ever associated his own name with that of the poet Gray. In the Aldine edition of his works he performed the good office of restoring the genuine text of Gray’s letters, which his first biographer, Mason, had so singularly garbled. For this and other good services of the same kind the public were already indebted to Mr Mitford. He has now, we presume, completed his labours on this subject by the publication of The Correspondence of Gray and Mason in the form Mason himself had preserved it, with copious notes explanatory of all things necessary to be known, and some which, we are happy to think, are not quite necessary items in the sum of human knowledge.
The publication of this octavo volume in its separate form was, we suppose, inevitable. The course of editorial labours will not run smooth any more than any other courses. In due order of things, Mr Mitford, when he prepared his edition of Gray’s Letters for the press, should have had the materials which form this volume put into his hands; he could then have incorporated in his book such additions to the letters of Gray as are to be found here; he could have avoided reprinting a considerable number of them, and might have given us such of the letters of Mason (none others are of the least value) as throw light upon the biography and writings of the poet Gray. But this natural order of things was not to be permitted. It was, we must presume, after the Aldine edition had been printed that the manuscript of Mason came under his inspection. Thus this large new volume was judged indispensable, although it is manifestly destined to a very brief existence; and, in spite of its luxury of type, and its neat livery of green and gold, must be absorbed, its personality entirely lost, in the next and more complete edition of the works of Gray.
When Mason prepared the letters of his distinguished friend for publication, he was not sufficiently unreasonable to thrust many of his own upon the notice of the reader; but he took care to preserve carefully in a manuscript volume the correspondence of both parties, or at least such portions of his own letters as he thought were creditable to himself. This manuscript volume he bequeathed to his friend Mr Stonhewer; from him “it passed,” Mr Mitford tells us in his preface, “into the hands of his relative, Mr Bright of Skeffington Hall, Leicestershire. When, in the year 1845, the library of Gray was sold by the sons of that gentleman, then deceased, this volume of Correspondence was purchased by Mr Penn of Stoke Park, and by him was kindly placed in my hands for publication.”
Mr Mitford has not only judged it worthy of a separate publication, but has bestowed the utmost pains in preparing it for the press. His industrial annotation strikes us with a sort of wonder. We are amazed at the pertinacity of research, all the more laudable, we presume, because the prize held forth was of such almost inappreciable value. “So you have christened Mr Dayrolles’ child,” says Mr Gray to the Rev William Mason, and passes on, regardless, to other matter—to something pertaining to the then Chancellor of the Exchequer. Not so the conscientious editor. Who is this Mr Dayrolles? and why has the christening of his child by the Rev. William Mason been glanced at by the poet? Forthwith a ransacking amongst all memoirs; we are referred to Chesterfield’s Letters, Maty’s edition, and Lord Mahon’s edition, and Walpole’s Miscellaneous Letters; and at length, in a manuscript memorandum (so far do we extend our researches), we find the bit of scandal: this “Mr Dayrolles’ child” is not the child of Mr Dayrolles at all, but of one Mr Stanhope; and to this it was that, we are told, “Mr Gray silently pointed.”—P. 129.
It is not always that we get even such a result. Sometimes we have a long list of references, with some dates and facts, dry as a parish register. Here is a note on a certain Mr Cambridge.
“On Mr Cambridge and his habits of conversation, see ‘Walpole’s Letters to Lady Ossory,’ vol. i. pp. 132, 140, 410; vol. ii. p. 242; Walpole to Mason, vol. i. p. 235; and ‘Nichol’s Literary Illustrations,’ vol. i. p. 130; and ‘Rockingham Memoirs,’ vol. i. p. 215, for his letter to Lord Hardwicke, in June 1765. In conversation he was said to be full of entertainment, liveliness, and anecdote. One sarcastic joke on Capability Brown testifies his wit, and his Scribleriad still survives in the praises of Dr Warton; yet the radical fault that pervades it is well shown in Annual Review, ii. 584.”—P. 184.