In 1753 all Gray’s completed poems, except the sonnet on the death of West, were published by Dodsley in a handsome volume illustrated by Richard Bentley, the son of the celebrated master of Trinity. To these designs we owe the verses to the artist which were posthumously published from a MS. torn at the end. In the same year Gray’s mother died and was buried in the churchyard at Stoke Poges, the scene of the “Elegy,” in the same grave with Mary Antrobus. A visit to his friend Dr Wharton at Durham later in the year revives his earlier impressions of that bolder scenery which is henceforth to be in the main the framework of his muse. Already in 1752 he had almost completed “The Progress of Poesy,” in which, and in “The Bard,” the imagery is largely furnished forth by mountain and torrent. The latter poem long held fire; Gray was stimulated to finish it by hearing the blind Welsh harper Parry at Cambridge. Both odes were the first-fruits of the press which Walpole had set up at Strawberry Hill, and were printed together there in 1757. They are genuinely Pindaric, that is, with corresponding strophes, antistrophes and epodes. As the Greek motto prefixed to them implies, they were vocal to the intelligent only; and these at first were few. But the odes, if they did not attain the popularity of the “Elegy,” marked an epoch in the history of English poetry, and the influence of “The Bard” may be traced even in that great but very fruitful imposture, the pseudo-Ossian of Macpherson. Gray yields to the impulse of the Romantic movement; he has long been an admirer of ballad poetry; before he wrote “The Bard” he had begun to study Scandinavian literature, and the two “Norse Odes,” written in 1761, were in style and metrical form strangely anticipative of Coleridge and Scott. Meanwhile his Cambridge life had been vexed by the freaks of the fellow-commoners of Peterhouse, a peculiarly riotous set. He had suffered great inconvenience for a time by the burning of his property in Cornhill, and so nervous was he on the subject of fire that he had provided himself with a rope-ladder by which he might descend from his college window. Under this window a hunting-party of these rude lads raised in the early morning the cry of fire; the poet’s night-capped head appeared and was at once withdrawn. This, or little more than this, was the simple fact out of which arose the legend still current at Cambridge. The servile authorities of Peterhouse treated Gray’s complaints with scant respect, and he migrated to Pembroke College. “I left my lodgings,” he said, “because the rooms were noisy, and the people of the house dirty.”
In 1758 died Mrs Rogers, and Gray describes himself as employed at Stoke in “dividing nothing” between himself and the surviving aunt, Mrs Oliffe, whom he calls “the spawn of Cerberus and the Dragon of Wantley.” In 1759 he availed himself of the MS. treasures of the British Museum, then for the first time open to the public, made a very long sojourn in town, and in 1761 witnessed the coronation of George III., of which to his friend Brown of Pembroke he wrote a very vivacious account. In his last years he revealed a craving for a life less sedentary than heretofore. He visited various picturesque districts of Great Britain, exploring great houses and ruined abbeys; he was the pioneer of the modern tourist, noting and describing in the spirit now of the poet, now of the art-critic, now of the antiquary. In 1762 he travelled in Yorkshire and Derbyshire; in 1764 in the Lowlands of Scotland, and thence went to Southampton and its neighbourhood. In 1765 he revisits Scotland; he is the guest of Lord Strathmore at Glamis; and revels in “those monstrous creatures of God,” the Highland mountains. His most notable achievement in this direction was his journey among the English lakes, of which he wrote an interesting account to Wharton; and even in 1770, the year before his death, he visited with his young friend Norton Nicholls “five of the most beautiful counties of the kingdom,” and descended the Wye for 40 m. In all these quests he displays a physical energy which surprises and even perplexes us. His true academic status was worthily secured in 1768, when the duke of Grafton offered him the professorship of modern history which in 1762 he had vainly endeavoured to obtain from Bute. He wrote in 1769 the “Installation Ode” upon the appointment of Grafton as chancellor of the university. It was almost the only instance in which he successfully executed a task, not, in the strictest sense, self-imposed; the great founders of the university are tactfully memorized and pass before us in a kind of heraldic splendour. He bore with indifference the taunts to which, from Junius and others, he was exposed for this tribute to his patron. He was contemplating a journey to Switzerland to visit his youthful friend de Bonstetten when, in the summer of 1771, he was conscious of a great decline in his physical powers. He was seized with a sudden illness when dining in his college hall, and died of gout in the stomach on the 30th of July 1771. His last moments were attended by his cousin Mary Antrobus, postmistress through his influence at Cambridge and daughter of his Eton tutor; and he was laid beside his beloved mother in the churchyard of Stoke Poges.
Owing to his shyness and reserve he had few intimate friends, but to these his loss was irreparable; for to them he revealed himself either in boyish levity and banter, or wise and sympathetic counsel and tender and yet manly consolation; to them he imparted his quiet but keen observation of passing events or the stores of his extensive reading in literature ancient, medieval or modern; and with Proteus-like variety he writes at one time as a speculative philosopher, at another as a critic in art or music, at another as a meteorologist and nature-lover. His friendship with the young, after his migration to Pembroke College, is a noteworthy trait in his character. With Lord Strathmore and the Lyons and with William Palgrave he conversed as an elder brother, and Norton Nicholls of Trinity Hall lost in him a second father, who had taught him to think and feel. The brilliant young foreigner, de Bonstetten, looked back after a long and chequered career with remembrance still vivid to the days in which the poet so soon to die taught him to read Shakespeare and Milton in the monastic gloom of Cambridge. With the elderly “Levites” of the place he was less in sympathy; they dreaded his sarcastic vein; they were conscious that he laughed at them, and in the polemics of the university he was somewhat of a free lance, fighting for his own hand. Lampoons of his were privately circulated with effect, and that he could be the fiercest of satirists the “Cambridge Courtship” on the candidature of Lord Sandwich for the office of high steward, and the verses on Lord Holland’s mimic ruins at Westgate, sufficiently prove. The faculty which he displayed in humour and satire was denied to his more serious muse; there all was the fruit of long delay; of that higher inspiration he had a thin but very precious vein, and the sublimity which he undoubtedly attained was reached by an effort of which captious and even sympathetic criticism can discover the traces. In his own time he was regarded as an innovator, for like Collins he revived the poetic diction of the past, and the adverse judgments of Johnson and others upon his work are in fact a defence of the current literary traditions. Few men have published so little to so much effect; few have attained to fame with so little ambition. His favourite maxim was “to be employed is to be happy,” but he was always employed in the first instance for the satisfaction of his own soul, and to this end and no other he made himself one of the best Greek scholars at Cambridge in the interval between Bentley and Porson. His genius was receptive rather than creative, and it is to be regretted that he lacked energy to achieve that history of English poetry which he once projected, and for which he possessed far more knowledge and insight than the poet Thomas Warton, to whom he resigned the task. He had a fine taste in music, painting and architecture; and his correspondence includes a wide survey of such European literature as was accessible to him, with criticisms, sometimes indeed a little limited and insular, yet of a singularly fresh and modern cast. In person he was below the middle height, but well-made, and his face, in which the primness of his features was redeemed by his flashing eyes, was the index of his character. There was a touch of affectation in his demeanour, and he was sometimes reticent and secretive even to his best friends. He was a refined Epicurean in his habits, and a deist rather than a Christian in his religious beliefs; but his friend, Mrs Bonfoy, had “taught him to pray” and he was keenly alive to the dangers of a flippant scepticism. In a beautiful alcaic stanza he pronounces the man supremely happy who in the depths of the heart is conscious of the “fount of tears,” and his characteristic melancholy, except in the few hours when it was indeed black, was not a pitiable state; rather, it was one secret of the charm both of the man and of the poet.
A very complete bibliography of Gray will be found in Dr. Bradshaw’s edition of the poems in the Aldine series. Dodsley published ten of the poems, exclusive of the “Long Story,” in 1768. Mason’s Life of Gray (1778) included the poems and some hitherto unpublished fragments, with a selection from his letters, much garbled. Mathias in 1814 reprinted Mason’s edition and added much from Gray’s MS. commentaries together with some more of his translations. The most exhaustive edition of Gray’s writings was achieved by the Rev. John Mitford, who first did justice to the correspondence with Wharton and Norton Nicholls (5 vols., Pickering, 1836-1843; correspondence of Gray and Mason, Bentley, 1853); see also the edition of the works by Edmund Gosse (4 vols., 1884); the Life by the same in Eng. Men of Letters (2nd ed., 1889); some further relics are given in Gray and His Friends by D. C. Tovey (Cambridge, 1890); and a new edition of the letters copiously annotated by D. C. Tovey is in the Standard Library (1900-1907). Nicholl’s Illustrations, vol. vi. p. 805, quoted by Professor Kittredge in the Nation, Sept. 12th, 1900, gives the true story of Gray’s migration to Pembroke College. Matthew Arnold’s essay on Gray in Ward’s English Poets is one of the minor classics of literary criticism.
(D. C. To.)
GRAY (or Grey), WALTER DE (d. 1255), English prelate and statesman, was a nephew of John de Gray, bishop of Norwich, and was educated at Oxford. He owed his early and rapid preferment in church and state to the favour of King John, becoming the king’s chancellor in 1205, and being chosen bishop of Lichfield in 1210. He was, however, not allowed to keep this bishopric, but he became bishop of Worcester in 1214, resigning his office as chancellor in the same year. Gray was with John when the king signed Magna Carta in June 1215; soon after this event he left England on the king’s business, and it was during his absence that he was forced into the archbishopric of York, owing his election to the good offices of John and of Pope Innocent III. He took a leading part in public affairs during the minority of Henry III., and was regarded with much favour by this king, who employed him on important errands to foreign potentates, and left him as guardian of England when he went to France in 1242. Afterwards the archbishop seems to have been less favourably disposed towards Henry, and for a time he absented himself from public business; however, in 1255, he visited London to attend a meeting of parliament, and died at Fulham on the 1st of May 1255. Gray was always anxious to assert his archiepiscopal authority over Scotland, and to maintain it against the archbishop of Canterbury, but in neither case was he very successful. He built the south transept of the minster at York and bought for his see the village, afterwards called Bishopthorpe, which is still the residence of the archbishop of York. He was also generous to the church at Ripon. Gray was regarded by his contemporaries as an avaricious, but patriotic man.
GRAY, a town of eastern France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Haute-Saône, situated on the declivity of a hill on the left bank of the Saône, 36 m. S.W. of Vesoul by the Eastern railway. Pop. (1906) 5742. The streets of the town are narrow and steep, but it possesses broad and beautiful quays and has a busy port. Three bridges, one dating from the 18th century, unite it to suburbs on the right bank of the river, on which is the railway-station from which lines branch off to Auxonne, Dijon, Besançon and Culmont-Chalindrey. The principal buildings are the Gothic church, restored in the style of the Renaissance but with a modern portal, and the hôtel de ville, built by the Spaniards in 1568. The latter building has a handsome façade decorated with columns of red granite. Gray is the seat of a subprefect and has tribunals of first instance and of commerce, a chamber of commerce, a communal college and a small museum. It has large flour-mills; among the other industries is the manufacture of machinery and iron goods. There is also a considerable transit traffic in goods from the south of France and the colonies, and trade in iron, corn, provisions, vegetables, wine, wood, &c., much of which is carried by river. Gray was founded in the 7th century. Its fortifications were destroyed by Louis XIV. During the Franco-German War General von Werder concentrated his army corps in the town and held it for a month, making it the point d’appui of movements towards Dijon and Langres, as well as towards Besançon.
Gray gave its name to the distinguished English family of de Gray, Gray or Grey, Anschitel de Gray being mentioned as an Oxfordshire tenant in Domesday.