Gray.
To these lines on Crashaw Pope is indebted for a sentiment which in his hands assumes a very infidel form:
"For modes of faith let senseless bigots fight;
His can't be wrong whose life is in the right."
Crashaw had become a Roman Catholic, and was a canon of Loretto when he died; but Cowley's Protestant feelings could not blind him to his worth, and he says:
"His Faith perhaps in some nice tenets might
Be wrong; his Life, his soul were in the Right."
How much the two last-mentioned poems of Gray's owe to Milton's "Lines to Mansus" and his "Epitaphium Damonis," any one acquainted with them may remember. I have only been alluding to Gray's reproductions of Cowley.
RT.
Warmington.