GRAY, THOMAS English poet, the fifth and sole surviving child of Philip and Dorothy Gray, was born in London on Dec. 26, 1716. His mother's maiden name was Antro bus, and with her sister Mary she kept a millinery shop in Corn hill. The premises belonged to Philip Gray, a money-scrivener, who married Dorothy in 1706 and lived with her in the house, the sisters renting the shop from him and supporting themselves by its profits. Philip Gray was selfish and brutal, and in his wife took some abortive steps to obtain a separation from him. It was at his mother's expense that Gray went to Eton in 1727, where he was confided to the care of her brother, William Antrobus, one of the assistant-masters, during some part at least of his school-life.
At Eton Gray's closest friends were Horace Walpole, Richard `'Vest, and Thomas Ashton, afterwards fellow of Eton; they were studious and literary, and took little part in the amusements of their fellows. In 1734 Gray matriculated at Peterhouse, Cam bridge, and at this time made the firmest and most constant friendship of his life with Thomas Wharton of Pembroke college. On March 29, 1739, he started with Walpole for a long continental tour, for the expenses of which it is probable that his father, for once, came in some measure to his assistance. In Paris, Gray cultivated a taste for the French classical dramatists, especially Racine, whom he afterwards tried to imitate in the fragmentary "Agrippina" ; he had already learned Italian and made translations from Dante, Guarini and Tasso. In Italy he made a long sojourn, principally at Florence, but Rome, Naples and Herculaneum are also described in Gray's letters, sometimes vividly, always amus ingly, and in his notes are almost catalogued. At length in April 1741 Gray and Walpole set out northwards for Reggio. Here they quarrelled, and with two friends, John Chute and Francis Whithed, Gray went to Venice to see the doge wed the Adriatic on Ascension Day. Thence he returned home attended only by a laquais de voyage, visiting once more the Grande Chartreuse, where he left in the album of the brotherhood the beautiful alcaics, 0 Tu severa Religio loci.
On his return in 1741, London was Gray's headquarters for more than a year, with occasional visits to Stoke Poges, to which his mother and Mary Antrobus had retired from business to live with their sister, Mrs. Rogers. The year 1742 was, for him, fruitful in poetic effort, of which, however, much was incomplete. The "Agrippina," the De principiis cogitandi, the splenetic "Hymn to Ignorance" in which he contemplates his return to the uni versity, remain fragments ; but besides the two poems already mentioned, the "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College" and the "Hymn to Adversity," perhaps the most faultless of his poems, were written before the close of the summer. After hesitating between Trinity Hall and Peterhouse, he returned to the latter, probably as a fellow-commoner. He had hitherto neglected to read for a degree; he proceeded to that of LL.B. in In a reconciliation with Walpole was effected through the kind offices of Chute's sister. In 1748 he first came before the public, but anonymously, in Dodsley's Miscellany, in which appeared the Eton ode, the ode on spring, and that on the cat.
There was little to break the monotony of his days till 175o, when from Stoke he sent Walpole "a thing to which he had at last put an end." The "thing" was the "Elegy." It was shown about in manuscript by his admiring friend ; it was impudently pirated, and Gray had it printed by Dodsley in self-defence. The publication led to the one incident in Gray's life which has a touch of romance. At Stoke house had come to live the widowed Lady Cobham, who learnt that the author of the "Elegy" was her neighbour. A platonic affection sprang up between Gray and Miss Speed, her protegee; rumour, upon the death of Lady Cobham, said that they were to be married, but the lady escaped this mild destiny to become the Baroness de la Peyriere, of ter wards Countess Viry, and a dangerous political intriguante.
In 1753 all Gray's completed poems, except the sonnet on the death of West, were published by Dodsley in a volume illustrated by Richard Bentley, the son of the master of Trinity. 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. These odes were the first-fruits of the press which Walpole had set up at Strawberry Hill, and were printed together there in 1757. Though they did not attain the popularity of the "Elegy," these poems 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 riotous fellow-commoners of Peterhouse; the author ities treated his 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 Gray lived quietly at Stoke ; in 1759 he made a very long sojourn in town, where in 1761 he witnessed the coronation of George III. In his last years he visited various picturesque districts of Great Britain, exploring great houses and ruined abbeys, 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 Scot land, and thence went to Southampton and its neighbourhood. In 1765 he revisited Scotland. His most notable achievement in this direction was his journey among the English lakes; and even in 177o, the year before his death, he visited with his young friend Norton Nicholls "five of the most beautiful counties of the kingdom." In 1768 the duke of Grafton offered him the pro fessorship of modern history which in 1762 he had vainly en deavoured to obtain from Bute, and in 1769 he wrote the "In stallation Ode" upon the appointment of Grafton as chancellor of the university. He was contemplating a journey to Switzer land to visit his youthful friend de Bonstetten when, in the summer of 1771, he was seized with a sudden illness when dining in his college hall. He died on July 3o, 1771, and 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. His friendship with the young, after his migration to Pembroke college, is a noteworthy trait in his character; with the elderly "Levites" of the place he was less in sympathy ; in the polemics of the university he was somewhat of a free lance, and lampoons of his were privately circulated with much effect. In literature 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," and in pursuance of this end he made himself one of the best Greek scholars at Cambridge in the interval between Bentley and Porson. He had a fine taste in music, painting and architecture; and his correspondence in cludes a wide survey of European literature, with criticisms of a singularly fresh and modern cast. 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 will be found in The Poetical Works of Thomas Gray (ed. J. Bradshaw, Aldine edition, 1891) . See also W. Mason, The Poems of Mr. Gray, to which are prefixed memoirs of his life and writings (1775 ; reprinted, with additions, by T. J. Mathias, 1814) ; J. Nichols, Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century, vol. VI. (1817-58), for the true story of Gray's migration to Pembroke college; The Works of Thomas Gray (ed. J. Mitford, 1836-43) ; The Correspondence of T. Gray and W. Mason (ed. J. Mitford, 1853) ; Matthew Arnold's essay on Gray in T. H. Ward's The English Poets, vol. 3 (188o ; 2nd ed., 5 vol., 1883-1918) ; Edmund Gosse, Gray in the Eng. Men of Letters Series (1882, 2nd ed. 1889), and his editions of The Works of Thomas Gray in prose and verse (4 vol., 1884) ; D. C. Tovey, Gray and his Friends (189o), and his edition of The Letters of Thomas Gray in Bohn's Standard Library (3 vol., 1900-12) . C. To. ; X.)