fo his Odes, Gray now found it necessary to add some notes; " partly," he says, " from justice, to acknowledge a debt when I had any thing ; partly from ill tem per, just to tell the gentle reader, that Edward I. was not Oliver Cromwell, not Queen Elizabeth the witch of Endor." In 1768, the professorship of modern history became again vacant, and the Duke of Grafton, then in power, at the request of Mr Stonehewer, bestowed it on Gray. Soon after the Duke of Grafton was elected to the chancellor ship of the university, and Gray wrote the Ode, that was set to music, on the occasion of his installation. " He thought it better that gratitude should sing than expecta tion." When this ceremony was past, he went on a tour to the lakes of Westmoreland and Cumberland, from which his letters are written in a style of the most picturesque de scription. " He that reads his. epistolary narrative," says Dr Johnson, " wishes that to travel, and to tell his travels, had been more of his employment." In the April of 1770, he complains much of a depres sion of spirits, and talks of an intended tour into Wales, which took place in autumn ; but not a single letter is pre served in Mr Mason's book on this journey.
In May 1771, he wrote to his friend Dr Wharton, •just sketching the outline of his tour in Wales, and some of the adjacent country. This is the last letter that remains in Mr. Mason's collection. Ile there complains of an incura ble cough, of spirits habitually low, and of the uneasiness which the thought of the duties of his profession gave him, which, Mr. Mason says, he had now a determined resolu tion to resign,* He mentions also different plans of amuse ment and travel which he had projected, but which unfor tunately were not to be accomplished. Within a few days after the date of this letter he removed to London, where his health more and more declined. His physician, Dr Gisborne, advised free air, and he went to Kensington. There he in some degree Ievived, and returned to Cam bridge, intending to go from that place to Old Palk, near Durham, the residence of his friend Dr Wharton. On the 24th of July, however, while at dinner in the college hall, he was seized with an attack of the gout in his stomach. The violence of the disease resisted all the powers of me dicine. On the 29th he was seized with convulsions, Which returned mot e violently on the 30th, and he expired on the evening of that clay, in the 55th year of his age, sensible al most to the last, aware of his danger, and expressing no visible concern at the thought of his approaching death.
His friend, Mr Mason, was at that time absent ; and the rare of his funeral devolved on the other executor, 1)r Brown, the president of Pembroke hail, who saw him bu ried, as he desired, by the side of his mother, in the church yard of Stoke.
Gray, independently of his poetical character, sustained that of a first-rate scholar. He was perhaps (says the Rev. Mr Temple, in the summary of his character) the most learned man in Europe. He knew every branch of histo ry, natural and civil ; had read all the original historians of England, France, and Italy ; and was a great antiquarian. His skill in zoology was accurate ; and in an interleaved copy of Linrmus which he had left behind, he had nor only concentrated what other writers had mitten, but had alter ed the style of the Swedish naturalist into classical Latin.t Botany, which he had studied in early life, was also an amusement of his later years. In architect ure he was end.
newly sklltd.d ; and in heraldry a complete master. To these accomplishments must be added his exquisite and scientific taste in painting and music. Walpole, in his History of Painters olIentham, in his of Ely ; Pen • mint, in Iris AntiqUities of London ; and Ross, in his cdi tion of Cicero's Frmiliar Epistles, were all respectively in debted to the learning of Gray.
As a man, the only blemish in his fine character seems to have been an excessive and hallaffected delicacy. His genius as a poet is not of the most extensive, but of the highest cast. lie is the only English poet who has divest ed elegiac poetry of its txdium ; placed its sombrous ima ges in a light of picturesque fancy ; and given a tone of stedfast though subdued romantic feeling to the plain re flections of truth. Respecting his lyric poetry, the suffra ges of criticism are certainly more divided. While by some his Odes have been extolled as the model of lyric po etry, they are esteemed by another school of taste to abound in over-wrought refinements, and obscurity of lan guage. Our limits preclude dissertation ; yet whatever justice there may be in the charge of obscurity which at taches to his Odes, the grandeur of thought, and the har mony of versification, which pervade them, will for ever support their general merit, and their rank in the first rate productions of our language, and the muse of England will be for ever acknowledged to have expressed A Pinches raptures in the lyre of Cray.
See Mason's Life and Letters of Gray ; and Mitford's Life. (v)