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This drove the poor Cardinal to premature delivery, and an instalment of thirteen thousand lines appeared; of which perhaps one line (Eripuitque Jovi fulmen, Phoeboque sagittas), having since suggested Franklin's epitaph (Eripuit cœlo fulmen, sceptrumque tyrannis), has a chance to live. To the

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by Mr. Gray, I find opinions which place in lively contrast the obscure Oliver and the brilliant Horace.

Walpole called himself a Whig, in compliment to his father; but except in his rarer humours he hated, while he envied, all things popular. I am more humbled,' was his cry, when thirsting for every kind of notoriety, 'I am 'more humbled by any applause in the present age, than 'by hosts of such critics as Dean Miller.' He was very steady in his fondness for Gray, both because Gray was master of some secrets of their earlier life that a little

the wit and fine.

affected him, and because there was that real indifference to popular influences in the poet, which gentleman was anxious to have credit for.

Six years before

the present, he proclaimed this liking to the world as loudly as he could, by a Strawberry Hill edition of the Eton College Ode and Churchyard Elegy; and when he heard, in the July of this year, that Gray had left his loved Pembroke Hall for a visit to Dodsley the bookseller, he hurried to London, as he says himself, to 'snatch' away the new Odes for another pet publication at Strawberry Hill. These were the Bard and the Progress of Poesy; two noble productions, it must surely be admitted, whatever of cavil can be urged against them: though not to be admired as Walpole admired. Their weaknesses were to him their strength; he treasured every obscure allusion; would have had the remoteness and violent effort even more remote and violent; would have closed the page, he could, to all but the circles he moved in; and cherished most those too fastidious fears, which checked Gray's otherwise certain flight into the highest poetic heaven. On the other hand I find no evidence that the pathos and sublimity of his friend had rightly affected him that he could sympathise with the grand tone of melancholy, or discover the deep and touching human reference, which prevail over every minor fault in those remarkable poems. He never praises without shewing his dislike of others, much more than his love of Gray. You are very parti'cular,' he says to Montague, 'in liking Gray's Odes : but

if

you must remember the age likes Akenside, and did like 'Thomson! Can the same people like both?' It was a habit of depreciation much in the manner of the time. Even the enchanting genius of Collins struck no responsive chord in Gray himself; nor had the Elegies of Shenstone, the Imagination of Akenside, or even the Castle of Indolence itself, given grateful addition to the lettered idleness of the learned poet of Pembroke Hall.

But Goldsmith was not yet to this manner born, and when Mr. Griffiths laid Gray's handsome quarto before him, was disposed to no comparison or test less fair than his own feeling of the objects and aims of poetry. And this he stated with a strength and plainness, which marks with personal interest what was said of Gray. Verses of his own he had already written, fragments of exquisite simplicity: what now appears will one day give them unity and aim, and raise them into enduring structures. We observe the gradual development of settled views; the better defined thoughts which these rude beginnings of literature are breeding in him; the rich upturning of the soil of his mind, as Mr. Griffiths passes with his harrow. The toils and sufferings of the past are not only yielding fruit to him now, but teaching him how it may be gathered.

The lesson is very simple: but of inappreciable value. It is the reverse of Horace Walpole's. It is to study the people, whom Walpole would disregard; to address those popular sympathies, which he affected to despise; to speak the language of the heart, of which he knew so little; and

before all things study, what his delicate gentility found unendurably tedious, the joys and the sorrows of the poor. It is the lesson which Roger Ascham would have taught two hundred and fifty years before: to think as a wise man, but to speak as the common people. We cannot without 'regret,' Goldsmith wrote, 'behold talents so capable of 'giving pleasure to all, exerted in efforts that at best can 'amuse only the few: we cannot behold this rising poet 'seeking fame among the learned, without hinting to him 'the advice that Isocrates used to give his scholars, 'Study the People. This study it is that has conducted 'the great masters of antiquity up to immortality. Pindar 'himself, of whom our modern lyrist is an imitator, appears ' entirely guided by it. He adapted his works exactly to the 'dispositions of his countrymen. Irregular, enthusiastic, 'and quick in transition, he wrote for a people inconstant, ' of warm imagination, and exquisite sensibility. He chose 'the most popular subjects, and all his allusions are to 'customs well known, in his days, to the meanest person.' Admirable rebuke to those who seize the form, but not the spirit, of an elder time; and mistake the phrase which passes in a century, for the heart which is young for ever. The poetical genius of which Goldsmith is already conscious, was in its essential character of a lower grade than that of Gray but the exquisite uses to which he will direct it, the wise and earnest purpose which will shape and control it, are to be read, as it seems to me, in this excellent piece of criticism.)

Mr. Gray, continued Goldsmith, wants the Greek writer's advantages. He speaks to a people not easily 'impressed with new ideas; extremely tenacious of the 'old; with difficulty warmed, and as slowly cooling again. 'How unsuited to our national character is that species of 'poetry which rises upon us with unexpected flights; where 'we must hastily catch the thought, or it flies from us; ' and the reader must largely partake of the poet's enthu'siasm, in order to taste his beauties! Mr. Gray's Odes, 'it may be confessed, breathe much of the spirit of 'Pindar; but they have also caught the seeming obscu'rity, the sudden transition, and hazardous epithet of his 'mighty master; all which, though intended for beauties, 'will probably be regarded as blemishes by the genera'lity of his readers. In short, they are in some mea'sure a representation of what Pindar now appears to be,

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though not what he appeared to the States of Greece, ' when they rivalled each other in his applause, and when 'Pan himself was seen dancing to his melody.' Than this, nothing happier could be said.

Of the capabilities of Gray's genius, misdirected as he thus believed it to be, it is delightful to mark Goldsmith's strong appreciation. He speaks of him, in the emphatic line of the Country Elegy, as one whom the Muse had marked for her own. He grieves that 'such a genius should not do justice to itself; and quotes passages from the Bard to support his belief that they are as great 'as 'anything of that species of composition which has hitherto

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