Gray, DAVID, a minor poet, was born 29th January 1838, at Duntiblae, on the south side of the Luggie, about 8 miles from Glasgow. He was the eldest of the eight children of an industrious weaver, who gave him as good an education as he could at the Normal School and university of Glasgow, in the hope of making him a Free Church minister. But the boy began early to write verses, and seems to have made from the beginning an enormously exaggerated estimate of his own promise. In May 1860 he started for London along with Robert Buchanan, with the usual lofty hopes, and quickly met the usual discouragements. He made an appeal to Monckton Milnes, afterwards
Lord Houghton, who found him some employment, but failed to get his poems printed. Meantime consumption seized him, and a stay in Devonshire, for which Milnes, Sydney Dobell, and other friends had found him the means, proving useless, he went home to his parents at Merckland, a mile from Kirkintilloch, to die. The end came quickly, 3d December 1861, but the day before he had had the happiness to hold in his hand a specimen page of the volume of his poems in print. The volume was entitled The Luggie and other Poems (1862), and was prefaced by an introduction by R. Monckton Milnes and a memoir by J. Hedderwick. His latest work was his best, and, indeed, the sonnets grouped together here under the title 'In the Shadows' are stamped with a solemn and touching beauty of their own. An enlarged edition, edited by Sheriff Glassford Bell, appeared in 1874. See also R. Buchanan's too high-pitched essay, in David Gray, and other Essays (1868).