Gray, THOMAS, one of the greatest of English poets, in value if not in bulk, was born in Cornhill, London, 26th December 1716. His father, Philip Gray, a money-scrivener, was of so violent and jealous a temper that his wife (Dorothy Antrobus) was obliged to separate from him, and it was mainly through her own exertions that the boy was placed at Eton, and afterwards at Cambridge, where two of her brothers were fellows of colleges, and afterwards tutors at Eton. Both the mother and her sister Mary loved the boy with a devotion that was rewarded by a life-long and passionate attachment. In 1727 he was sent to Eton, whither in the same year also came Horace Walpole, son of the prime-minister. As a boy Gray was shy and studious, and he carried the same temper to
Peterhouse, which he entered in 1734. The predominant mathematics in the studies of Cambridge were distasteful to his mind, and a habitual but passive melancholy early seized and mastered him. In the March of 1739 he was prevailed upon by Walpole to accompany him on the grand tour. They spent the next two and a half years visiting the towns and exploring the picture-galleries of France and Italy, and Gray's letters home reveal not only an exquisite taste in art and music, but also the first touch of that romantic love of nature which Rousseau was soon to make so fashionable. The two friends quarrelled at Reggio and parted. Walpole afterwards took the blame entirely on himself, and certainly by his efforts the breach was healed within three years, and the friendship never again interrupted. Gray reached England in the September of 1741, and seems now to have begun seriously to write poetry, his Ode on Eton College being written in the autumn of 1742, and the Elegy at least begun. In the winter he went back to Peterhouse, took his bachelors in civil law, and became a resident there. For the next four or five years he studied Greek literature profoundly, and busied himself with abortive projects for editions of Strabo, Plato, and the Greek Anthology. This was perhaps the happiest period of his life, while he breathed the serene air of noble libraries, and was as yet untroubled by broken health. He found his relaxation and his keenest pleasure in the company of his friends, and in writing, when absent from them, letters such as only men at that time could write. His holidays were spent with his mother and aunt at Stoke Poges, with Walpole at London, Windsor, and Strawberry Hill, or in travelling in different parts of the country. From his letters we see that he had a quick eye for the variety and colour of nature, and certainly he was almost the first of modern Englishmen to see the beauty as well as the horror in the Highland mountains—those 'monstrous children of God.'
In the summer of 1747 Dodsey printed Gray's famous Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, and early next year reprinted it with two other pieces in his Miscellany. The death of Gray's aunt, Mary Antrobus, in the November of 1749 appears to have brought back to his recollection his Elegy, and he seems about June 1750 to have finished it where he began it seven years before—at Stoke Poges. This humane and stately poem is perhaps the best-known piece of English verse, a masterpiece in the balanced perfection of a metre that beats true to the pulse of human sympathy in the solemn alternation of passion and reserve, and especially happy in a subject that can never lose its interest for mankind. The poem was sent to Walpole, was handed about in manuscript, and soon became so well known that Gray was forced to print it in the February of 1751. Early in March 1753 appeared in a thin folio the editio princeps of Gray's collected poems, with designs by Bentley, only son of the famous Master of Trinity. Gray's mother died 11th March 1753, and was buried at Stoke Poges, with an exquisitely simple and affecting epitaph from her son's pen upon her tombstone.
Walpole said that Gray was 'in flower' during the years 1750-55, and during this period he commenced his most ambitious poems, the Pindaric Odes, the splendidly resonant Progress of Poesy, perhaps his really greatest work, being finished by the close of 1754. The Bard, begun at the same time, was not completed till the summer of 1757. Gray had long had a nervous horror of fire, and had fixed a rope-ladder from his window in Peterhouse by which to escape in emergency. One night in February 1756 he was roused from sleep by a pretended alarm of fire, and, without staying to put on his clothes, descended from his window into a tub of water that had been placed under his window by some frolicsome undergraduates. Displeased at the authorities of Peterhouse for not punishing this brutal practical joke, the poet migrated in 1756 to Pembroke Hall, where he spent the remaining fifteen years of his life surrounded by congenial friends, in the midst of his books, his china, his pictures, and his flowers. His two odes were printed at Strawberry Hill in 1757, and were admitted to have put their author at one bound at the head of living English poets. The laureateship was offered him in 1757 on Colley Cibber's death, but declined. During the years 1760 and 1761 he devoted himself to early English poetry, of which he intended to write a history; later he made studies in Icelandic and Celtic verse, which bore fruit in his Eddaic poems, The Fatal Sisters and The Descent of Odin—genuine precursors of romanticism. In 1768 he collected his poems in the first general edition, and accepted the professorship of History and Modern Languages at Cambridge, an office which entailed no duties and yielded an income of £400 a year. Johnson in his perverse life of Gray made, from 'a slight inspection of his letters,' one solitary remark that showed insight, that Gray 'was a man likely to love much where he loved at all.' Certainly no silent and melancholy poet was ever more happy in his friendships, and few men have been loved with such singleness and devotion. His biographer Mason's affection was not entirely disinterested, but the love of friends like Nicholls, Bonstetten, Robinson, Wharton, Stonehewer, and Brown proves that there must have been some singular charm in the object on which it was lavished.
Gray's latest journeys were made to Glamis Castle and to the Cumbrian lakes, the beauties of which he was the first to discover. He was now comparatively rich, and enjoyed a reputation peculiarly dear to a scholar's heart, and his life glided quietly on, troubled only by fits of dejection and by attacks of hereditary gout. As he was dining one day in the college hall at Pembroke, a severe attack seized him, and after a week's suffering he died, 30th July 1771. He was buried fittingly by his mother's side in his own Country Churchyard—Stoke Poges.
Gray said of his own poetry that 'the style he aimed at was extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical.' The excellence he aimed at he attained, and in his lyrical work, moreover, he reached in a high degree the Greek quality of structure, especially in his Pindaric Odes. 'I do not think,' says Edward Fitzgerald, 'that his scarcity of work was from design: he had but a little to say, I believe, and took his time to say it.' At any rate all his work bears the stamp of dignity and distinction, and it was perhaps as much the fault of the chilling atmosphere of his age as of his own hyper-refinement of taste or intermittency in the fits of creative fancy that its quantity was so little. Yet this slender garland of verse has been sufficient to give Gray his rank among the dui maiores of English poetry.
The earlier Lives of Gray and editions of his works by Mason and Mitford have been superseded by the study by Edmund W. Gosse (1882) in the 'English Men of Letters' series, and by the same editor's complete edition of his works in prose and verse, including as many as 349 of his letters (4 vols. 1884). See also the essay by Matthew Arnold in vol. iii. (1880) of T. H. Ward's English Poets.