few so copious and expressive. . . . My college has set me a versifying on a public occasion (viz. those verses which are called tripos) on the theme of Luna est habitabilis.

VII. TO RICHARD WEST.

AFTER a month's expectation of you, and a fortnight's despair, at Cambridge, I am come to town, and to better hopes of seeing you. If what you sent me last1 be the product of your melancholy, what may I not expect from your more cheerful hours? For by this time the ill health that you complain of is (I hope) quite departed; though, if I were self-interested, I ought to wish for the continuance of anything that could be the occasion of so much pleasure to me. Low spirits are my true and faithful companions;2 they get up with me, go to bed with me, make journeys and returns as I do; nay, and pay visits, and will even affect to be jocose, and force a feeble laugh with me; but most commonly we sit alone together, and are the prettiest insipid company in the

1 A very touching elegy in Latin, "Ad Amicos," sent by West to Gray and Walpole from Christ Church on the 4th of July 1737.-[Ed.]

2 So Flaubert says in writing to George Sand: "Je suis submergé par une mélancolie noire, qui revient à propos de tout. et de rien, plusieurs fois dans la journée. Puis, ça se passe et ça recommence. Il y a peut-être trop longtemps que je n'ai écrit?" There is much in what is recorded of the temperament of Flaubert which may help us to comprehend Gray.—[Ed.]

world. However, when you come, I believe they must undergo the fate of all humble companions, and be discarded. Would I could turn them to the same

use that you have done, and make an Apollo of them. If they could write such verses with me, not hartshorn, nor spirit of amber, nor all that furnishes the closet of an apothecary's widow, should persuade me to part with them. But, while I write to you, I hear the bad news of Lady Walpole's death on Saturday night last. Forgive me if the thought of what my poor Horace must feel on that account, obliges me to have done in reminding you that I am yours, etc. London, August 22, 1737.

VIII. TO HORACE WALPOLE.

I WAS hindered in my last, and so could not give you all the trouble I would have done. The description of a road, which your coach wheels have so often honoured, it would be needless to give you; suffice it that I arrived safe at my uncle's, who is a great hunter in imagination; his dogs take up every chair in the house, so I am forced to stand at this present writing; and though the gout forbids him galloping after them in the field, yet he continues still to regale his ears and nose with their comfortable noise and stink. He holds me mighty cheap, I perceive, for walking when I should ride, and reading when I

1 His mother's brother, Robert Antrobus, of Burnham.

should hunt. My comfort amidst all this is, that I have at the distance of half a mile, through a green lane, a forest (the vulgar call it a common) all my own, at least as good as so, for I spy no human thing in it but myself. It is a little chaos of mountains and precipices; mountains, it is true, that do not ascend much above the clouds, nor are the declivities quite so amazing as Dover cliff; but just such hills as people who love their necks as well as I do may venture to climb, and crags that give the eye as much pleasure as if they were more dangerous. Both vale and hill are covered with most venerable beeches, and other very reverend vegetables, that, like most other ancient people, are always dreaming out their old stories to the winds,

And as they bow their hoary tops relate,

In murm'ring sounds, the dark decrees of fate;
While visions, as poetic eyes avow,

Cling to each leaf, and swarm on every bough.

At the foot of one of these squats ME I (il penseroso), and there grow to the trunk for a whole morning. The timorous hare and sportive squirrel gambol around me like Adam in Paradise, before he had an Eve; but I think he did not use to read Virgil, as I commonly do there. In this situation I often converse with my Horace, aloud, too, that is, talk to you, but I do not remember that I ever heard you answer me. I beg pardon for taking all the conversation to myself, but it is entirely your own fault. We have

old Mr. Southern1 at a gentleman's house a little way off, who often comes to see us; he is now seventyseven years old, and has almost wholly lost his memory; but is as agreeable as an old man can be, at least I persuade myself so when I look at him, and think of Isabella and Oroonoko. I shall be in town in about three weeks. Adieu.

September 1737.

IX.-TO HORACE WALPOLE.2

I SYMPATHISE with you in the sufferings which you foresee are coming upon you. We are both at present, I imagine, in no very agreeable situation; for my part I am under the misfortune of having nothing to do, but it is a misfortune which, thank my stars, I can pretty well bear. You are in a confusion of wine, and roaring, and hunting, and tobacco, and, heaven be praised, you too can pretty well bear it; while our evils are no more I believe we shall not much repine. I imagine, how

1 Thomas Southerne (1660-1746), the last survivor of the Restoration dramatists. His two best tragedies were The Fatal Marriage, 1694, of which Isabella was the heroine, and Oroonoko, 1696, to both of which Gray presently refers. Southerne lived nine years after this interview.-[Ed.]

2 At this time with his father at Houghton.- [Mason.] Houghton Hall, in Norfolk, the seat of Sir Robert Walpole. It was famous for its gallery of pictures, which were sold to the Empress of Russia in 1779. In 1789 the hall was burned down.-[Ed.]

ever, you will rather choose to converse with the living dead, that adorn the walls of your apartments, than with the dead living that deck the middles of them; and prefer a picture of still life to the realities of a noisy one, and as I guess, will imitate what you prefer, and for an hour or two at noon will stick yourself up as formal as if you had been fixed in your frame for these hundred years, with a pink or rose in one hand, and a great seal ring on the other. Your name, I assure you, has been propagated in these countries by a convert of yours, one * *, he has brought over his whole family to you; they were before pretty good Whigs, but now they are absolute Walpolians. We have hardly anybody in the parish but knows exactly the dimensions of the hall and saloon at Houghton, and begin to believe that the lanthorn1 is not so great a consumer of the fat of the land as disaffected persons have said. For your reputation, we keep to ourselves your not hunting nor drinking hogan, either of which here would be sufficient to lay your honour in the dust. To-morrow se'nnight I hope to be in town, and not long after at Cambridge. I am, etc. Burnham, September 1737.

1 A lanthorn for eighteen candles, of copper-gilt, hung in the hall at Houghton. It became a favourite object of Tory satire at the time; see the Craftsman. This lanthorn was afterwards sold to the Earl of Chesterfield. See Walpole's Works, vol. ii. p. 263; and Letters to H. Mann, vol. ii. p. 368. -[Mit.]