tle margin for him. His temperament and his mode of study shut him out from every energetic profession. He was twenty-five years of age, and hitherto had not so much as begun any serious study of the law, for which his mother still imagined him to be preparing. Only one course was open to him, namely, to return to Cambridge, where living was very cheap, and to reside in college, spending his vacations quietly at Stoke-Pogis. As Mason puts it, "he was too delicate to hurt two persons for whom he had so tender an affection by peremptorily declaring his real intentions, and therefore changed, or pretended to change, the line of his study." Henceforward, until 1759, his whole life was a regular oscillation between Stoke and Cambridge, varied only by occasional visits to London. The first part of his life was now over. At twenty-five Gray becomes a middle-aged man, and loses, among the libraries of the University, his last pretensions to physical elasticity. From this time forward we find that his ailments, his melancholy, his reserve, and his habit of drowning consciousness in perpetual study, have taken firm hold upon him, and he begins to plunge into an excess of reading, treating the acquisition of knowledge as a narcotic. In the winter of 1742 he proceeded to Peterhouse, and taking his bachelor's degree in Civil Law, was forthwith installed as a resident of that college. CHAPTER IV. LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE. His letters GRAY took up his abode at Peterhouse, in the room nearest the road on the second floor on the north side, a room which still exists, and which commands a fine view of Pembroke College, further east, on the opposite side of Trumpington Street. It would seem, indeed, that Gray's eyes and thoughts were forever away from home, and paying a visit to the society across the road. are full of minute discussions of what is going on at Pembroke, but never a word of Peterhouse; indeed, so naturally and commonly does he discuss the politics of the former college, often without naming it, that all his biographers-except, of course, Mason-seem to have taken for granted that he was describing Peterhouse. Oddly enough, Mason, who might have explained this circumstance in half a dozen words, does not appear to have noticed the fact, so natural did it seem to him to read about events which went on in his own college of Pembroke. Nor is it explained why Gray never became a Fellow of Peterhouse. In all the correspondence of Gray I have only noted one solitary instance in which he has mentioned a Petrusian; on this one occasion he does name the Master, J. Whalley, afterwards Bishop of Chester, in connexion with an anecdote which does more hon our to him as a kind old soul than as a disciplinarian. But all Gray's friends, and enemies, and interests were centered in Pembroke, and he shows such an intimate knowledge of all the cabals and ridiculous little intrigues which thrilled the common-room of that college, as requires an explanation that now can never be given. These first years of his residence are the most obscure in his whole career. It must be remembered that of his three most intimate correspondents one, West, was dead; another, Walpole, estranged; and the third, Wharton, a resident in Cambridge like himself, and therefore too near at hand to be written to. On the 27th of December, 1742, a few years after his arrival at the University, he wrote a letter to Dr. Wharton, which has been preserved, and his Hymn to Ignorance, Mason tells us, dates from the same time. But after this he entirely disappears from us for a couple of years, a few legends of the direction taken by his studies and his schemes of literary work being the only glimpses we get of him. But although Gray tells us nothing about his own college, it is still possible to form a tolerably distinct idea of the society with whom he moved at Pembroke. The Master, Dr. Roger Long, was a man of parts, but full of eccentricities, and gifted with a very disagreeable temper. He was a species of poetaster, oddly associated in verse, at different extremes of his long life, with Laurence Eusden, the poet laureate, and the great Erasmus Darwin. When Gray settled in the University, Roger Long was sixty-two years of age, had been Master of Pembroke nine years, and, after being appointed Lowndes Professor of Astronomy in 1750, was to survive until 1770, dying in his ninety-first year. He was fond of exercising his invention on lumbering constructions, which provoked the ridi cule of young wits like Gray; such as a sort of orrery which he built in the north-eastern corner of the inner court of Pembroke; and a still more remarkable watervelocipede, upon which Dr. Long was wont to splash about in Pembroke basin, "like a wild goose at play," heedless of mocking undergraduates. This eccentric personage was the object of much observation on the part of Gray, who frequently mentioned him in his letters, and was delighted when any new absurdity gave him an opportunity of writing to his correspondents about "the high and mighty Prince Roger surnamed the Long, Lord of the great Zodiac, the glass Uranium, and the Chariot that goes. without horses." As the astronomer grew older he more and more lost his authority with the Fellows, and Gray describes scenes of absolute rebellion which are, I believe, recorded by no other historian. Gray was, undoubtedly, in possession of information denied to the rest of the world. Part of this information came, we cannot doubt, from Dr. Wharton, and part from another intimate friend of Gray's, William Trollope, who had taken his degree in 1730, and who was one of the senior Fellows of Pembroke. Another excellent friend of Gray's, also a leading man at Pembroke, was the gentle and refined Dr. James Brown, who eventually succeeded Long in the Mastership, and in whose arms Gray died. Outside this little Pembroke circle Gray had few associates. He knew Conyers Middleton very well, and seems to have gained, a little later, while haunting the rich library of Emmanuel College, the acquaintance of a man whose influence on him was distinctly hurtful, the satellite of Warburton, Richard Hurd, long afterwards Bishop of Worcester. But his association with Conyers Middleton, certainly one of the most remarkable men then moving in the University, amounted almost to friendship. They probably met nearly every day, Middleton being Librarian of Trinity. There was much that Gray would find sympathetic in the broad theology of Middleton, who had won his spurs by attacking the deists from ground almost as sceptical as their own, yet strictly within the pale of orthodoxy; nor would the irony and free thought of a champion of the Church of England be shocking to Gray, whose own tenets were at this time no less broad than his hatred of an open profession of deism. was pronounced. Gray's feeling in religion seems to have been one of high and dry objection to enthusiasm, or change, or subversion. He was willing to admit a certain breadth of conjecture, so long as the forms of orthodoxy were preserved, but he objected excessively to any attempt to tamper with those forms, collecting Shaftesbury, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Hume under one general category of abhorrence. As he says, in a cancelled stanza of one of his poems "No more, with reason and thyself at strife, Give anxious cares and endless wishes room; an attitude which would not preclude a good deal of sympathy with the curious speculations of Conyers Middleton. There is no doubt, however, that, in spite of a few companions of this class, most of them, like Middleton, much older than himself, he found Cambridge exceedingly dreary. He talks in one of his letters of "the strong attachment, or rather allegiance, which I and all here owe to our sovereign lady and mistress, the president of presidents, and head of heads (if I may be permitted to pronounce her name, that ineffable Octogrammaton), the power of Lazi |