THOMAS GRAY, in a letter to his friend Wharton, relating that he had taken his degree of Bachelor in Civil Law, adds a postscript:

Won't You come to the Jubilee Dr Long is to dance a Saraband and Hornpipe of his own Invention without lifting either Foot once from the Ground.'

The allusion to the Jubilee has not been explained by the editors. The letter is dated "Dec. 27, Cambridge." Mason assigned the letter to 1742, and Mr Tovey, on a mistake as to the year of Gray's degree, to 1744. It is now clear that Gray was admitted Bachelor in December 1743, and in this year Pembroke Hall (of which Wharton was a fellow), according to the dates then accepted, had been founded for just four hundred years. The mention of the Jubilee, in connection with Dr Long, Master of Pembroke, prompts the suggestion that Gray was referring to some festive celebration of this four hundredth anniversary. The suggestion has been confirmed by the recent discovery of a poem, "A Secular Ode on the Jubilee at Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1743." The

poem has been disinterred from the pages of the Universal Visiter,' a magazine edited by Christopher Smart in 1756; and there can be little doubt that the ode was written by Smart at the time of the Jubilee.1

The celebration, which is otherwise unknown, thus brings into conjunction two Cambridge poets, both associated with Pembroke College: Gray, as a fellow commoner, who lived within its walls from 1756 until his death; and Smart, admitted sizar, and later scholar and fellow of the College. They were men of very different character, and in later years had little liking for each other. Gray's opinion of Smart is shown in his letters: oral tradition still preserves à scurrilous description of Gray's precise gait, which is attributed to Smart.

Thomas Gray, "a little waddling Freshman," in his own description, entered Peterhouse in 1734, and was elected scholar soon after. He resided until 1738, but from a keen distaste for mathematics and philosophy, the main subjects of academic study, he gave up the idea of taking a degree, and devoted himself to literature,

Latin and Greek, English, French, and Italian. By a strange perversity of choice, his father had destined him for the profession of the law, and he had been admitted to the Inner Temple a year after he went to Cambridge. His disinclination to enter the “barbarous halls of strife" found expression in a Latin ode to West, and he must have accepted with joy Walpole's invitation to go to France and Italy in 1739. With the experience of a larger world, with some new friends and the loss of an old one, due to his quarrel with Walpole, he came home in 1741, as little disposed as ever for the serious study of the law. Soon after his return his father died, and during the next year Gray, professedly perhaps a student in the Temple, was pursuing his literary interests and making experiments in Latin and English poetry. "My life," he wrote to West, "is like Harry the Fourth's supper of Hens, . . . Reading here, Reading there; nothing but books with different sauces.' He had inherited a very modest income, and might be expected to qualify himself to increase it.

His mother and aunt still hoped to see him a lawyer, and as Mason says, he was unwilling to wound their feelings, and so pretended to change the line of his study by going to Cambridge to take a degree in Civil Law.

With this professed intention he returned to Peterhouse, now as a fellow commoner, in 1742.

VOL. CCXXI.-NO. MCCCXXXV.

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66

He was nearly twenty-six, and his character was formed. Outwardly he was a little dandyish, or at least precise, in his dress, and he had an affectation of delicacy in his manner. He was shy and reserved, with a lack of facility in company. Writing from Florence to West, he had sent what he called his picture, and ascribed to himself a reasonable quality of dulness, a great deal of silence . . . a want of love for general society, indeed an inability to it." On the other hand, with his intimate friends his converse was easy and frank, witty in expression, revealing the irony with which he always regarded life. We may believe him when, in describing himself to West, he said, "On the good side, you may add a sensibility for what others feel, and indulgence for their faults and weaknesses, a love of truth and a detestation of everything else." From an early age, if his own phrase may be adapted, he had marked melancholy for his own, and his melancholy had been accentuated by West's untimely death. The relief for it he found in hard study: "to be employed is to be happy," he wrote in later years. In the year before his return to Cambridge, he had written his Eton Ode and other poems and had begun the Elegy, but he had published nothing, and was not known as a poet. The law troubled him but little, and he had probably burdened himself with the minimum of of knowledge when, as he de

D 2

scribed his achievement, he "got half-way to the Top of Jurisprudence."

Cambridge enabled him to follow his bent, and, with one interval of residence in London to study in the British Museum, he made his home there all his life. But for Cambridge he professed no love. Laziness

he regarded as the "sovereign Lady and Mistress " of the place, and to the University he dedicated his "Hymn to Ignorance." When he returned to Cambridge, such friends as he had made at Peterhouse had gone out into the world, and with the somewhat rowdy young bloods, who ultimately caused him to flee from the College, he had little in common. There are no intimate friends of his later years who can be traced as being at Peterhouse at this time. But in his first period of residence he had formed a friendship, which was to last all his life, with Thomas Wharton of Pembroke, a College separated by the street from Peterhouse. In 1742 Wharton was a fellow of his College, studying medicine, and it must have been Wharton who introduced Gray to other members of the Pembroke Society. His particular friends, after Wharton went away, were Mr Trollope and Mr Brown.

Gray was already devoting himself to scholarship, and finding perhaps that the Pembroke library was better stocked with the books that he needed, he was allowed to make full use

of it. Some few leaves of a library register have survived, and in them we find that "Mr Gray of Peterhouse," about 1743 and 1744, was constantly borrowing books. So free was he made of the privilege, that many entries of books that he borrowed are written in his own hand. It is clear from all his letters that his interests were in Pembroke and not in Peterhouse; it is probable that he passed most of his time in Pembroke, and so thoroughly did he associate himself with the College that was not his own, that a few years later he wrote to Wharton and alluded to the Master of Peterhouse as our friend over the way." This gradual absorption in the society of Pembroke will explain how it was that he could write the postscript quoted above, and appear to be inviting a fellow of Pembroke to come to a celebration in his own College.

Christopher Smart was then a senior sophister of Pembroke. He is described as a little, smart, black-eyed man," in manner abnormally nervous and retiring, but when his shyness was overcome particularly amiable." His father had been steward of the Kentish estates of Lord Barnard, and Christopher, who was sent to Durham School for his education, gained the patronage of the Duchess of Cleveland, who allowed him £40 a year. With this assistance he entered Pembroke Hall as a sizar in 1739.

Of his life in college it is recorded that he was so fond of walking that a fellow student remembered "a path worn by his constant treading on the pavement under the Cloisters of the College." One or two poems of his undergraduate days survive, and the lines" To the pretty barkeeper at the Mitre" gives us a hint of the convivial disposition which was to handicap his later life.

The "Jubilee" must have been celebrated at the Foundress' Feast held on New Year's Day, 1743-4. The ancient statutes of the college prescribed this date for the Feast, and it was religiously observed until towards the end of the last century, when the discomfort of travelling in the depth of winter and lodging in a college, cold from disuse, caused a change. But in the eighteenth century, when both dons and undergraduates stayed on through the Christmas vacation, it was a fit occasion for festivity, coming half-way between the banquets of Christmas and of Twelfth Night.

Pembroke Hall was a small,

snug, sleepy College. The fellows received fairly fat dividends, and shared most of the College offices by a system of rotation. They had the less reason to trouble their peaceful life with the cares of pupils, but at this time the College had more undergraduates than it had a few years later.

Neither Wharton, in spite of Gray's appeal, nor the other fellows out of residence, came to the Jubilee, but the College records tell us that the Master and six fellows, three fellow commoners and about twenty other undergraduates, were present for the Feast. It is to be hoped that for this occasion the sizars were released from their ordinary duty of waiting at table.

In a society of men marked by little distinction, Dr Long, the master, was the most eminent. He was born in 1680 and lived to be ninety, still "for his years vegete and active," as he was described. He affected academic poetry, and in 1714 at the Public Commencement, he had delivered in St Mary's Church "The Music Speech," dealing with the wrongs of the ladies who were moved from their usual place in the church. It began:

"The humble Petition of the Ladies who are all ready to be eaten up with the Spleen, To think they are to be lock'd up in

the Chancel, where they can neither see nor be seen; But must sit i' the Dumps, by themselves all stew'd and pent up,