Nicholls and Mason letters, which, as I have already said, received the particular attention of Mitford at a later period, when he understood his duties as an editor in a much more serious sense than in his youth. In his later publications Mitford was as much given to exceed in the bulk of his notes as in his earlier ones he had been needlessly scanty. I have not scrupled to cut down and even to omit notes of his, attached to the Mason Correspondence, in which the information given, however curious and interesting in itself, bears no relation whatever to Gray. Detailed political gossip, in particular, is obviously out of place in annotating the writings of a literary recluse. In the same way, I have taken the liberty of suppressing the notes of Mason, when, as is not unfrequently the case, they are purely tributes to his own inordinate vanity. The fact, however, that Mason was personally intimate with Gray gives a special value to his impressions, and I have often retained his notes where they are not in themselves important, merely because they bear slightly, but at first hand, on the habits and character of Gray. My own notes I have made as brief and business-like as possible, intruding a reference only where I fancied that it might assist in giving the general reader a clearer notion of the writer's meaning, or in putting him on a level of intelligence with the correspondent. When the notes are Gray's I have said so, and in general each reference is attributed to its author. Those notes which are signed [ED.] are my own, throughout the volumes. The orthography of the text may perhaps be attacked, but I am prepared to defend it. Where I had Gray's holograph before me, with no text printed in his lifetime, I had no choice but to reproduce it without modification of any kind. The odd spelling, which presents forms quite peculiar to Gray, the abundance of capitals, which was a foible with him, the eccentric punctuation,—all these may annoy certain readers, but I think the majority of students will be glad to see these preserved in an edition that does not aim at being popular on the one hand, or educational on the other. As an instance of the value of accuracy in orthography, I may refer to the extremely fine passage in blank verse, from Dante, which I print here (vol. i. 157-160), for the first time, from a MS. of the poet's in the possession of Lord Houghton. This is undated, and no one knows anything of its history; but from the peculiarities of its spelling, I have no hesitation in attributing it to the period from 1742 to 1744. Such a fact as this may be allowed to justify exactitude. The Latin poems I have not left as Gray wrote them,—that is to say, with the clumsy accents then in use,—and for 99 this reason, that while Gray's English orthography may be conceived to throw light on the development of the English language, his orthography in a dead tongue can possess no value or interest for any one. My sincere thanks are due to the Master and Fellows of Pembroke College, Cambridge, who have placed their invaluable collection of Gray's holograph writings at my disposal in the most generous and sympathetic manner; to Lord Houghton, who has supplied me with two unpublished poems by Gray from his rich collection of holographs; to Mr. John Murray, who very kindly allowed me to examine and use his interesting MSS. of Gray; to Mr. William J. Rolfe, of Cambridge, Mass., who has obliged me with interesting suggestions, and who, in his Select Poems of Thomas Gray, 1876, was the first to return to the revised text of 1768; to my friend Mr. J. Cotter Morison; and to Mr. R. F. Sketchley, the learned and most obliging Librarian of the Dyce and Forster Collections at South Kensington. EDMUND GOSSE. 16th April 1884. b ILLUSTRATIONS. THE frontispiece to vol. i. is a reproduction of a silhouette of Gray lately discovered in the Master's Lodge at Pembroke College, Cambridge. It has never before been published. The frontispiece to vol. ii. is an engraving made expressly for this edition from the oil-painting for which Gray sat in the autumn of 1747 to John Giles Eckhardt, and which was long in the gallery at Strawberry Hill. The frontispiece to vol. iii. is a reproduction of a pencildrawing, never before published, now at Pembroke College, drawn by Mason from life in 1760; and that to vol. iv. is a facsimile of the original MS. of the Sonnet to Richard West among the Stonehewer Papers. [ED.] |