knowledge, an exquisite taste in the fine arts, and above all purity of morals and an unaffected reverence for religion, made him an ornament to society and an honour to human nature." The desire to be thought a gentleman to whom literature was an amusement rather than a profession may account for the desultory manner of his composition, with its fits of passing inspiration severed by long periods of poetical inactivity. In fact he so constantly broke off in the middle of a poem that when some years after its commencement he finished his Elegy and sent it to Horace Walpole he wrote with it, "Having put an end to a thing whose beginning you have seen long ago I immediately send it to you. You will, I hope, look upon it in the light of a thing with an end to it a merit that most of my writings have wanted and are like to want." But whatever the mode of the composition the results are of the very highest order. Mr. Gosse points out that in his Ode on Adversity, now usually styled a hymn, " He first shows that stateliness of movement and pomp of allegorical illustration which give an individuality to his mature style." This mature style is seen in his Pindaric Odes and in the famous Elegy. In this the use of the Heroic quatrain with alternate rhymes, in which Gray so excels all others, was not his invention. Gray knew it well as used by Sir John Davies in his poem Nosce teipsum (know thyself) printed in 1599, and he was evidently familiar with a quatrain of West's Ah me what boots us all our boasted power, They cannot ward the inevitable hour, But what others had used Gray made entirely his own, and no poem was produced between the days of Milton and Wordsworth which has enjoyed so high a reputation in literature as Gray's Elegy. Its fame is worldwide and always fresh. "It possesses," says Mr. Gosse, "the charm of incomparable felicity, of a melody that is not too subtle to charm every ear, of a moral persuasiveness that appeals to every generation, and of metrical skill that in each line proclaims the Master. The Elegy may be looked upon as the typical piece of English verse, our poem of poems; not that it is the most brilliant or original or profound lyric of language, but because it combines in more balanced perfection than any other all the qualities that go to the production of a fine poetical effect.” 1 our Mr. Swinburne, who infinitely preferred Collins to Gray as a lyric poet, has felt impelled by "the high perfection of the poem, and its universal appeal to the tenderest and noblest depths of human feeling," to admit that "as an elegiac poet Gray holds for all ages to come his unassailable and sovereign station." Like all the plays of Shakespeare and like so much of Tennyson, the Elegy is "thickly studded with phrases that have become part and parcel of colloquial speech." In the eyes of scholars its classical phrases and forms add to its charm, for just as no traveller had brought so much learning and cultivation to bear on all that he saw since Milton, so, like Milton, 1 Gray in the English Men of Letters series, by Edmund Gosse. F he was imbued with the classics, and wrote a good deal of elegant Latin verse. Indeed his longest work is a Latin poem, and his Latin Alcaics on the Grande Chartreuse are famous. Gray himself considered, and no doubt rightly, his Pindaric Ode on The Progress of Poesy to be a better piece of work than the Elegy. But the latter appeals to a wider circle of admirers; one can only wish that we had more of either kind. As it is, Gray, who said himself that the style he aimed at was extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical," a very proper aim for all writers of poetry-may truly be said to have reached his aim, and the only thing which prevents his name being placed amongst the greatest English poets is that he wrote so little, which is accounted for by the fact that, though a born poet he fell upon an age of prose. Much of that little is unsurpassed, but that we should possess a considerable bulk or volume of writing is, as Matthew Arnold points out, a sine qua non, if we are going to place a poet quite in the front rank, and of this Gray was himself fully aware when he said, After all I am but a shrimp of an author.” BURNS 1759-1796 BURNS was and is better known and loved by his compatriots than any English poet ever was-and a striking instance of this was furnished when the navvies were digging the trench from Thirlmere through the Lake District for the Manchester Water Works, for the Scotchmen on the works all seemed to be able to quote Burns, and with delight, though they knew nothing of the great Lake Poet Wordsworth. But for all this, to most English people he is comparatively unknown, and this is, I think, owing to two causes. One that it is generally understood that he lived an irregular life, which is reflected in his writing, and the other that some of his writing is so Scotch that it needs a glossary. But to take these objections in order. There is very much in his life which is of supreme interest; indeed to follow his life and the growth of his genius is far more stirring than to read the biography of any other poet you can mention, with the possible exception of Keats, and as for the Scotch, it is not as a rule at all hard to follow, the greater part being plain English. In estimating a man's place on the roll of poets, as Matthew Arnold insists in his essay on Wordsworth's poems, the mere bulk of his writing must be duly considered, and though Charles Wolfe is for ever to be remembered, for the one solitary poem on The Burial of Sir John Moore and Blanco White for his great sonnet on Night, it requires a body of poetry to place a man in the first rank. Now Burns, besides his poems, wrote some 300 songs, and many of them of such beauty that Tennyson declared that they must make their author immortal; and more than one of those whose opinion is worth taking on the subject have placed his songs so high that Shakespeare alone is considered to have surpassed them in lyrical beauty. If this is true, or anything like the truth, it is indeed no credit to English lovers of verse that they do not know the songs of Burns better; for once known there can be no doubt as to the unanimous verdict about their merits. He had a genius for melody, and taking the ordinary subjects of everyday life among the Scottish peasantry, and using the homely peasant speech, he turned out song after song of the very highest quality. Principal Shairp, in the opening sentence of his life of Burns, says: Great men, great events, great epochs, it has been said, grow as we recede from them; and the rate at which they grow in the estimation of men is in some sort a measure of their greatness. Tried by this standard, Burns must be great indeed, for during the eighty years that have passed since his death, men's interest in the man himself and their estimate of his genius have been steadily increasing, and each decade since he died has produced at least two biographies of him." "What," he goes on to ask, "has caused this |