The Sun.
London, England, 1852-12-18 00:00:00

LORD CARLISLE ON THE POETRY OP GRAY.

The noble example which the Right Hon. the Earl of
Carlisle afforded to the peers of England two years ago
at Leeds, when he gave two lectures before the Me-
chanics' Institute of that town, has been followed by
men of such exalted rank as the Earl of Belfast, the
Earl of Ellesmere, Lord Montagu, and others, and it is
understood that his Grace the Duke of Newcastle will
shortly rank amongst the same class of aristocratic
teachers of the people. The Earl of Carlisle has laid the
mechanics' institutes of Yorkshire under additional ob-
ligations, by delivering at Sheffield, on Tuesday even-
ing, a lecture on the writings of the poet Gray. The
meeting was in the lecture-hall of the Mechanics' Insti-
tute, and in addition to the members of the institution,
there were present a great many of the principal inha-
bitants of Sheffield and the neighbourhood.
Amongst the audience we noticed Mr. James Mont-
.

gomery, the poet ; the Rev. Canon Trevor, the Mayor
(Mr. Matthews), Mr. Alderman Dunn (the President of
the Institution), the Master Cutler (Mr. Hunter), Dr.
Holland. Mr. Fisher, sen., Alderman Pye Smith, Mr.
Henry Jackson, Mr.i Henry Newbould, Mr. Gains-
ford, Mr. John Newbould, Mr. Edward Smith, Mr.
J. B. Brown, Mr. Badger (Rotherham), Mr. Alderman
Carr, Mr. Solly, Mr. Bramley, Mr. Leader, jun., Mr.
F. Hoole, &c.
Alderman DUNN, who, as president of the institution
took the chair, having introduced the noble lecturer.
Lord CARLISLE then proceeded to read his lecture, the
subject to which it referred being the poetry of Gray, an
author, he said, who, in point of mere bulk, had proba-
bly written less than any other poet whose works were
comprised in any collection of English poetry, but few
had attempted a greater variety of styles, and these, too
amongst the most difficult and lofty in the whole range of
song. He had written odes which might be divided
into the regular and Pindaric ; he had written elegiac
verses ; he had written Latin heroic, Latin elegiac,
and Latin lyric poetry ; he had written burlesque ' - he
had written satire ; he had written epitaphs ; he had
written a sonnet ; he had written part of a tragedy ;
and all he had written was not only excellent, but nearly
perfect in its kind. His leading characteristic and
probably that which interfered mainly with his being a
more prolific writer, was the nicety and purity of his
taste. If he were forced to compare his style and genius
with those of any other writer he believed he should
select Virgil. He would back his own estimate of the

1 poetical merits of Gray by the weightier authority of Sir
J. Mackintosh, who said, "Of all English poets he was
the most finished artist ; he attained the highest degree
of splendour of which poetical style seems to be capable."
He appeared to have laboured under an hereditary ten-
dency to gout, which closed his illustrious career in his
fifty-fifth year, and which probably' gave to the whole of
his sedentary and eventful life that disposition to a pen-
sive, but not morose, melancholy to which he frequently
alluded in his correspondence, and which has left most
distinct impressions even on his highly-polished and
carefully laboured poetry. It was in that light he was
represented in the following lines, written in a poem of
the last century, " The Pursuits of Literature," by Mr.
Mathias, a distinguished classical and Italian scholar : ,

" Go then and view, since closed his cloistered day,
The self-supported, melancholy Gray.
Dark was his morn of life, and bleak the spring,
Without one fost'ring ray from Britain's king :
Granta's dull abbots cast a sidelong glance,
And Levite gownsmen hugged their ignorance :
With his high spirits strove the master bard,
And was his own exceeding great reward."

Though the " dull abbots" of Cambridge were spoken of
with extreme irreverence by Gray himself, he spent, by
choice, the greater portion of the last twenty-nine years
of his life at that University ; and with reference to the
want of " one fostering ray from Britain's king," in the
first place he not only had the option of becoming poet
laureate, abut had received the office of Professor of
Modern History (which he feared he had made a sine-
cure) in the University of Cambridge, if not actually
from George the Third, at least from the Duke of Graf-
ton with the king's conveyed assent. He imagined,
moreover, that Gray, who never was a distressed man,
would have shrunk instinctively from all the common
appearances of patronage, and it should be recollected
that when he travelled with the son of the most power-
ful Prime Minister England ever had, be quarrelled
with hini. One of the greatest readers, he was one of
the most sparing of writers, and when he consented
to the publication of his immortal Elegy, he requested it
should be without his name, and expressed an almost
ludicrous degree of horror at the notion of its being pub-
lished with an engraving of his own head prefixed to it.
Lastly, and most conclusively of all, when late in life he
authorised two editions of his works in England and
Scotland, he expressly mentioned that he was to receive
no remuneration for them. The same sensitive and fas-
tidious delicacy which pruned every expression of his
pen, guarded every action of his life ; and they were told
by his editor and friend, the poet Mason, that he even
assumed an appearance of effeminacy and delicacy to
ward off persons whom he did not wish to please. His
existence, on the whole, was that of a scholar and re-
cluse, pursuing varied walks of learning, many of which
he mastered, if not with the massive completeness of a
German student, yet with the refined diligence of an
English gentleman. In addition to his own captivating
art of poetry, he was keenly alive to the excellencies of
music, painting, and architecture ; and, though there
would appear to have been no trace of his ever having
been in love—(laughter)—his heart was open to the
warmest emotions of friendship. Nor is it easy to re-
member a more congenial union of tastes and feelings
than distinguished the too brief intimacy between him
and his accomplished friend, Richard West. His affec-
tion for his mother was tender, constant, and practical,
as proved by the inscription which he placed upon her
tom

"In the same pious confidence,
Beside her Friend and Sister.
Here sleep the Remains of
DOROTHY GRAY,
Widow, the careful tender Mother
Of many children, one of whom alone
Had the misfortune to survive her."

He exhibited a most becoming tone of religion, and ap-
peared to have always spoken with the utmost repug-
nance of Bolingbroke and Voltaire. In one place h•
thus pointedly described himself—

" No very great wit, he believed in God."

As a letter writer, he held a middle station between
Horace Walpole and Cowper ; and with respect to his
different notices of scenery, Sir James Mackintosh says,
" I am struck by the recollection of a sort of merit in
Gray, which is not generally observed ; he was the
first discoverer of the beauties of nature in England,
and has marked out the course of every picturesque
journey that can be made in it." His descriptions
of Italy placed the reader in the midst of it, and
every word of them showed that the intention was to
show off the scene, and not the writer. His Latin poetry
was not uniformly out of the reach of even modern
criticism ; they had it for the most part rather in small.
fragments, as well as in a great variety of form, but it
was on the whole extremely beautiful. The ode on
" The Spring," his earliest English production, written
in his twenty-sixth year, was as nicely polished and as
carefully finished as almost any of his subsequent com-
positions. In it a hot noon is pourtrayed with much
truth :

" Still is the toiling hand of care ;
The panting herds repose ;
Yet hark ! how through the peopled air
The busy murmur glows !
The insect youth are on the wing,
Eager to taste the honeyed spring,
And float amid the liquid noon." (Cheers.)
He did not feel called upon to pause over the next "Ode
on the Death of a favourite Cat, drowned in a Tub of
Gold Fishes." (Laughter.) Having spent six years of
his life as a boy at Eton School, they must excuse him
for exclaiming with filial fervour—
" Ye distant spires, ye antique towers,
That crown the watery glade,
Where grateful Science still adores
Her Henry's holy shade !" (Cheers.)
He might mention that he felt so strongly the kind of
identification which this brief ode gave to the muse of
Gray with the memory of Eton, that upon a proposal
being lately made that a collection of busts of the prin-
cipal worthies of Eton should be placed in the large
school-room, he requested permission to present a bust
of Gray. It might be stated that of the six last Prime
Ministers of this country, four had been Eton men ; and
not long after the poet had cast his desponding glance
upon the boyish group assembled there, among those
who disported on " the margent green" was Arthur
Wellesley, Duke of Wellington. (Cheers.) The hymn to
Adversity stood next, and amongst his unfinished poems
was found one headed " An Ode on the Pleasures arising
from Vicissitude." He now came to the two great odes
which more particularly represented the varied, though
not irregular structure and fervid tone of that form of
composition not improperly termed Pindaric, and which
signally developed the genuine ore in the poetic vein of
Gray. It was to these and to one written later, and not
unworthy to be associated with them, that they must
mainly refer the expression in the stanza inscribed by
Mason as an epitaph on Gray's monument in Westmin-
ster Abbey
" No more the Grecian muse unrivalled reigns ;
To Britain let the nations homage pay !
She boasts a Homer's fire in Milton's strains,
A Pindir's rapture in the lyre of Gray."
(Cheers.) " The Progress of Poesy" stood first, and was
chronicled by genuine poesy herself ; though the next of
the Pindaric odes, " The Bard," was far more generally
popular, and familiar to their recollection. The noble
lord gave several extracts from both poems, and entered
into a spirited refutation of Dr. Johnson's harsh criti-
cism upon them. Having spoken in favourable terms of
Gray's unfinished tragedy of Agrippina, he concluded by
referring to "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," of which
Dr. Johnson himself approved—of which General Wolfe
on the night before the capture of Quebec, said, " Well,
gentlemen, I had rather be the author of that poem than
take Quebec ;" and which, at the request of the great
American statesman, Mr. Webster, was read to him
when lying upon his bed of death.