Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes by Thomas Gray;Thomas Parnell;Tobias George Smollett;Samuel Johnson
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page 172 of 295 (58%)
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opened a vein with her own hand. This, and many other acts of maternal
tenderness, rendered her memory unspeakably dear to the poet, who seldom mentioned her, after her death, "without a sigh." He was sent to study at Eton College, the happy days spent in which he has so beautifully commemorated in his "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College." It added to his comfort here that his maternal uncle, Mr Antrobus, was an assistant-teacher. From Eton he passed to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he was admitted as a pensioner in 1734, in the nineteenth year of his age. He had at Eton become intimate with Horace Walpole and with Richard West, a young man of high promise, who died early. It is worth noticing that, during his residence both at Eton and Cambridge, he was supported entirely out of the separate industry of his mother, his father refusing him all aid. At Cambridge, Gray studied very hard, attending less to mathematics than to classical literature, modern languages, history, and poetry. He aspired to be a universally accomplished as well as a minutely learned man. His compositions, from 1734 to 1738, were translations from Italian into Latin and English, and one or two small pieces of original verse. In September 1738, he returned to his father's house, and remained there for six months, doing little except carrying on a correspondence he had begun at Cambridge with West and other friends. Correspondence, from the first and to the last, was the best OUTCOME of Gray's mind--he felt himself most at home in it; and, next to Cowper's, his letters are the most delightful in the English language. He had intended to study law, but was diverted from his purpose by Horace Walpole, who invited him to take in his Company the "grand tour." To no Briton, since Milton, could travel have been more congenial or more instructive than to Gray. He that would travel to |
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