Walpole at his own invitation, but told him frankly he never could be
on the same terms of friendship again. Left now to pursue his journey
alone, he went to Venice, and thence came back through Padua and Milan
to France. On his way between Turin and Lyons, he turned aside to see
again the noble mountainous scenery surrounding the Grande Chartreuse
in Dauphiné; and in the album kept by the fathers wrote his Alcaic
Ode, testifying to his admiration of a scene where, he says, "every
precipice and cliff was pregnant, with religion and poetry."

Two months after his return to England, his father died, somewhat
impoverished by improvidence. Gray, thinking himself too poor to study
the law, sent his mother and a maiden sister to reside at Stoke, near
Windsor, and retired to Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he resumed his
classical and poetical pursuits. To West, who by this time was
declining in health, he sent part of "Agrippina," a tragedy he had
commenced. West objected to the length and prosiness of Agrippina's
speeches. These were afterwards altered by Mason, in accordance with
West's suggestions; but Gray was discouraged, and has left "Agrippina"
a Torso. The subject was unpleasing. To have treated adequately the
character of Nero, would have required more than the genius of Gray;
and the language of the fragment is distinguished rather by rhetorical
burnish than by poetical spirit and heat. We have not thought it
necessary to reprint it, nor several besides of the fragmentary and
inferior productions of this poet, which Mason, too, thought proper
to omit.

Gray now plunged into the _mare magnum_ of classical literature. With
greater energy and exclusiveness than before, he read Thucydides,
Theocritus, and Anacreon; he translated parts of Propertius, and he
wrote a heroic epistle in Latin, after the manner of Ovid, and a Greek