epigram. This last he communicated to West, who was now in
Hertfordshire, waiting the approach of the Angel of Death. To the same
dear friend he sent his "Ode to Spring," which he had written under
his mother's roof at Stoke. He was too late. West was dead before it
arrived. This amiable and gifted person, who was thought by many
superior in natural genius to his friend, and whose name is for ever
connected with that of Gray, expired on the 1st of June 1742, and now
reposes in the chancel of Hatfield Church. We strongly suspect that it
was he whom Gray had in his eye in the close of his "Elegy."

Autumn has often been thought propitious to genius, especially when
its tender sun-light is still further sweetened and saddened by the
joy of grief. In the autumn of this year, Gray, who was peculiarly
susceptible to skiey influences, wrote some of his best poetry--his
"Hymn to Adversity," his "Distant Prospect of Eton College," and
commenced his "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard." A Sonnet in
English, and the Apostrophe which opens the fourth book of his "De
Principiis Cogitandi," bore testimony to his esteem for the character
and his regret for the premature loss of Richard West.

To Cambridge Gray seems to have had little attachment; but partly from
the smallness of his income, and partly from the access he had to its
libraries, he was found there to the last, constantly complaining, and
always continuing, like the _statue_ of a murmurer. In the winter of
1742 he was admitted Bachelor of Civil Law; and in acknowledgment of
the honour of the admission, began an "Address to Ignorance," which it
is no great loss to his fame that he never finished. Hazlitt completed
what appears to have been Gray's design in that admirable and
searching paper of his, entitled, "The Ignorance of the Learned," in
which he shows how ill mere learning supplies the want of common sense