honourable condition, that he was to hold it as a sinecure. The poet,
however, refused, on the ground, as he tells Mason, that the office
had 'hitherto humbled its possessor.'"

In 1758, he composed, for his amusement, a "Catalogue of the
Antiquities, Houses, &c., in England and Wales," which was, after his
death, printed and distributed by Mason among his friends.

The next year the British Museum was opened (15th January 1759), and
Gray went to London to read and transcribe the MSS. collected there
from the Harleian and Cottoman libraries. During his residence in the
capital, appeared two odes to "Obscurity" and "Oblivion," in ridicule
of his lyrics, from the pens of Colman and Lloyd, full of spirited
satire, which failed, however, to disturb the poet's equanimity. Like
many fastidious writers, he was more afraid of his own taste, and of
the strictures of good-natured friends, than of the attacks of foes.
In 1762 he applied for the Professorship of Modern History, vacant by
the death of Turner; but it was given to Brochet, the tutor of Sir
James Lowther.

In 1765 he took a tour to Scotland, and saw many of its more
interesting points--Stirling, Loch Tay, the Pass of Killierankie, and
Glammis Castle, where he met Beattie. He wrote a very entertaining
account of the journey, in his letters to his friends. He was offered
an LL.D. by the College of Aberdeen; but out of respect to his own
University, declined the honour. In 1767 he added his "Imitations of
Welsh and Norwegian Poetry" to his other productions. Sir Walter Scott
tells us, that when Gray's poems reached the Orkney and Shetland
Isles, and when the "Fatal Sisters" was repeated by a clergyman to
some of the old inhabitants, they remembered having sung it all in its