"Save where the beetle wheels his _drony_ flight."

Has anybody observed upon this difference, which surely is worthy of a
Note? I cannot find that the circumstance has been remarked upon, but,
as I said, I am here without the means of consulting the best
authorities. The _Elegy_, I presume, must have been first separately
printed, and from thence transferred to Dodsley's _Collection_; and I
wish to be informed by some person who has the earliest impression, how
the line is there given? I do not know any one to whom I can appeal on
such a point with greater confidence than to MR. PETER CUNNINGHAM, who,
I know, has a large assemblage of the first editions of our most
celebrated poets from the reign of Anne downwards, and is so well able
to make use of them. It would be extraordinary, if _drony_ were the
epithet first adopted by Gray, and subsequently altered by him to
"droning," that no notice should have been taken of the substitution by
any of the poet's editors. I presume, therefore, that it has been
mentioned, and I wish to know where?

Now, a word or two on Dodsley's _Collection of Poems_, in the fourth
volume of which, as I have {265} stated, Gray's-_Elegy_ comes first.
Dodsley's is a popular and well-known work, and yet I cannot find _that
anybody has given the dates connected with it accurately_. If Gray's
_Elegy_ appeared in it for the first time (which I do not suppose), it
came out in 1755 which is the date of vol. iv. of Dodsley's
_Collection_, and not in 1757, which is the date of the Strawberry Hill
edition of Gray's _Odes_. The Rev. J. Mitford (Aldine edit. xxxiii.)
informs us that "Dodsley published three volumes of this _Collection_ in
1752; the fourth volume was published in 1755 and the fifth and sixth
volumes, which completed the _Collection_, in 1758." I am writing with
the title-pages of the work open before me, and I find that the first