The little Tyrant of his Fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Tully here may rest;
Some Caesar, guiltless of his Country's Blood.

The substitution of English names is an obvious attempt to bring truth
closer to the souls of his readers by use of "domestica facta" and the
avoidance of school-boy learning.

All these changes illustrate the quality of Gray's curious felicity.
His assault on the reader's sensibilities was organized and careful:
here is no sign of that contradiction in terms, "unpremeditated art."
He probably did not work on the poem so long as historians have said
he did, but he scanted neither time nor attention. Mason thought the
poem begun and perhaps finished in 1742, and he connected its
somberness with Gray's great sorrow over the death of his close friend
Richard West. All this seems more than doubtful: to Dr. Thomas
Wharton in September 1746 Gray mentioned recently composing "a few
autumnal verses," and there is no real evidence of work on the poem
before this time. Walpole evidently inclined to 1746 as the date of
commencement, and it may be pointed out that Mason himself is not so
sure of 1742 as have been his Victorian successors. All he says is, "I
am inclined to believe that the Elegy ... was begun, if not concluded,
at this time [1742] also." Gray's reputation for extreme leisurely
composition depends largely on the "inclination" to believe that the
"Elegy" was begun in 1742 and on a later remark by Walpole concerning
Gray's project for a History of Poetry. In a letter of 5 May 1761
Walpole joked to Montagu saying that Gray, "if he rides Pegasus at his
usual foot-pace, will finish the first page two years hence." Not
really so slow as this remark suggests, Gray finally sent his "Elegy"
to Walpole in June of 1750, and in December he sent perhaps an earlier