display; it accounts for Pepys thinking _King Lear_ ridiculous. Let me
go on rather to the day of the tie-wig, of Pope's Achilles and Diomede
in powder; of Gray awaking the purple year; of Kitty beautiful and
young, of Sir Plume and his clouded cane; of Mason and Horace Walpole.
When ladies were painted, and their lovers in powder, poetry would be
painted too. It would be either for the boudoir or the alcove. I don't
call to mind a single genuine love-song in all that century among
those who dressed _à la mode_. There were, however, some who did not
so dress.

Gray was not one. Whether in the country churchyard, or by the grave
of Horace Walpole's favourite cat, he never lost hold of himself,
never let heart take whip and reins, never drowned the scholar in the
poet, never, in fact, showed himself in his shirtsleeves. But before
he was dead the hearts of men began to cry again. Forty years before
Gray died Cowper was born; fourteen years before he died, Blake was
born; twelve years before he died, Burns. It is strange to contrast
the _Elegy_ with _The Poplar Field:_

My fugitive years are all wasting away,
And I must ere long be as lowly as they,
With a turf on my breast and a stone at my head,
Ere another such grove shall arise in its stead.

Put beside that melodious jingle the ordered diction and ordered
sentiment of one of the best-known and most elegant poems in our
tongue. They were written within fifteen years of each other. Within
the same space of time, or near about it, there came this spontaneous
utterance of simplicity, tragedy and hopeless sorrow: