XXIV.

That a "kindred spirit" should be more interested in the fate of the writer, than one of a different temperament, is natural; but how this kindred spirit should, in his lonely contemplations, stumble into the same Church-yard in which this Elegy was written, we search in vain for a probable account. One is tempted to suppose Gray to have sometimes figured this Elegy as fixed up in the Country Church-yard, as well as originally penned in it. But this only leads us from one incongruity, to land us immediately in another. Why does the kindred spirit enquire the fate of him, whose fate is commemorated in the Elegy that made him originally known? as is also the very enquiry he is here supposed to make. But I hasten from this part of the piece, afraid of being invol

ved in its entanglements, and apprehensive of the confusion of ideas that it seems to threaten to him who shall dwell on it long.

That Gray, in a work so serious, should have intended to amuse himself, or his reader, with picturing the talkativeness of the rustic character, or the excursiveness of narrative age, I am not willing to believe. But certain it is, that the "hoary-headed swain" tells the "kindred spirit" more than was asked of him; and, instead of simply relating the fate of the writer, enters somewhat diffusely into his character. Here, again, the manners are violated; and the rustic is made to tell his tale, in language the most chaste and polished, and in style the most poetical, that the Elegy contains. Gray seems, by a kind of perverseness of application, to have finished off this passage with all the care of which he was master; and to have given

it out of his hand with a consciousness of success, that brings back to memory the self-complacency of Bayes, after one of his most ranting passages, in which he thinks he has brought out every excellence to which even his powers were adequate-" That is as well as I can do."

That Gray should have formed a wish to exert himself with more than ordinary earnestness on a subject so near to him, is not to be wondered at. But he forgets that the enthusiasm and fancy, which might be allowable in a description of his character, when that description came from himself, are inadmissible in the mouth of another, and that other a stranger, and a clown. But this is one of the most strongly marked peculiarities of his poetical temperament. He is always more attentive to the grandeur and magnificence of his building, than to the propriety of its site. He is ever

1

meditating a great structure; taking it for granted, that it may stand in all places alike. From all quarters he fatigues himself in collecting ponderous and bulky materials, which he encourages himself to pile up, till they shall have reached the Empyreum; without considering the incongruities in the design, or the obstacles that may ruin its execution like the commemorated projectors of a tower that was to reach to heaven, which they began to build in a plain, and without considering that the very laws of matter, on which the operation of building proceeds, entailed impracticability. The epithet φιλοπονώτατος, bestowed by an ancient critic on Euripides, may, with propriety, be transferred to Gray; as may also the critic's description of the strained and laboured elevation of

'Longin. de Sublim.

that poet's tragical imagery, in which he is ludicrously compared to Homer's lashing his hips with his tail,

Lion,

66

and forcing himself forward to fight."

XXV. XXVI. XXVII. XXVIII. XXIX.

66

Nor is much of the poet's character unfolded by the rustic; though many words are used. "That he was a man given to musing; that he loved to "meet the sun in the morning, and to 66 repose in the shade at noon; that he "walked by the side of a wood, and

66

66

lounged on the bank of a brook; and

that, after having been two days miss

ing, he was decently buried, on the "third, at the foot of an old thorn"-is all that the hoary-headed swain can say about him: for the rest he refers to the Epitaph, or, as he calls it, the Lay, en