THOMAS GRAY. Precisely the same conflict of impulses appears in the lyrics of a greater though still minor poet of the same generation, a man of perhaps still more delicate sensibilities than Collins, namely Thomas Gray. Gray, the only survivor of many sons of a widow who provided for him by keeping a millinery shop, was born in 1716. At Eton he became intimate with Horace Walpole, the son of the Prime Minister, who was destined to become an amateur leader in the Romantic Movement, and after some years at Cambridge the two traveled together on the Continent. Lacking the money for the large expenditure required in the study of law, Gray took up his residence in the college buildings at Cambridge, where he lived as a recluse, much annoyed by the noisy undergraduates. During his last three years he held the appointment and salary of professor of modern history, but his timidity prevented him from delivering any lectures. He died in 1771. He was primarily a scholar and perhaps the most learned man of his time. He was familiar with the literature and history not only of the ancient world but of all the important modern nations of western Europe, with philosophy, the sciences of painting, architecture, botany, zoölogy, gardening, entomology (he had a large collection of insects), and even heraldry. He was himself an excellent musician. Indeed almost the only subject of contemporary knowledge in which he was not proficient was mathematics, for which he had an aversion, and which prevented him from taking a college degree.