English literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism; Great Britain -- Intellectual life -- 18th century
Of the classics he must have been a most unwearied and sedulous student.
Euripides he read in the great folio of Joshua Barnes (Cantab. 1694),
which is marked throughout by a special system of stars, inverted
commas, and lines in red crayon; and his note-books bristle with
extracts, neatly 'arranged and digested,' from all the best Greek
authors--Sophocles, Thucydides, Xenophon, and even that Isocrates
whom Goldsmith, from the critical altitudes of the 'Monthly Review,'
recommended him to study. At other 'classics' he worked with equal
diligence. His 'Decameron'--the London _quarto_ of 1725--was filled
with _marginalia_ identifying Boccaccio's sources of inspiration and
principal imitators, while his Milton--the two-volume _duodecimo_ of
1730-8--was interleaved,and annotated profusely with parallel passages
drawn from the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, and 'the ancients.'' He had
crowded Dugdale's 'Baronage' with corrections and additions; he had
largely 'commented' the four folio volumes of Clarendon's 'Rebellion;'
and he had followed everywhere, with remorseless rectifications, the
vagrant utterances of gossiping Gilbert Burnet. His patience, accuracy,
research, were not less extraordinary than his odd, out-of-the-way
knowledge. In the 'Voyages de Bergeron' (quarto) that author says:
'Mango Cham fut noie.' No, comments Gray, decisively, 'Muncacâ or
Mangu-Khanw was not drowned, but in reality slain in China at the siege
of Hochew in 1258.' Which of us could oblige an inquisitive examiner
with the biography of this Eastern potentate! Which of us would not be
reduced to 'combining our information' (like the ingenious writer on
Chinese Metaphysics) as to 'mangoes' and 'great Chams'!
But the two most interesting items of the Catalogue are yet unmentioned.
One is the laborious collection of Manuscript Music that Gray compiled
in Italy while frivolous Horace Walpole was eating iced fruits in
a domino to the sound of a guitar. Zamperelli, Pergolesi, Arrigoni,
Galuppi--he has ransacked them all, noting the school of the composer
and the source of the piece selected--copying out religiously even the
'Regole per l'Accompagnamento.' The other, which we who write have seen,
is the famous Linnaeus exhibited at Cambridge in 1885 by Mr. Ruskin. It
is an interleaved copy of the 'Systema Naturae,' two volumes in three,
covered as to their margins and added pages with wonderful minute notes
in Latin, and illustrated by Gray himself with delicately finished
pen-and-ink drawings of birds and insects. During the later part of his
life these volumes, we are told, were continually on his table, and
his absorbing love for natural history is everywhere manifested in his
journals and pocket-books. When he is in the country, he classes the
plants; when in town, he notes the skins of birds in shops; and when he
eats whitebait at Greenwich, he straightway describes that dainty in
the language of Tacitus. _Nullus odor nisi Piscis; farina respersus,
frixusque editur_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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