Yet he could condescend to a little good-natured puffing of his friend's writings. He sends Mason's tragedy, _Caractacus_, a tiresome work, to a friend. "You will receive to-morrow _Caractacus_, piping hot, I hope before any one else has it. Observe it is I that send it, for Mason makes no presents to any one whatever; and moreover you are desired to lend it to nobody, that we may sell the more of them,--for money, not fame, is the declared purpose of all we do. He has had infinite fits of affectation as the hour approached, and is now gone into the country for a week, like a new-married couple." He mistrusts his powers as a critic: "You know I do not love, much less pique myself on criticism, and think even a bad verse as good a thing or better than the best observation that was ever made upon it." Indeed his diffidence with regard to his own work was profound. This is the first announcement of the completion of the _Elegy_: "I have been here at Stoke a few days, and having put an end to a thing, whose beginning you have seen long ago, I immediately send it to you. You will, I hope, look upon it in the light of a thing with an end to it, a merit that most of my writings have wanted and are like to want." The following contains a pathetic touch; the diffident man's silent hankering after recognition: "I cannot brag of my spirits, my situation, my employments, or my fertility; the days and the nights pass, and I am never the nearer to anything but that one to which we are all tending. Yet I love people that leave some traces of their journey behind them, and have strength enough to advise you to do so while you can; winter is the season of harvest to an author." This is his own account of his powers of composition: "I by no means pretend to inspiration, but yet I affirm that the faculty in question [of composition] is by no means voluntary. It is the result (I suppose) of a certain disposition of mind, which does not depend on one's self, and which I have not felt this long time. You that are a witness how seldom this spirit has moved me in my life, may easily give credit to what I say." The great Doctor, whose favourite maxim it was that any one can write at any time who sets himself "doggedly" to it, was profoundly irritated by this. He speaks of Gray's "fantastic" notion that he could not write except at happy moments; a "foppery," he adds, "to which my kindness for a man of learning makes me wish that he had been superior." Gray was a master of the art of delicate moralising. I cannot help wondering that more literary apophthegms have not been extracted from his writings. Here is one for example: "I am persuaded that the whole matter is to have always something going forward." And again: "You mistake me, I was always a friend to employment and no foe to money; but they are no friends to each other. Promise me to be always busy, and I will allow you to be rich." Or more solemnly still: