Such was the general outline of Gray's life. In reading it, we find the most interesting features those which he describes so well in his letters, his travels, and his occasional retreats at Stoke-Pogis. He made a tour into the north of England, to the lakes, and into Scotland; at another time through Worcester, Hereford, Monmouth, and parts of the neighboring counties; and all his details of such rambles, as they are given with an evident zest, are full of life and interest. In his prose, Gray gets out of the stiff and stilted formality of much of his poetry. He forgets his learning and his classical notions, and is at once easy, amiable, witty, and jocose. There was a degree of effeminacy about him, which you see in the portraits of him, which you do not the less detect in his poetry; but his prose gives you a far more attractive idea of him, as he must be in the familiar circle of his friends. On turning to Gray's account of those places which I have visited in various parts of the kingdom, I have always found him seizing on their real features, and impressed with their true spirit. Of this genuine feeling of nature, his account of his visit to the Grande Chartreuse may be taken as a sufficient specimen: "We took the longest road, which lies through Savoy, on purpose to see a famous monastery called the Grande Chartreuse, and had no reason to think our time lost. After traveling seven days, very slow--for we did not change horses, it being impossible for a chaise to go fast in these roads--we arrived at a little village among the mountains of Savoy, called Echelles, from whence we proceeded on horses, who are used to the way, to the mountain of the Chartreuse. It is six miles to the top; the road runs winding up it, commonly not six feet broad; on the one hand is the rock, with woods of pine-trees hanging over head; on the other a monstrous precipice, almost perpendicular, at the bottom of which rolls a torrent that, sometimes tumbling among the fragments of stone that have fallen from on high, and sometimes precipitating itself down vast descents with a noise like thunder, which is made still greater by the echo from the mountains on each side, concurs to form one of the most solemn, the most romantic, and the most astonishing scenes I ever beheld. Add to this the strange views made by the crags and cliffs on the other hand; the cascades that in many places throw themselves from the very summit down into the vale and the river below, and many other places impossible to describe--you will conclude we had no occasion to repent of our pains. This place St. Bruno chose to retire to, and upon its very top founded the aforesaid convent, which is the superior of the whole order. When we came there, the two fathers who are commissioned to entertain strangers--for the rest must neither speak to one another nor to any one else--received us very kindly, and set before us a repast of