The whole matter is, perhaps, of less importance than is sometimes attached to it. There is, after all, a good deal in Macaulay's common-sense explanation of the phenomenon—that a love of mountain scenery means simply the formation of good roads and comfortable inns in mountain districts. But Gray's taste in this respect is at least significant as to Gray's own position. His contempt for Rousseau and his love of Ossian are inversions of the judgment of later times; for no one would now deny the power of Rousseau, or find much pleasure—unless possessed by some antiquarian or patriotic mania—in the epics of the mythical bard. And yet we can see that Gray represents a vein of sentiment allied to some modern modes of thought, and generally regarded as antipathetic to the spirit of his own time. With all his popularity, he appears to be an isolated phenomenon. Everybody knows his poetry by heart. The 'Elegy' has so worked itself into the popular imagination that it includes more familiar phrases than almost any poem of equal length in the language. The 'Bard' and the lines upon Eton have become so hackneyed as perhaps to acquire a certain tinge of banality. If few English poets have written so little, none certainly has written so little that has fallen into oblivion. And yet, though Gray is in this sense the most popular poet of his day, though he is more read than Young, or Thomson, or Collins, or Goldsmith, or many others, we do not think of him as stamping his image upon the time. He stands apart. His poetry is taken to be like an oasis in the desert; it is a sudden spring of perennial freshness gushing out in the midst of that dreary didactic, argumentative, monotonous current of versification poured forth by the imitators of Pope. He never used Pope's measure for serious purposes, except in one fine fragment—the least read of his poems—and is, as it were, an outsider in the literature of the time. And yet, again, it must be remembered that Wordsworth picked him out for special condemnation as the worst offender in the use of conventional language. He definitely accepted and has enlarged upon the theory which Wordsworth attempted to upset—that poetry should use a language differing from that of common life. Indeed, he gets upon stilts as deliberately and consciously as any poet of the day, and is nervously sensitive to the risk of a lapse into the vernacular.