"The next, with dirges due,[368-32] in sad array, Slow through the church way path we saw him borne.-- Approach and read, for thou canst read, the lay Graved on the stone beneath yon aged thorn."[368-33] THE EPITAPH Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth, A youth, to Fortune and to Fame unknown: Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth, And Melancholy marked him for her own. Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere; Heaven did a recompense as largely send: He gave to Misery, all he had, a tear, He gained from Heaven ('twas all he wished) a friend. No farther seek his merits to disclose, Or draw his frailties from their dread abode, (There they alike in trembling hope repose,) The bosom of his Father and his God. [Illustration: THE COUNTRY CHURCHYARD] Thomas Gray was born in London on the twenty-sixth of December, 1716, and received his education at Cambridge, where he lived most of his quiet life and where he died in 1771. He was a small and graceful man with handsome features and rather an effeminate appearance, always dressed with extreme care. The greater part of his life was spent in neatly furnished rooms among his books, for he was a hard student, and became noted as one of the first scholars of his time. Among his friends he was witty and entertaining, but among strangers, quiet and reserved, almost timid. He loved his mother devotedly, and after her death he kept her dress neatly folded in his trunk, always by him. Innocent, well-meaning, gentle and retiring, he drew many warm friends to him, though his great learning and his fondness for giving information made many people think him something of a prig. It might be considered a weakness in the _Elegy_ that it drifts into an elegy on the writer, who becomes lost in the pathos of his own sad end. Yet, knowing the man as we do, we can understand his motives and forgive the seeming selfishness. He is not the only poet whose own sorrows, real or imaginary, were his greatest inspiration. The metre of the _Elegy_ had been used, before Gray's time, by Sir John Davies for his _Immortality of the Soul_, Sir William Davenant in his _Gondibert_, and Dryden in his _Annus Mirabilis_, and others; but in no instance so happily as here by Gray. In the _Elegy_ the quatrain has not the somewhat disjunctive and isolating effect that it has in some other works where there is continuous argument or narrative that should run on with as few metrical hindrances as possible. It is well adapted to convey a series of solemn reflections, and that is its work in the _Elegy_. FOOTNOTES: