SELECT POEMS OF THOMAS GRAY. EDITED, WITH NOTES, BY WILLIAM J. ROLFE, A.M., FORMERLY HEAD MASTER OF THE HIGH SCHOOL, CAMBRIDGE, MASS. _WITH ENGRAVINGS_. _NEW YORK_: HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE. 1883. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1876, by HARPER & BROTHERS, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. PREFACE. Many editions of Gray have been published in the last fifty years, some of them very elegant, and some showing considerable editorial labor, but not one, so far as I am aware, critically exact either in text or in notes. No editor since Mathias (A.D. 1814) has given the 2d line of the _Elegy_ as Gray wrote and printed it; while Mathias's mispunctuation of the 123d line has been copied by his successors, almost without exception. Other variations from the early editions are mentioned in the notes. It is a curious fact that the most accurate edition of Gray's collected poems is the _editio princeps_ of 1768, printed under his own supervision. The first edition of the two Pindaric odes, _The Progress of Poesy_ and _The Bard_ (Strawberry-Hill, 1757), was printed with equal care, and the proofs were probably read by the poet. The text of the present edition has been collated, line by line, with that of these early editions, and in no instance have I adopted a later reading. All the MS. variations, and the various readings I have noted in the modern editions, are given in the notes. Pickering's edition of 1835, edited by Mitford, has been followed blindly in nearly all the more recent editions, and its many errors (see pp. 84 and 105, foot-notes) have been faithfully reproduced. Even its blunders in the "indenting" of the lines in the corresponding stanzas of the two Pindaric odes, which any careful proof-reader ought to have corrected, have been copied again and again--as in the Boston (1853) reprint of Pickering, the pretty little edition of Bickers & Son (London, n. d.), the fac-simile of the latter printed at our University Press, Cambridge (1866), etc. Of former editions of Gray, the only one very fully annotated is Mitford's (Pickering, 1835), already mentioned. I have drawn freely from that, correcting many errors, and also from Wakefield's and Mason's editions, and from Hales's notes (_Longer English Poems_, London, 1872) on the _Elegy_ and the Pindaric odes. To all this material many original notes and illustrations have been added.