Several localities have contended for the honor of being the scene of the _Elegy_, but the general sentiment has always, and justly, been in favor of Stoke-Pogis. It was there that Gray began the poem in 1742; and there, as we have seen, he finished it in 1750. In that churchyard his mother was buried, and there, at his request, his own remains were afterwards laid beside her. The scene is, moreover, in all respects in perfect keeping with the spirit of the poem. According to the common Cambridge tradition, Granchester, a parish about two miles southwest of the University, to which Gray was in the habit of taking his "constitutional" daily, is the locality of the poem; and the great bell of St. Mary's is the "curfew" of the first stanza. Another tradition makes a similar claim for Madingley, some three miles and a half northwest of Cambridge. Both places have churchyards such as the _Elegy_ describes; and this is about all that can be said in favor of their pretensions. There is also a parish called Burnham Beeches, in Buckinghamshire, which one writer at least has suggested as the scene of the poem, but for no better reason than that Gray once wrote a description of the place to Walpole, and casually mentioned the existence of certain "beeches," at the foot of which he would "squat," and "there grow to the trunk a whole morning." Gray's uncle had a seat in the neighborhood, and the poet often visited here, but the spot was not hallowed to him by the fond and tender associations that gathered about Stoke. 1. _The curfew_. Hales remarks: "It is a great mistake to suppose that the ringing of the curfew was, at its institution, a mark of Norman oppression. If such a custom was unknown before the Conquest, it only shows that the old English police was less well-regulated than that of many parts of the Continent, and how much the superior civilization of the Norman-French was needed. Fires were the curse of the timber-built towns of the Middle Ages: 'Solae pestes Londoniae sunt stultorum immodica potatio et _frequens incendium_' (Fitzstephen). The enforced extinction of domestic lights at an appointed signal was designed to be a safeguard against them." Warton wanted to have this line read "The curfew tolls!--the knell of parting day." It is sufficient to say that Gray, as the manuscript shows, did not want it to read so, and that we much prefer his way to Warton's. Mitford says that _toll_ is "not the appropriate verb," as the curfew was rung, not tolled. We presume that depended, to some extent, on the fancy of the ringer. Milton (_Il Pens._ 76) speaks of the curfew as "Swinging slow with sullen roar." Gray himself quotes here Dante, _Purgat._ 8: --"squilla di lontano Che paia 'l giorno pianger, che si muore;" and we cannot refrain from adding, for the benefit of those unfamiliar with Italian, Longfellow's exquisite translation: --"from far away a bell That seemeth to deplore the dying day."