The publication in February, 1751, of Gray’s _Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard_ had set a fashion in poetry which long continued. Goldsmith, who considered that work ‘a very fine poem, but overloaded with epithet’ (_Beauties of English Poesy_, 1767, i. 53), and once proposed to amend it ‘by leaving out an idle word in every line’ [!] (Cradock’s _ Memoirs_, 1826, i. 230), resented these endless imitations, and his antipathy to them frequently reveals itself. Only a few months before the appearance of Mrs. Blaize in _The Bee_ for October 27, 1759, he had written in the _Critical Review_, vii. 263, when noticing Langhorne’s _Death of Adonis_, as follows:—‘It is not thus that many of our moderns have composed what they call elegies; they seem scarcely to have known its real character. If an hero or a poet happens to die with us, the whole band of elegiac poets raise the dismal chorus, adorn his herse with all the paltry escutcheons of flattery, rise into bombast, paint him at the head of his thundering legions, or reining Pegasus in his most rapid career; they are sure to strew cypress enough upon the bier, dress up all the muses in mourning, and look themselves every whit as dismal and sorrowful as an undertaker’s shop.’ He returned to the subject in a _Chinese Letter_ of March 4, 1761, in the _Public Ledger_ (afterwards Letter ciii of _The Citizen of the World_, 1762, ii. 162–5), which contains the lines _On the Death of the Right Honourable ***_; and again, in _The Vicar of Wakefield_, 1766, i. 174, _ à propos_ of the _Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog_, he makes Dr. Primrose say, ‘I have wept so much at all sorts of elegies of late, that without an enlivening glass I am sure this will overcome me.’ The model for _An Elegy on Mrs. Mary Blaize_ is to be found in the old French popular song of Monsieur de la Palisse or Palice, about fifty verses of which are printed in Larousse’s _Grand Dictionnaire Universel du XIX_ me _Siècle_, x. p. 179. It is there stated to have originated in some dozen stanzas suggested to la Monnoye (_v. supra_, p. 193) by the extreme artlessness of a military quatrain dating from the battle of Pavia, and the death upon that occasion of the famous French captain, Jacques de Chabannes, seigneur de la Palice:— Monsieur d’La Palice est mort, Mort devant Pavie; Un quart d’heure avant sa mort, _Il était encore en vie._