_THE BICENTENARY OF GRAY._ _BORN DECEMBER 26, 1716._ BY THE DEAN OF NORWICH. It is a mere chance, but none the less suggestive, that Shakespeare’s commemoration this year should be followed by that of Gray. Shakespeare, of course, would cut up into many poets, but one of them would have been not unlike Gray; a man of a fastidious and somewhat melancholy temper but with a rare affectionateness, and a sincere love of his kind, which mingled with his critical faculty to produce a fresh and very delightful humour. However this may be, the lesser poet was drawn to the greater by a sure instinct from school-days. In a letter to Horace Walpole, written when he was just eighteen, he finds it natural to disguise his boyish affection in terms borrowed from Mrs. Quickly: ‘I have born and born, and been fub’d off and fub’d off,’ &c.; and he does so again later: ‘If I don’t hear from you this week, I shall be in a thousand Tyrrits and Frights about you.’ To his more literary friend, Richard West, another member of the ‘Quadruple Alliance,’ whose early death he was to mourn in the most exquisite of elegies, he writes with enthusiasm about Shakespeare’s language. ‘Every word in him is a picture. Pray put me the following lines into the tongue of our modern Dramatics: “But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks, Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass: I, that am rudely stampt, and want love’s majesty To strut before a wanton ambling nymph: I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion, Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, Deform’d, unfinish’d, sent before my time Into this breathing world, scarce half made up”— and what follows. To me they appear untranslatable; and if this be the case our language is greatly degenerated.’ ‘Every word in him is a picture.’ He said the same thing in a fine quatrain of the poem to Richard Bentley, contrasting the great masters of old with the poets of his own day, especially with himself, whose poems Bentley was illustrating: ‘But not to one in this benighted age Is that diviner inspiration giv’n That burns in Shakespeare’s or in Milton’s page, The pomp and prodigality of heaven.’