who draw his car, and also for his one great lyrical achievement, the Ode on St. Cecilia’s day. Gray’s admiration for Shakespeare and Milton as models was tempered by his recognition of what Dryden had done for the English language, in rendering it more ‘refined and free.’ To Beattie he wrote, ‘Remember Dryden and be blind to all his faults,’ and he told him in an interview (according to Mason) that ‘if there was any excellence in his own numbers he had learned it wholly from that great poet; and pressed him with great earnestness to study him, as his choice of words and versification were singularly happy and harmonious.’ If Dryden’s ‘Alexander’s Feast’ be compared with the ‘Progress of Poesy’ we can see how successfully Gray has blended the qualities he most admired in his several masters. From Dryden he has caught the smoothness and strength of his line; but Gray’s rhythm owes more to ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Comus’ than to the commonplace movement of Dryden’s ode; while the imaginative beauty of its many pictures was part of his debt to the greatest of them all. There is one other great English poet to whom Gray was ready to acknowledge a debt. He told Norton Nicholls that he never sat down to compose poetry without reading Spenser for a considerable time previously. I do not remember that Gray ever incorporates a Spenserian phrase in his own verse; his instinct would have told him that the two styles would not agree. But his instinct would also tell him that to bathe himself in Spenser before entering the temple of his Muse was a sure way of freeing himself from any pollution of mind or spirit. The ‘Elegy written in a Country Churchyard’ was composed at intervals between 1746 and 1750, and sent to Walpole in June of that year. Walpole showed it to many friends and in some way it got into the hands of a publisher, who wrote to Gray announcing his intention of printing it, and begging his ‘indulgence.’ Gray wrote at once to Walpole desiring him to let Dodsley print it without delay from his copy, and it accordingly appeared in February 16, 1751, in a quarto pamphlet, priced sixpence, and entitled ‘An Elegy wrote in a Country Church Yard.’ The fashionable solecism must be attributed to Walpole, who saw the poem through the press, and prefixed this short ‘advertisement’: ‘The following Poem came into my hands by Accident, if the general Approbation with which this little Piece has spread, may be call’d by so slight a Term as Accident. It is this Approbation which makes it unnecessary for me to make any Apology but to the Author: As he cannot but feel some Satisfaction in having pleas’d so many Readers already, I flatter myself he will forgive my communicating that Pleasure to many more. The Editor.’