Gray’s published letters extend from 1739 to 1770. Scattered through these are occasional passages indicative of a genuine love of Nature. In the midst of a humorous letter to Walpole (Sept. 1737) he speaks of “venerable beeches ... always dreaming out their old stories to the winds.” After he came back from Scotland, in 1765, he wrote to Mr. Mason: I am returned from Scotland charmed with my expedition; it is of the Highlands I speak; the Lowlands are worth seeing once, but the mountains are ecstatic, and ought to be visited in pilgrimage once a year. None but these monstrous creatures of God know how to join so much beauty with so much horror. A fig for your poets, painters, gardeners, and clergymen, that have not been up among them; their imagination can be made up of nothing but bowling-greens, flowering shrubs, horse-ponds, Fleet ditches, shell-grottoes, and Chinese rails. So early as 1739 he expressed his dislike of formal gardens in his sarcastic description of the grounds at Versailles. The same feeling of irritation at the preponderance of art over Nature recurs in his description of Warwick in 1754. That even the most natural garden did not satisfy Gray as did wild Nature we see from Mason’s lines written just after the death of Gray. He evidently had not approved of “The Garden” as a subject for a poem and Mason represents him as saying: “Why waste thy numbers on a trivial art, That ill can mimic e’en the humblest charms Of all-majestic Nature?” At the words His eye would glisten, and his accents glow With all the poet’s frenzy. “Sovereign Queen! Behold, and tremble, while thou view’st her state Throned on the heights of Skiddaw; call thy art To build her such a throne; that art will feel How vain her best pretensions. Trace her march Amid the purple crags of Borrowdale,” etc. In general, however, the testimony of the letters is to a scientific rather than a poetic love of Nature. There are many exact records of the weather, of the coming crops, of the blossoming of flowers. A single example may serve as typical. It is a record of observations made at Stoke Pogis in July, 1754. Barley was in ear on the first day; gray and white peas in bloom. The bean flowers were going off. Duke-cherries in plenty on the 5th; hearts were also ripe. Green melons on the 6th, but watry and not sweet. Currants began to ripen on the 8th, and red gooseberries had changed color. And so on with nearly a hundred more of the tabulated natural facts. Of Gray as a traveler Sir James Mackintosh is quoted by Mitford as saying: “Gray was the _first_ discoverer of the natural beauties in England, and has marked out the course of every picturesque journey that can be made in it.”