Wakefield has traced this imitation to Dryden; Gray himself refers to Virgil and Petrarch. Wakefield gives the line from Dryden, thus,

"Beyond the year, and out of heaven's high-way;" which he calls extremely bold and poetical. I confess a critic might be allowed to be somewhat fastidious on this unpoetical diction on the highway, which I believe Dryden never used. I think his line was thus,

66

Beyond the year out of the SOLAR WALK."

Pope has expressed the image more elegantly, though copied from Dryden,

"Far as the SOLAR WALK, or milky way."

Gray has in his " Bard"

"Dear as the light that visits these sad eyes,

Dear as the ruddy drops that warm my heart."

Gray himself points out the imitation in Shakspeare, of the latter image; but it is curious to observe that Otway, in his "Venice Preserved,” makes Priuli most pathetically exclaim to his daughter, that she is

"Dear as the vital warmth that feeds my life, Dear as these eyes that weep in fondness o'er thee." Gray tells us that the image of his "Bard"

"Loose his beard and hoary hair,

Streamed like a METEOR to the troubled air,"

was taken from a picture of the supreme being by Raphael. It is, however, remarkable, and somewhat ludicrous, that the beard of Hudibras is also compared to a meteor; and the accompanying observation in Butler almost induces one to think that Gray derived from it the whole plan of that sublime Ode-since his Bard precisely performs what the beard of Hudibras denounced. These are the verses:

"This HAIRY METEOR did denounce

The fall of sceptres and of crowns."

Hud. C. I.

I have been asked if I am serious in my conjecture that "the meteor beard" of Hudibras might have given birth to "the Bard" of Gray. I reply that the burlesque and the sublime are extremes, and extremes meet. How often does it merely depend on our own state of mind, and on our own taste, to consider the sublime as burlesque. A very vulgar, but acute genius, Thomas Paine, whom we may suppose destitute of all delicacy and refinement, has conveyed to us a notion of the sublime, as it is probably experienced by ordinary and uncultivated minds, and even by acute and judicious ones, who are destitute of imagination. He tells us that "the sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related, that it

is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again." May I venture to illustrate this opinion? Would it not appear the ridiculous or burlesque, to describe the sublime revolution of the Earth on her axle, round the Sun, by comparing it with the action of a top flogged by a boy? And yet some of the most exquisite lines in Milton do this; the poet only alluding in his mind, to the top. The earth he describes, whether

"She from west her silent course advance With inoffensive pace that spinning sleeps On her soft axle, while she paces even”

Be this as it may! it has never I believe been remarked (to return to Gray) that when he conceived the idea of the beard of his Bard, he had in his mind the language of Milton, who describes Azazel, sublimely unfurling

The "imperial ensign, which full high advanced,
Shone like a meteor streaming to the wind."

very similar to Gray's

Par. Lost. B. I. v. 535.

"Streamed like a meteor to the troubled air!"

Gray has been severely censured by Johnson, for

the expression,

"Give ample room and verge enough

The characters of hell to trace." The BARD. On the authority of the most unpoetical of critics we must still hear that the poet has no line so bad "ample room" is feeble, but would have passed unobserved in any other poem but in the poetry of Gray, who has taught us to admit nothing but what is exquisite. "Verge enough" is poetical, since it conveys a material image to the imagination. No one appears to have detected the source from whence, probably, the whole line was derived. I am inclined to think it was from the following passage in Dryden:

"Let fortune empty her whole quiver on me,

I have a soul that, like an AMPLE SHIELD,
Can take in all, and VERGE ENOUGH for more!"
DRYDEN'S Don Sebastian.

Gray in his Elegy has

"Even in our ashes live their wonted fires."

This line is so obscure that it is difficult to apply it to what precedes it. Mason in his edition in vain attempts to derive it from a thought of Petrarch, and still more vainly attempts to amend it;

Wakefield expends an octavo page, to paraphrase this single verse! From the following lines of Chaucer, one would imagine Gray caught the recollected idea. The old Reve, in his prologue, says of himself, and of old men,

"For whan we may not don, than wol we speken; Yet in our ASHEN cold is FIRE yreken.

TYRWHIT'S CHAUCER, vol. 1. p. 153, v. 3879.

Gray has a very expressive word, highly poetical, but I think not common;

"For who to DUMB FORGETFULNESS a prey

and Daniel has, as quoted in Cooper's Muses Library preface,

"And in himself with sorrow does complain

The misery of DARK FORGETFULNESS."

A line of Pope's in his Dunciad," High-born Howard," echoed in the ear of Gray, when he gave with all the artifice of alliteration,

Johnson bitterly censures Gray for giving to adjectives the termination of participles, such as the cultured plain; the daisied bank; but he solemnly adds, I was sorry to see in the line of a scholar like Gray, "the honied spring." I confess I was not sorry; had Johnson received but