oving from St. John's College to
Pembroke Hall, was unexpectedly nominated Fellow of that society in
1747, when by the advice of Dr. Powell, he published Musaeus. His fourth
Ode expresses his delight at the prospect of being restored to the banks
of the Cam. In a letter to a friend written this year, he boasts that
his poem had already passed through three impressions. At the same time,
he wrote his Ode to a Water Nymph, not without some fancy and elegance,
in which his passion for the new style of gardening first shewed itself;
as his political bias did the year after in Isis, a poem levelled
against the supposed Toryism of Oxford, and chiefly valuable for having
called forth the Triumph of Isis, by Thomas Warton. To this he prefixed
an advertisement, declaring that it would never have appeared in print,
had not an interpolated copy, published in a country newspaper,
scandalously misrepresented the principles of the author. Now commenced
his intimacy with Gray, who was rather more than eight years his senior,
a disparity which, at that period of life, is apt to prevent men at
college from uniting very closely. His friend described him to Dr.
Wharton as having much fancy, little judgment, and a good deal of
modesty. "I take him," continued Gray, "for a good and well-meaning
creature; but then he is really in simplicity a child, and loves every
body he meets with: he reads little or nothing, writes abundance, and
that with a design to make his fortune by it." On reviewing this
character of himself twenty-five years after, he confessed, what cannot
be matter of surprise, that this interval had made a considerable
abatement in his general philanthropy; but denied having looked for more
emolument from his publications than a few guineas to take him to a play
or an opera. Gray's next report of him, after a year's farther
acquaintance, is, that he grows apace into his good graces, as he knows
him more; that "he is very ingenious, with great good nature and
simplicity; a little vain, but in so harmless and so comical a way, that
it does not offend one at all; a little ambitious, but withal so
ignorant in the world and its ways, that this does not hurt him in one's
opinion; so sincere and so undisguised, that no mind with a spark of
generosity would ever think of hurting him, he lies so open to injury;
but so indolent, that if he cannot overcome this habit, all his good
qualities will signify nothing at all." At this time, he pub