superior to him as a letter-writer.

[Sidenote: GRAY]

The case of another famous eighteenth-century epistoler--Walpole's
schoolfellow and except for the time of a quarrel (the blame of which
Horace rather generously took upon himself but in which there were
doubtless faults on both sides)[18] life-long friend--is curiously
different. Gray was a poet, while Walpole, save for a touch of fantastic
imagination, had nothing of poetry in him and could not, as some who
are not poets can, even appreciate it. In more than one other
intellectual gift he soared above Horace. He was essentially a scholar,
while his friend was as essentially a sciolist. He even combined the
scientific with the literary temperament to a considerable extent: and
thus was enabled to display an orderliness of thought by no means
universal in men of letters, and (at least according to common
estimation) positively rare in poets. His tastes were as various as his
friend's: but instead of being a mere bundle of casual likings and
dislikings, they were aesthetically conceived and connected. He was not
exactly an amiable person: indeed, though there was less spitefulness in
him than in Horace there was, perhaps, more positive "bad blood." As for
the feature in his character, or at least conduct, that impressed itself
so much on Mr. Matthew Arnold--that he "never spoke out"--it might be
thought, if it really existed, to have been rather fatal to
letter-writing, in which a sense of constraint and "keeping back" is one
of the very last things to be desired. And some of the positive
characteristics and accomplishments above enumerated (not the
poetry--poets have usually been good epistolers) might not seem much
more suitable.

As a matter of fact, however, Gray _is_ a good letter-writer--a very
good letter-writer indeed. His letters, as might be expected from what
has been said, carry much heavier metal than Horace's; but in another
sense they are not in the least heavy. They are very much less in bulk
than those of the longer lived and more "scriblative" though hardly more
leisured writer:[19] and--as not a defect but a consequence of the
quality just attributed to them--they do not quite carry the reader
along with them in that singular fashion which distinguishes the others.
But no one save a dunce can find them dull: and their variety is
astonishing when one remembers that the writer was, for great part of
his life, a kind of recluse. He touches almost e