n to the time when
his attendance on lectures was no longer required. As he intended to
profess the common law, he, took no degree.

When he had been at Cambridge about five years, Mr. Horace Walpole,
whose friendship he had gained at Eton, invited him to travel with him
as his companion. They wandered through France into Italy; and Gray's
letters contain a very pleasing account of many parts of their journey.
But unequal friendships are easily dissolved: at Florence they
quarrelled and parted; and Mr. Walpole is now content to have it told
that it was by his fault. If we look, however, without prejudice on the
world, we shall find that men, whose consciousness of their own merit
sets them above the compliances of servility, are apt enough, in their
association with superiours, to watch their own dignity with troublesome
and punctilious jealousy, and in the fervour of independence to exact
that attention which they refuse to pay. Part they did, whatever was the
quarrel; and the rest of their travels was, doubtless, more unpleasant
to them both. Gray continued his journey in a manner suitable to his own
little fortune, with only an occasional servant.

He returned to England in September, 1741, and in about two months
afterwards buried his father, who had, by an injudicious waste of money
upon a new house, so much lessened his fortune, that Gray thought
himself too poor to study the law. He, therefore, retired to Cambridge,
where he soon after became bachelor of civil law; and where, without
liking the place or its inhabitants, or professing to like them, he
passed, except a short residence at London, the rest of his life.

About this time he was deprived of Mr. West, the son of a chancellor of
Ireland, a friend on whom he appears to have set a high value, and who
deserved his esteem by the powers which he shows in his letters, and in
the Ode to May, which Mr. Mason has preserved, as well as by the
sincerity with which, when Gray sent him part of Agrippina, a tragedy
that he had just begun, he gave an opinion which probably intercepted
the progress of the work, and which the judgment of every reader will
confirm. It was certainly no loss to the English stage that Agrippina
was never finished.

In this year, 1742, Gray seems first to have applied himself seriously
to poetry; for in this year were produced the Ode to Spring, his
Prospect of Eton, and his Ode to Adversity. He began likewise a Latin
poem, De Principiis C