rs, the whole of the work that he left behind him
amounted only to some fourteen hundred lines.

His value to literature and to posterity, therefore, is to be measured
not by the quantity of his literary contributions or by any special
variety in their scope, but by a certain wholesome and independent
influence which he exerted upon the language of poetry, and by a rare
quality of intense yet seemingly calm and almost repressed genius, which
no one among his commentators has been able to define clearly. The most
comprehensive thing ever written about him--wise, just, witty, yet
sympathetic and penetrating--is the essay by James Russell Lowell in his
final volume of criticism.

"It is the rarest thing," says Lowell, "to find genius and
dilettantism united in the same person (as for a time they
were in Goethe): for genius implies always a certain
fanaticism of temperament, which, if sometimes it seem
fitful, is yet capable of intense energy on occasion; while
the main characteristic of the dilettante is that sort of
impartiality which springs from inertia of mind, admirable
for observation, incapable of turning it to practical
account. Yet we have, I think, an example of this rare
combination of qualities in Gray; and it accounts both for
the kind of excellence to which he attained, and for the way
in which he disappointed expectation.... He is especially
interesting as an artist in words and phrases, a literary
type far less common among writers of English than it is in
France or Italy, where perhaps the traditions of Latin
culture were never wholly lost.... When so many have written
so much, we shall the more readily pardon the man who has
written too little or just enough."

He was born in London, December 26th, 1716, the son of a money scrivener
who had dissipated most of his inherited property, but was skilled in
music, and perhaps transmitted to the son that musical element which
gives beauty and strength to his poetry. Gray's mother was a woman of
character, who with his aunt set up an India warehouse and supported
herself; also sending the young man to St. Peter's College, Cambridge,
after his studies at Eton. Leaving college without a degree, he traveled
on the Continent of Europe with Horace Walpole in 1739; then returned to
Cambridge and passed the remainder of his life in the university, as a
bachelor of civil law nom