h they date
their years of manhood, liberty, and happiness; but Gray seems to have
been very little delighted with academical gratifications; he liked at
Cambridge neither the mode of life nor the fashion of study, and lived
sullenly on 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 superiors 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