The Project Gutenberg EBook of Select Poems of Thomas Gray, by Thomas Gray

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Title: Select Poems of Thomas Gray

Author: Thomas Gray

Contributor: Robert Carruthers

Editor: William J. Rolfe

Release Date: October 29, 2009 [EBook #30357]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SELECT POEMS OF THOMAS GRAY ***

Produced by Ron Swanson

SELECT POEMS OF THOMAS GRAY.

EDITED, WITH NOTES,
BY
WILLIAM J. ROLFE, A.M.,
FORMERLY HEAD MASTER OF THE HIGH SCHOOL, CAMBRIDGE, MASS.

_WITH ENGRAVINGS_.

_NEW YORK_:
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS,
FRANKLIN SQUARE.
1883.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1876, by
HARPER & BROTHERS,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

PREFACE.

Many editions of Gray have been published in the last fifty years,
some of them very elegant, and some showing considerable editorial
labor, but not one, so far as I am aware, critically exact either in
text or in notes. No editor since Mathias (A.D. 1814) has given the
2d line of the _Elegy_ as Gray wrote and printed it; while Mathias's
mispunctuation of the 123d line has been copied by his successors,
almost without exception. Other variations from the early editions
are mentioned in the notes.

It is a curious fact that the most accurate edition of Gray's
collected poems is the _editio princeps_ of 1768, printed under his
own supervision. The first edition of the two Pindaric odes, _The
Progress of Poesy_ and _The Bard_ (Strawberry-Hill, 1757), was
printed with equal care, and the proofs were probably read by the
poet. The text of the present edition has been collated, line by
line, with that of these early editions, and in no instance have I
adopted a later reading. All the MS. variations, and the various
readings I have noted in the modern editions, are given in the notes.

Pickering's edition of 1835, edited by Mitford, has been followed
blindly in nearly all the more recent editions, and its many errors
(see pp. 84 and 105, foot-notes) have been faithfully reproduced.
Even its blunders in the "indenting" of the lines in the
corresponding stanzas of the t