icately correct; but the sources of creative impulse
dried up in him more and more under the desiccating air of academic study
and the increasing hold upon him of his constitutional malady.
"Melancholy marked him for her own." There is a significant passage in
one of his early letters to Horace. Walpole (1737): "I have, at the
distance of half a mile, through a green lane, a forest (vulgar call it a
common) all my own, at least as good as so, for I spy no human thing in
it but myself. It is a little chaos of mountains and precipices. . .
Both vale and hill are covered with most venerable beeches and other very
reverend vegetables that, like most other ancient people, are always
dreaming out their old stories to the winds. . . At the foot of one of
these, squats ME, I, (il penseroso) and there grow to the trunk for a
whole morning."[22] To Richard West he wrote, in the same year, "Low
spirits are my true and faithful companions"; and, in 1742, "Mine is a
white Melancholy, or rather Leucocholy, for the most part . . . but there
is another sort, black indeed, which I have now and then felt."

When Gray sees the Eton schoolboys at their sports, he is sadly reminded:

"--how all around them wait
The ministers of human fate
And black Misfortune's baleful train."[23]

"Wisdom in sable garb," and "Melancholy, silent maid" attend the
footsteps of Adversity;[24] and to Contemplation's sober eye, the race of
man resembles the insect race:

"Brushed by the hand of rough mischance,
Or chilled by age, their airy dance
They leave, in dust to rest."[25]

Will it be thought too trifling an observation that the poets of this
group were mostly bachelors and _quo ad hoc_, solitaries? Thomson,
Akenside, Shenstone, Collins, Gray, and Thomas Warton never married.
Dyer, Mason, and Joseph Warton, were beneficed clergymen, and took unto
themselves wives. The Wartons, to be sure, were men of cheerful and even
convivial habits. The melancholy which these good fellows affected was
manifestly a mere literary fashion. They were sad "only for wantonness,"
like the young gentlemen in France. "And so you have a garden of your
own," wrote Gray to his young friend Nicholls, in 1769, "and you plant
and transplant, and are dirty and amused; are you not ashamed of
yourself? Why, I have no such thing, you monster; nor ever shall be
either dirty or amused as long as I live." Gray never was; but the
Wartons were eas