the strain of meditation that
follows. The universal appeal of its subject and the perfection of its
style have made the "Elegy" known by heart to more readers than any other
poem in the language. Parody is one proof of celebrity, if not of
popularity, and the "sister odes" were presently parodied by Lloyd and
Colman in an "Ode to Obscurity" and an "Ode to Oblivion." But the
"Elegy" was more than celebrated and more than popular; it was the most
admired and influential poem of the generation. The imitations and
translations of it are innumerable, and it met with a response as
immediate as it was general.[32] One effect of this was to consecrate
the ten-syllabled quatrain to elegiac uses. Mason altered the sub-title
of his "Isis" (written in 1748) from "An Elegy" to "A Monologue," because
it was "not written in alternate rimes, which since Mr. Gray's exquisite
'Elegy in the Country Church-yard' has generally obtained, and seems to
be more suited to that species of poem."[33] Mason's "Elegy written in a
Church-yard in South Wales" (1787) is, of course, in Gray's stanza and,
equally of course, introduces a tribute to the master:

"Yes, had he paced this church-way path along,
Or leaned like me against this ivied wall,
How sadly sweet had flowed his Dorian song,
Then sweetest when it flowed at Nature's call."[34]

It became almost _de rigueur_ for a young poet to try his hand at a
churchyard piece. Thus Richard Cumberland, the dramatist, in his
"Memoirs," records the fact that when he was an undergraduate at
Cambridge in 1752 he made his "first small offering to the press,
following the steps of Gray with another church-yard elegy, written on
St. Mark's Eve, when, according to rural tradition, the ghost of those
who are to die within the year ensuing are seen to walk at midnight
across the churchyard."[35] Goldsmith testifies to the prevalence of the
fashion when, in his "Life of Parnell," he says of that poet's "Night
Piece on Death"[36] that, "with very little amendment," it "might be made
to surpass all those night-pieces and church-yard scenes that have since
appeared." But in this opinion Johnson, who says that Parnell's poem "is
indirectly preferred by Goldsmith to Gray's 'Churchyard,'" does not
agree; nor did the public.[37]

Gray's correspondence affords a record of the progress of romantic
taste for an entire generation. He set out with classical
prepossessions--forming his verse,