as he declared, after Dryden--and
ended with translations from Welsh and Norse hero-legends, and with an
admiration for Ossian and Scotch ballads. In 1739 he went to France and
Italy with Horace Walpole. He was abroad three years, though in 1741 he
quarreled with Walpole at Florence, separated from him and made his way
home alone in a leisurely manner. Gray is one of the first of modern
travelers to speak appreciatively of Gothic architecture, and of the
scenery of the Alps, and to note those strange and characteristic aspects
of foreign life which we now call picturesque, and to which every
itinerary and guidebook draws attention. Addison, who was on his travels
forty years before, was quite blind to such matters. Not that he was
without the feeling of the sublime: he finds, _e.g._, an "agreeable
horror" in the prospect of a storm at sea.[38] But he wrote of his
passage through Switzerland as a disagreeable and even frightful
experience; "a very troublesome journey over the Alps. My head is still
giddy with mountains and precipices; and you can't imagine how much I am
pleased with the sight of a plain."

"Let any one reflect," says the _Spectator_,[39] "on the disposition of
mind he finds in himself at his first entrance into the Pantheon at Rome,
and how his imagination is filled with something great and amazing; and,
at the same time, consider how little, in proportion, he is affected with
the inside of a Gothic cathedral, though it be five times larger than the
other; which can arise from nothing else but the greatness of the manner
in the one, the meanness in the other."[40]

Gray describes the cathedral at Rheims as "a vast Gothic building of a
surprising beauty and lightness, all covered over with a profusion of
little statues and other ornaments"; and the cathedral at Siena, which
Addison had characterized as "barbarous," and as an instance of "false
beauties and affected ornaments," Gray commends as "labored with a Gothic
niceness and delicacy in the old-fashioned way." It must be acknowledged
that these are rather cold praises, but Gray was continually advancing in
his knowledge of Gothic and his liking for it. Later in life he became
something of an antiquarian and virtuoso. He corresponded with Rev.
Thomas Wharton, about stained glass and paper hangings, which Wharton,
who was refitting his house in the Gothic taste, had commissioned Gray to
buy for him of London dealers. He describes, for Wharto