CHAP. I,] REVIEWING FOE ME. AND MRS. GKIFFIEHS.
and the Progress of Poesy'; two noble productions, it must 1757.
surely be admitted,' whatever of caviT can be urged against jEt.29.
•them for the want of clearness or ease : though not to he
admired after the manner of Walpole, who never praises
•without showing his dislike of others, much more than his
love of Gray. "You are very particular,"I can tell you,"
he says to Montague, "in liking Gray's Odes: hut you
''must remember that the age likes Akenside, and, did like
'*: Thomson! can the same people like both ? Milton was
" forced to wait till the world had done admiring Quarles."*
It" was a habit of depreciation too much the manner of the
time. Even "the enchanting genius of Collins struck no
responsive chord in Gray himself; nor had the Elegies of
Shenstone, the Imagination of Akenside, or even the Castle
of Indolence itself, given always grateful addition to the
learned idleness of the poet of Pembroke-hall.f
But Goldsmith, for the present, was not to this manner
born; and though he might perhaps more freely have
acknowledged the splendour of Gray's imagination and the
deep humanity of his feeling, his exquisite pathos, the
melancholy grandeur of his tone, his touching thoughts and
most delicately chosen words,—yet was he " at least not
" liked them." Correspondence of Gray and Mason, 465. Nevertheless it
would seem, from passages in the same correspondence (89, 101) that Dodsley had
had the courage to print 200Q copies ; and he told Gray, in little more than a
month after the publication, that "about 12 or 1SOO were gone." The formal
assignment, dated 29th June 1767, and showing the sum received by the poet to
have been foi'ty guineas for the two odes, brought eight guineas at a public sale
nearly twenty years ago (Times of Dec. 23, 1835). * Coll. Lett, iii. 313,
f Nothing surprises me so mxich as these little heterodoxies in Gray, whose taste
for poetry was in other respects exquisite,—always generous, almost always right,
To Shenstone, Akenside, and Thomson, lie makes objection, indeed only^as to special
poems, admitting the beauties of others; but Collins he classes generally with
Thomas Warton, as " both writers of odes ;" and continues, " it is odd enough,
"but each is the half of a considerable man, and one the counterpart of the other...'
f They both deserve to last some years, but will not." Gbray to Wharton, Dec.
1746, ' WorJas,"m. 28-9. ,