in which the variety and accuracy of his learning are justly commended. His intimate friend, Mason, in a letter written soon after Gray's death, thus described him :

'Perhaps he was the most learned man in Europe. He was equally acquainted with the eloquent and profound parts of science, and that not superficially but thoroughly. He knew every branch of history, both natural and civil; had read all the original histories of England, France, and Italy; and was a great antiquarian. Criticism, metaphysics, morals, politics, made a principal part of his study; voyages and travels of all sorts were his favourite amusements, and he had a fine taste in painting, prints, architecture, and gardening. With such a fund of knowledge, his conversation must have been equally instructing and entertaining; but he was also a good man, a man of virtue and humanity. There is no character without some speck, some imperfection, and I think the greatest defect in his was an affectation in delicacy, or rather effeminacy, and a visible fastidiousness, or contempt and disdain of his inferiors in science. He also had, in some degree, that weakness which so much disgusted Voltaire in Mr. Congreve : though he seemed to value others chiefly according to the progress they made in knowledge, yet he could not bear to be considered merely as a man of letters; and though without birth, or fortune, or station, his desire was to be looked upon as a private independent gentleman, who read for his amusement. Perhaps it may be said, what signified so much knowledge, when it produced so little? Is it worth taking so much pains to leave no memorial but a few poems? But let it be considered that Mr. Gray was to others at least innocently employed; to himself, certainly beneficially. His time passed agreeably; he was every day making some new acquisition in science; his mind was enlarged, his heart softened, his virtue strengthened; the world and mankind were shown to him without a mask; and he was taught to consider everything as trifling, and unworthy of the attention of a wise man, except the pursuit of knowledge and practice of virtue, in that state wherein God hath placed us."

Mathias's edition of Gray should be consulted in order to see how far Gray was in advance of his age, and how many subjects which now are eagerly cultivated as vehicles of notoriety, Gray earnestly studied a century ago; because he, while the mass neglected them, was capable of discerning their intrinsic import

Y

ance; because to him the worship of Truth was not mere lipworship; but he could act as well as talk in the spirit of the great maxim,

"Imprimis Hominis est veri investigatio ;"

and because, to him (as already expressed), "Knowledge was its own exceeding great reward."

In Mathias's second volume are collected Gray's "Observations on English Metre, or the Pseudo-Rhythmus, or Rhyme, on the Poems of Lydgate; " his "Critical and Explanatory Notes on Aristophanes;" his valuable "Memoirs on the Geography of Ancient India, Parthia, and Bactriana;" his "Analysis of the Works of Plato;" and his "Notes on Linnæus's System of Nature." This volume alone might be referred to as sufficient fruit of a long and learned life.

Gray's prose compositions are so little known, that I shall, in conclusion, cite one of them, which shows his piety as well as his learning; and which was an important service rendered by him to the cause of the highest and holiest of truths. Lord Bolingbroke's anti-Christian writings were published in Gray's lifetime. In them Lord Bolingbroke has called in question the moral attributes of the Deity, and maintained this position, "That we have no adequate ideas of his goodness and his justice, as we have of his natural ones, his wisdom and his power." This is the main pillar of Bolingbroke's philosophical system, and this Gray overthrew in the following masterly argument:

"I will allow Lord Bolingbroke, that the moral as well as the physical attributes of God must be known to us only à posteriori, and that this is the only real knowledge we can have either of the one or the other; I will allow, too, that perhaps it may be an idle distinction which we make between them, his moral attributes being as much in his nature and essence as those we call his physical; but the occasion of our making some distinction is plainly this; his eternity, infinity, omniscience, and almighty power are not what connect him, if I may so speak, with us his creatures. We adore him, not because he always did in every place, and always will, exist; but because he gave and still preserves to us our own existence by an exertion of his goodness. We adore him, not because he knows and can do all things, but because he made us capable of knowing and of doing what may conduct us to happiness; it is, therefore, his benevolence which we adore-not

his greatness or power; and if we are made only to bear our part in a system, without any regard to our own particular happiness, we can no longer worship him as our all-bounteous parent; there is no meaning in the term. The idea of his malevolence (an impiety I tremble to write) must succeed. We have nothing left but our fears, and those, too, vain; for whither can they lead but to despair, and the sad desire of annihilation? If, then, justice and goodness be not the same in God as in our ideas, we mean nothing when we say that God is necessarily just and good; and, for the same reason, it may as well be said that we know not what we mean, when, according to Dr. Clarke (Evid. 26th), we affirm that he is necessarily a wise and intelligent being. What then can Lord Bolingbroke mean, when he says that everything shows the wisdom of God; and yet adds, everything does not show in like manner the goodness of God conformably to our ideas of this attribute in either? By wisdom, he must only mean, that God knows and employs the fittest means to a certain end, no matter what that end may be: this, indeed, is a proof of knowledge and intelligence, but these alone do not constitute wisdom; the word implies the application of these fittest means to the best and kindest ends-or who will call it true wisdom? even amongst ourselves it is not held as such. All the attributes, then, that he seems to think apparent in the constitution of things, are his unity, infinity, eternity, and intelligence, from no one of which, I boldly affirm, can result any duty of gratitude or adoration incumbent on mankind, more than if he, and all things round him, were produced, as some have dared to think, by the necessary working of eternal matter in an infinite vacuum: for what does it avail to add intelligence to those other physical attributes, unless that intelligence be directed, not only to the good of the whole, but also to the good of every individual, of which the whole is composed.

"It is therefore no impiety, but the direct contrary, to say that human justice and the other virtues, which are indeed only various applications of human benevolence, bear some resemblance to the moral attributes of the Supreme Being: it is only by means of that resemblance we conceive them in him, or their effects in his works: it is by the same means only that we comprehend those physical attributes which his Lordship allows to be demonstrable. How can we form any notion of his unity, but from that unity of

which we ourselves are conscious? how of his existence, but from our own consciousness of existing? how of his power, but of that power which we experience in ourselves? Yet neither Lord Bolingbroke nor any other man, that thought on these subjects, ever believed that these our ideas were real and full representations of these attributes in Divinity. They say he knows; they do not mean that he compares ideas which he has acquired from sensation, and draws conclusions from them. They say he acts: they do not mean by impulse, nor as the soul acts on an organised body. They say he is omnipotent and eternal: yet on what are their ideas founded, but on our own narrow conceptions of space and duration, prolonged beyond the bounds of space and time? Either, therefore, there is a resemblance and analogy (however imperfect and distant) between the attributes of the Divinity and our conceptions of them, or we cannot have any conceptions of them at all: he allows we ought to reason from earth, that we do know, to heaven, which we do not know how can we do so but by that affinity which appears between one and the other?

"In vain, then, does my Lord attempt to ridicule the warm but melancholy imagination of Mr. Wollaston in that fine soliloquy: 'Must I then bid my last farewell to these walks when I close these lids, and yonder blue regions and all this scene darken upon me and go out? Must I then only furnish dust to be mingled with the ashes of these herds and plants, or with this dirt under my feet? Have I been set so far above them in life, only to be levelled with them in death?' No thinking head, no heart, that has the least sensibility, but must have made the same reflection; or at least must feel not the beauty alone, but the truth of it, when he hears it from the mouth of another. Now, what reply will Lord Bolingbroke make to these questions which are put to him, not only by Wollaston, but by all mankind? He will tell you that we, that is, the animals, vegetables, stones, and other clods of earth, are all connected in one immense design; that we are all dramatis personæ in different characters, and that we were not made for ourselves, but for the action; that it is foolish, presumptuous, impious, and profane to murmur against the Almighty author of this drama, when we feel ourselves unavoidably unhappy. On the contrary, we ought to rest our head on the soft pillow of resignation, on the immoveable rock of tranquillity; secure, that if our pains and afflictions grow violent indeed, an immediate end will be

put to our miserable being, and we shall be mingled with the dirt under our feet, a thing common to all the animal kind; and of which he who complains does not seem to have been set by his reason so far above them in life, as to deserve not to be mingled with them in death. Such is the consolation his philosophy gives us, and such is the hope on which his tranquillity was founded."" (Memoir in Mathias's Edition.-Life by Mitford.-Johnson's Lives of the Poets.)

BROOME AND WEST.

THERE are two Etonians of the first half of this century, whom Johnson has ranked among the English poets: and, in deference to so high an authority, I have abridged and inserted his memoirs of their Lives. But I have searched in vain for any favourable specimen of their poetry which I might transfer to these pages.

These two are BROOME and WEST: not Gray's friend, Richard West, but Gilbert West, a friend of Lord Lyttelton.

Johnson says of the first," William Broome was born in Cheshire, as is said, of very mean parents. Of the place of his birth, or the first part of his life, I have not been able to gain any intelligence. He was educated upon the foundation at Eton, and was Captain of the school a whole year, without any vacancy by which he might obtain a scholarship at King's College. Being by this delay, such as is said to have happened very rarely, superannuated, he was sent to St. John's College by the contributions of his friends, where he obtained a small exhibition."

Johnson must be inaccurate as to Broome being Captain of a year in which no vacancy at King's occurred. No year wholly blank of resignations is recorded in the Registrum Regale from 1653 to 1756. Broome must have been at Eton soon after 1700. I suppose the fact to have been, that Broome's seniors in his year went off to King's soon after Election, and that Broome remained Captain till the next election, without another resignation coming. Johnson proceeds to speak of Broome's career at Cambridge, and says, "He was introduced to Mr. Pope, who was then visiting Sir John Cotton at Madingley, near Cambridge, and gained so much by his esteem, that he was employed, I believe, to make

7 Mathias's Works of Gray, vol. i. pp. 370-374.