```'Who prowl'd the country far and near,
````Bewitch'd the children of the peasants,
```Dried up the cows, and lam'd the deer,
````And suck'd the eggs, and kill'd the pheasants.'=
Another group of autographs in this volume had a special interest. The
first was the notelet, or 'spell,' which Lady Schaub and Miss Speed left
for Gray upon that first call when the nervous poet was 'not at home'
to his unexpected visitors. Next to this came the poem which the note
elicited--that charming 'Long Story,' with its echo of Matthew Prior,
which has set their tune to so many later verse-spinners:
Does not one seem to catch in this the coming cadences of another
haunter of the 'Poets' Walk' at Eton--of Winthrop Mackworth Praed;
nay, an it be not _lèse majesté_, even of the lighter strains of Lord
Tennyson himself! To the 'Long Story' followed Miss Speed's polite
little acknowledgment with its invitation to dinner, and a few pages
further on the verses beginning--=
```* Midst Beauty and Pleasure's gay Triumphs to languish,'=
which Gray probably wrote for her--verses in which there is more of
poetic ardour than genuine passion. Gray was not a marrying man. Yet one
feels half sorry that he was never united to 'Your oblig'd & obedient
Henrietta Jane Speed,' with her £30,000, her house in town, and her
'china and old japan infinite.' Still more to be resented is the freak
of Fate which transformed the delightful Melissa of the 'Long Story'
into the berouged French Baronne who, sixteen years later, in company
with her lap-dogs, piping bullfinch, and cockatoo, arrived from the
Hague as Madame de la Perrière, and 'Ministress at London.'
The large _quarto_ volume containing the above poems also included
the first sketch in red crayon of Gray's unfinished Latin Poem, 'De
Principiis Cogitandi,' and a copy of the translation of the Ugolino
episode from the 'Inferno,' first printed by Mr. Gosse in 1884. Of the
volumes of miscellaneous MSS. (where was found the 'Dialogue of Books')
it is impossible to speak here. But among the rest comes a copy of the
'Strawberry Hill' edition of the 'Odes by Mr. Gray'--those Odes which at
first he had so obstinately refused to annotate. 'If a thing cannot
be understood without notes,' he told Walpole, 'it had better not be
understood at all.' He must, however, have subsequently recanted,
since this copy is filled with carefully written explanations of the
allusions, and with indications of the sources of information. This
book and the Note-books of Travel and Reading, with their methodical
arrangement, their scrupulous accuracy, their unwearied pains, all
help us to understand that leisurely fastidiousness, that hesitating
dilettanteism, that endless preluding to unachieved performance, which
make of the most literary, exact, and polished of poets, at the same
time the least copious of writers. In his bust in the Pembroke College,
Mr. Hamo Thorny-croft has happily succeeded in accentuating these
qualities of refinement and intellectual precision. For the rest, is not
Gray wholly contained in the vignette of Rogers to Mitford?
Gray, he says, saw little society in London. He had 'a nice dinner from
the Tavern brought to his lodgings, a glass or two of sweet wine, and
[here is a delightful touch!] as he sippd it talked about great People.'
It needs but to fill the room with those scarlet martagon-lilies and
double stocks for which he trudged daily to Covent Garden, to spread a
meteorological register upon the writing-table, to open Gavin Douglas
his 'Palice of Honour' in the window-seat--and the picture is finished.