_Chaucer and Gray._--Of all the oft-quoted lines from Gray's _Elegy_,
there is not one which is more frequently introduced than the well-known
"E'en, in our ashes live their wonted fires."
Now Gray was an antiquary, and there is no doubt too well read in
Chaucer. Is it too much, therefore, to suggest that he owed this line
to one in Chaucer's "Reves Prologue:"
"Yet in our ashen cold is fire yreken."