



Produced by Ron Swanson





SELECT POEMS OF THOMAS GRAY.


EDITED, WITH NOTES,
BY
WILLIAM J. ROLFE, A.M.,
FORMERLY HEAD MASTER OF THE HIGH SCHOOL, CAMBRIDGE, MASS.


_WITH ENGRAVINGS_.




_NEW YORK_:
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS,
FRANKLIN SQUARE.
1883.




Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1876, by
HARPER & BROTHERS,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.




PREFACE.


Many editions of Gray have been published in the last fifty years,
some of them very elegant, and some showing considerable editorial
labor, but not one, so far as I am aware, critically exact either in
text or in notes. No editor since Mathias (A.D. 1814) has given the
2d line of the _Elegy_ as Gray wrote and printed it; while Mathias's
mispunctuation of the 123d line has been copied by his successors,
almost without exception. Other variations from the early editions
are mentioned in the notes.

It is a curious fact that the most accurate edition of Gray's
collected poems is the _editio princeps_ of 1768, printed under his
own supervision. The first edition of the two Pindaric odes, _The
Progress of Poesy_ and _The Bard_ (Strawberry-Hill, 1757), was
printed with equal care, and the proofs were probably read by the
poet. The text of the present edition has been collated, line by
line, with that of these early editions, and in no instance have I
adopted a later reading. All the MS. variations, and the various
readings I have noted in the modern editions, are given in the notes.

Pickering's edition of 1835, edited by Mitford, has been followed
blindly in nearly all the more recent editions, and its many errors
(see pp. 84 and 105, foot-notes) have been faithfully reproduced.
Even its blunders in the "indenting" of the lines in the
corresponding stanzas of the two Pindaric odes, which any careful
proof-reader ought to have corrected, have been copied again and
again--as in the Boston (1853) reprint of Pickering, the pretty
little edition of Bickers & Son (London, n. d.), the fac-simile of
the latter printed at our University Press, Cambridge (1866), etc.

Of former editions of Gray, the only one very fully annotated is
Mitford's (Pickering, 1835), already mentioned. I have drawn freely
from that, correcting many errors, and also from Wakefield's and
Mason's editions, and from Hales's notes (_Longer English Poems_,
London, 1872) on the _Elegy_ and the Pindaric odes. To all this
material many original notes and illustrations have been added.

The facts concerning the first publication of the _Elegy_ are not
given correctly by any of the editors, and even the "experts" of
_Notes and Queries_ have not been able to disentangle the snarl of
conflicting evidence. I am not sure that I have settled the question
myself (see p. 74 and foot-note), but I have at least shown that Gray
is a more credible witness in the case than any of his critics. Their
testimony is obviously inconsistent and inconclusive; he may have
confounded the names of two magazines, but that remains to be
proved.[1]

[Footnote 1: Since writing the above to-day, I have found by the
merest chance in my own library another bit of evidence in the case,
which fully confirms my surmise that the _Elegy_ was printed in _The
Magazine of Magazines_ before it appeared in the _Grand Magazine of
Magazines_. _Chambers's Book of Days_ (vol. ii. p. 146), in an
article on "Gray and his Elegy," says:

"It first saw the light in _The Magazine of Magazines_, February,
1751. Some imaginary literary wag is made to rise in a convivial
assembly, and thus announce it: 'Gentlemen, give me leave to soothe
my own melancholy, and amuse you in a most noble manner, with a full
copy of verses by the very ingenious Mr. Gray, of Peterhouse,
Cambridge. They are stanzas written in a country churchyard.' Then
follow the verses. A few days afterwards, Dodsley's edition
appeared," etc.

The same authority gives the four stanzas omitted after the 18th (see
p. 79) as they appear in the _North American Review_, except that the
first line of the third is "Hark how the sacred calm that _reigns_
around," a reading which I have found nowhere else. The stanza "There
