¹ William Powell Jones, Thomas Gray, Scholar (Cambridge, Mass., 1937), p. 8. Odell Shepard, “A Youth to Fortune and to Fame Unknown,” MP, xx (May 1923), 366, calls the sonnet “rather nugatory.” Raymond D. Havens, The Influence of Milton on English Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1922), p. 491, mentions Unes which exhibit “the stilted phraseology of the eighteenth century.” And Duncan C. Tovey, Gray and his Friends (Cambridge, Eng., 1890), p. 27, writes of the “music now a little trite to us.”

² Wm. Mason, Poems of Mr. Gray (York, 1778), ii, 4: “Almost every anecdote which I have to produce, concerning the juvenile part of Mr. Gray's life, is included in his correspondence with this gentleman” [West].

³ Gray considered himself addicted to melancholy, for the most part “a white Melancholy, or rather Leucocholy … which though it seldom laughs or dances, nor ever amounts to what one calls Joy or Pleasure, yet is a good easy sort of a state. … The only fault of it is insipidity.” Yet the letter in which he makes this complaint to West (the last of Gray's letters West was to read) is full of the joys of “Reading here, Reading there.” See Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley (Oxford, 1935), i, 209210. The three volumes of this work are paged continuously; hereafter reference will be to Carres, and page number.

⁴ To mention the chief in the random order suggested by his poetic compositions and correspondence: Homer, Vergil, Propertius, Statius, Pliny, Martial, Theocritus, Anacreon, Plutarch, Lucretius, Cicero, Ovid, Horace, Tacitus, Thucydides.

⁵ The text of Gray's poems is the Oxford 3rd edition. 1937, edited by Austin Lane Poole and revised by Leonard Whibley; commonly available in the joint Poems of Gray and Collins.

⁶ This notion invites challenge because of Gray's statement to Norton Nicholls: “He congratulated himself on not having a good verbal memory.” The passage continues: “for, without it he said he had imitated too much; and if he had possessed such a memory all that he wrote would have been imitation, from his having read so much.—He had a memory however which served him accurately as to facts, and guided him infallibly to the source from which the information he wanted was to be drawn” {Corres., p. 1296). It is clear that Gray was referring to the absence of the power of total recall. His correspondence, and his notes to the editions of 1768, show that generally he knew what he was “imitating.” Prior to the writing of the sonnet Gray and West had been immersed in Milton for some years and had been making frequent references to that poet's writings.

⁷ Though the rhyme scheme belongs to a somewhat uncommon Italian form, the thematic structure invites analysis according to the English model.

⁸ v. 122–128. Morn smiles also in v. 168, and xi. 173–175.

⁹ The only surviving reference to the poem made during Gray's lifetime is in a letter to Bedingfield (31 Jan. 1758) in which he refuses to send a copy (Corres., p. 560).

¹⁰ West to Gray, April 1742: “I desire that you will quarrel no more with your manner of passing your time. In my opinion it is irreproachable, especially as it produces such excellent fruit” (Corres., p. 194). Gray had earlier submitted for West's criticism a long speech from his tragedy, Agrippina, and West in reply had questioned Gray's “antiquated” style. “I will not decide what style is fit for our English stage; but I should rather choose one that bordered upon Cato than upon Shakespear [sic].” Gray's next letter contained the now well-known discussion of the “language of poetry.” Then came—the four letters were all written within a period of about two weeks—West's reply with its observation on “excellent fruit,” presumably a reference to Gray's discourse on poetic diction.

¹¹ Of Friendship. Norton Nicholls: “La Bruyère likewise stood high in his estimation, and the Essays of Bacon” (Corres., p. 1296). The ninety-four occurrences of “fruit” in some form in Paradise Lost have been remarked (Cleanth Brooks, “Milton and Critical Re-estimates,” PMLA, lxvi [Dec. 1951], 1048). For Gray it certainly was not the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil that was now denied him.

¹² Sonnet XX. R. D. Havens (The Influence of Milton, p. 491) noted three of the “verbal borrowings,” assigning them all to Paradise Lost: “smileing Mornings” (v. 168) ; “amorous Descant” (iv. 603); and “Attire” (vii. 501). As indicated in n. 8, Morn also smiles elsewhere in Paradise Lost; only “amorous Descant” has a unique source in Milton.

¹³ R. W. Ketton-Cremer, Thomas Gray (Cambridge, Eng., 1955), p. 52. Jones writes of De principiis: “To my mind this is the only poem Gray ever wrote which portrays genuine personal emotion” (p. 52).

¹⁴ “A Youth to Fortune and to Fame Unknown,” MP, XX (May 1923), 347–373. Shepard's conclusions are rejected by Herbert W. Starr, “ ‘A Youth to Fortune and to Fame Unknown’: a Reestimation,” JEGP, xlviii (1949), 97–107.

¹⁵ For discussions of the date of composition see Ketton-Cremer, Thomas Gray, Appendix A, “The Composition of the ‘Elegy’,” pp. 271–273; and “An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard” and “The Eton College Manuscript,” Augustan Reprint Society, Publ. No. 31 (Los Angeles, 1951), intr. by George Sherburn.

¹⁶ See Frank H. Ellis, “Gray's Elegy: The Biographical Problem in Literary Criticism,” PMLA, LXVI (Dec. 1951), 971–1008.

¹⁷ The last line, as Johnson must have known from Mason's edition, is an “imitation” from Petrarch, Sonnet 169. Ellis (p. 999) also notes a parallel to Propertius.

¹⁸ See Leonard Whibley, Corres., Appendix C, “Gray's Corrections of West's Poems,” pp. 1199–1200.

¹⁹ See n. 16.