n Italy, and Horace, as he confesses, no doubt gave himself airs. But
it is pretty certain that Gray had not at this time, if he ever had,
that fortunate combination of good (or at least well-commanded) temper
and good breeding which enables a gentleman to meet such conduct with
conduct on his own side as free from petulant "touchiness" as from
ignoble parasitism.

[19] Gray was not, like Walpole, a richly endowed sinecurist. But to use
a familiar "bull" he seems never to have had anything to do, and never
to have done it when he had. His poems are a mere handful; his excellent
_Metrum_ is a fragment; and as Professor of History at Cambridge he
never did anything at all.

[20] They do not seem to have known each other personally. But (for
reasons not difficult to assign but here irrelevant) Johnson was on the
whole, though not wholly, unjust to Gray, and Gray seems to have
disliked and spoken rudely of Johnson.

[21] The varieties of what may be called literary _exercise_ which have
been utilised for educational or recreative purposes, are almost
innumerable. Has anyone ever tried "breaking up" a letter (such as those
to be given hereafter) into a conversation by interlarded comment,
questions, etc.?

[22] As far as the accidents are concerned. The essentials vary not.
Marianne is eternal, whether she faints and blushes, or jazzes and--does
not blush.

[23] One unfortunate exception, the _ex-post facto_ references to the
split with Lady Austin, may be urged by a relentless prosecutor. But
when William has to choose between Mary and Anna it will go hard but he
will _have_ to be unfair to one of them.

[24] This "swan's" utterances in poetry were quite unlike those of
Tennyson's dying bird: and her taste in it was appalling. She tells
Scott that the Border Ballads were totally destitute of any right to the
name.

[25] For a singular misjudgment on this point see Prefatory Note
_infra_.

[26] Particularly when he is able to apply the _Don Juan_ mood of
sarcastic if rather superficial life-criticism in which he was a real
master.

[27] _I.e._ "violently and vulgarly absurd."

[28] It may, however, be suggested that the extraordinary _bluntness_
(to use no stronger word) of both is almost sufficiently evidenced in
the fact that in his last edition of Keats Mr. Forman committed the
additional outrage of distributing these letters according to their
dates among the rest. The isolation of the agony gives almost th