er one.]

I have retained most of the "parallel passages" from the poets given
by the editors, and have added others, without regard to the critics
who have sneered at this kind of annotations. Whether Gray borrowed
from the others, or the others from him, matters little; very likely,
in most instances, neither party was consciously the borrower. Gray,
in his own notes, has acknowledged certain debts to other poets, and
probably these were all that he was aware of. Some of these he
contracted unwittingly (see what he says of one of them in a letter
to Walpole, quoted in the note on the _Ode on the Spring_, 31), and
the same may have been true of some apparently similar cases pointed
out by modern editors. To me, however, the chief interest of these
coincidences and resemblances of thought or expression is as studies
in the "comparative anatomy" of poetry. The teacher will find them
useful as pegs to hang questions upon, or texts for oral instruction.
The pupil, or the young reader, who finds out who all these poets
were, when they lived, what they wrote, etc., will have learned no
small amount of English literary history. If he studies the
quotations merely as illustrations of style and expression, or as
examples of the poetic diction of various periods, he will have
learned some lessons in the history and the use of his mother-tongue.

The wood-cuts on pp. 9, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 34, 36, 39, 40, 41, 42,
45, 50, and 61 are from Birket Foster's designs; those on pp. 29, 31,
33, 35, 37, and 38 are from the graceful drawings of "E. V. B." (the
Hon. Mrs. Boyle); the rest are from various sources.

_Cambridge_, Feb. 29, 1876.

CONTENTS.

PAGE
THE LIFE OF THOMAS GRAY, BY ROBERT CARRUTHERS . . . . 9

STOKE-POGIS, BY WILLIAM HOWITT . . . . . . . . . . . 16

ELEGY WRITTEN IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD . . . . . . . . 23

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

ON THE SPRING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

ON THE DEATH OF A FAVOURITE CAT . . . . . . . . . . 48

ON A DISTANT PROSPECT OF ETON COLLEGE . . . . . . . 50

THE PROGRESS OF POESY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

THE BARD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

HYMN TO ADVERSITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

NOTES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

APPENDIX TO NOTES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138

INDEX . .