The two stanzas of which a fac-simile is given on page 73 are from
the Pembroke MS., but the wood-cut hardly does justice to the
feminine delicacy of the poet's handwriting.]

The Wrightson MS. has in the first stanza, "The lowing herd _wind_
slowly," etc. See our note on this line, below.

In the 2d stanza, it reads, "And _now_ the air," etc.

The 5th stanza is as follows:

"For ever sleep: the breezy call of morn,
Or swallow twitt'ring from the straw-built shed,
Or Chanticleer so shrill, or echoing horn,
No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed."

In 8th stanza, "Their _rustic_ joys," etc.

In 10th stanza, the first two lines read,

"Forgive, ye proud, th' involuntary fault,
If memory to these no trophies raise."

In 12th stanza, "Hands that the _reins_ of empire," etc.

In 13th stanza, "Chill Penury _depress'd_," etc.

The 15th stanza reads thus:

"Some village Cato, who, with dauntless breast,
The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Tully here may rest,
Some Caesar guiltless of his country's blood."[4]

[Footnote 4: The _Saturday Review_ for June 19, 1875, has a long
article on the change made by Gray in this stanza, entitled, "A
Lesson from Gray's Elegy," from which we cull the following
paragraphs:

"Gray, having first of all put down the names of three Romans as
illustrations of his meaning, afterwards deliberately struck them out
and put the names of three Englishmen instead. This is a sign of a
change in the taste of the age, a change with which Gray himself had
a good deal to do. The deliberate wiping out of the names of Cato,
Tully, and Caesar, to put in the names of Hampden, Milton, and
Cromwell, seems to us so obviously a change for the better that there
seems to be no room for any doubt about it. It is by no means certain
that Gray's own contemporaries would have thought the matter equally
clear. We suspect that to many people in his day it must have seemed
a daring novelty to draw illustrations from English history,
especially from parts of English history which, it must be
remembered, were then a great deal more recent than they are now. To
be sure, in choosing English illustrations, a poet of Gray's time was
in rather a hard strait. If he chose illustrations from the century
or two before his own time, he could only choose names which had
hardly got free from the strife of recent politics. If, in a poem of
the nature of