y's
_Elegy_ appeared in it for the first time (which I do not suppose), it
came out in 1755 which is the date of vol. iv. of Dodsley's
_Collection_, and not in 1757, which is the date of the Strawberry Hill
edition of Gray's _Odes_. The Rev. J. Mitford (Aldine edit. xxxiii.)
informs us that "Dodsley published three volumes of this _Collection_ in
1752; the fourth volume was published in 1755 and the fifth and sixth
volumes, which completed the _Collection_, in 1758." I am writing with
the title-pages of the work open before me, and I find that the first
three volumes were published, not in 1752, but in 1748, and that even
this was the second edition so that there must have been an edition of
the first three volumes, either anterior to 1748, or earlier in that
year. The sale of the work encouraged Dodsley to add a fourth volume in
1755, and two others in 1758 and the plate of Apollo and the Muses was
re-engraved for vols. v. and vi., because the original copper, which had
served for vols. i., ii., iii., and iv., was so much worn.

This matter will not seem of such trifling importance to those who bear
in mind, that if Gray's _Elegy_ did not originally come out in this
_Collection_ in 1755, various other poems of great merit and
considerable popularity did then make their earliest appearance.

THE HERMIT OF HOLYPORT.

Sept. 1850.

P.S. My attention has been directed to the subject of Gray's _Poems_,
and particularly to his _Elegy_, by a recent pilgrimage I made to Stoke
Poges, which is only five or six miles from this neighbourhood. The
church and the poet's monument to his mother are worth a much longer
walk; but the mausoleum to Gray, in the immediate vicinity, is a
preposterous edifice. The residence of Lady Cobham has been lamentably
modernised.

* * * * *

HUGH HOLLAND AND HIS WORKS.

The name of Hugh Holland has been handed down to posterity in connexion
with that of our immortal bard; but few know anything of him beyond his
commendatory verses prefixed to the first folio of Shakspeare.

He was born at Denbigh in 1558, and educated at Westminster School while
Camden taught there. In 1582 he matriculated at Baliol College, Oxford;
and about 1590 he succeeded to a Fellowship at Trinity College,
Cambridge. Thence he travelled into Italy, and at Rome was guilty of
several indiscretions by the freedom of his conversations. He next went
to Jerusalem to pay his devotions at the Holy