00000041.htm

22 INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.

much, in advance of it, but that he could command
many delighted readers when he pleased; and what
happier lot could a man of letters crave than to com-
bine freedom and leisure .to follow his own bent, with
that measure of success which Gray achieved in
helping to give literature a new direction, amid mucli
applause and homage in his life-time? His was not
the type of mind, which an epoch of change, however
momentous, could stimulate into production. Ho
might have written letters or collected anecdotes
about it; but there is no evidence whatever that it
would have had any power to bring to the surface
any latent springs of poetic thought and emotion. In
his survey of contemporary events there is abundant
curiosity and the keenest interest; there is never
either much despondency or much enthusiasm. He
lived through a period of great national depression,
when as Cowper says

⁴ The inestimable Estimate of Brown
' Rose like a paper-kite and scared the town,*

by convincing, as Macaulay explains, its readers that
"they were a race of cowards and scoundrels; that
nothing could save them, that they were on the point
of being enslaved by their enemies, and that they
richly deserved their fate." He lived long enough to
have been able, had he chosen, to say, before Cowper,
that it was

"praise enough
To fill the ambition of a private man,



	22 INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. much, in advance of it, but that he could command many delighted readers when he pleased; and what happier lot could a man of letters crave than to com- bine freedom and leisure .to follow his own bent, with that measure of success which Gray achieved in helping to give literature a new direction, amid mucli applause and homage in his life-time? His was not the type of mind, which an epoch of change, however momentous, could stimulate into production. Ho might have written letters or collected anecdotes about it; but there is no evidence whatever that it would have had any power to bring to the surface any latent springs of poetic thought and emotion. In his survey of contemporary events there is abundant curiosity and the keenest interest; there is never either much despondency or much enthusiasm. He lived through a period of great national depression, when as Cowper says ⁴ The inestimable Estimate of Brown ' Rose like a paper-kite and scared the town,* by convincing, as Macaulay explains, its readers that "they were a race of cowards and scoundrels; that nothing could save them, that they were on the point of being enslaved by their enemies, and that they richly deserved their fate." He lived long enough to have been able, had he chosen, to say, before Cowper, that it was "praise enough To fill the ambition of a private man,