The names thus brought together, to which others might of course be added, give a sufficient indication of the general tendencies of what I have called the school of Gray. They did not form a clique, like most schools, for they lived in remote regions, and most of them showed the touchiness and even sensibility which is rubbed off by the friction of large societies. Tom Warton, who was certainly sociable enough in a fashion, was buried at Oxford for nearly fifty years. Gray was so secluded in his Cambridge cloister that the young men made a rush to see him in later years—leaving their dinners, it is said; but that is scarcely credible—when he appeared by some rare accident in the college walks. Beattie stuck with equal persistence to his college in Aberdeen, and could not be induced even to take a professorship in Edinburgh, being afraid, apparently, that his 'Essay on Truth' would expose him to unpleasantness from the more metropolitan circle which admired and respected his antagonist Hume. The alarm, indeed, was more reasonable than Mason's alarm about Oxford, for the essay was not only vehement in its abuse, but had succeeded in making a great stir in the world. Mason, again, fixed himself in his Yorkshire living and his canonry, emerging only at intervals to pay a few visits to his aristocratic friends. And even Walpole made a kind of sham cloister at Strawberry Hill, and, though a man of the world, a gossip, and a politician, was as irritable and uneasy a companion as the most retired of hermits. The great movements of thought generally spread, it is supposed, from the metropolitan centres, where intellectual activity is stimulated by the constant collision of eager and excited minds. But a new taste may make its appearance in the corners to which sensitive men retire from the uncongenial atmosphere of the world, and cultivate at their ease what is first an individual crotchet and afterwards develops into a fashionable amusement.
Gray, beyond all doubt, was the one man of genius of the school after the early death of Collins, for it would be strained to give a higher name than talent even to Horace Walpole's remarkable intellectual vivacity. Tom Warton's biographer (it is impossible to speak of Thomas) has drawn an elaborate parallel, in the proper historical fashion, between his hero and Gray. They were both dons, professors, students of antiquities, lovers of nature and of the romantic, composers of odes, and so forth. The parallel contains a good deal of truth, but it is consistent with an amusing contrast. Tom Warton was the thoroughly jovial, undignified don of the period. His poetry—even if his 'Triumph of Isis' be superior to Mason's 'Isis,' and his sonnets deserve some praise in a century barren of sonnets—is not generally refreshing; the poor man had to construct some of those fanciful pieces of verse which laureates in those days were bound to manufacture for the sovereign's birthday, and one cannot glance at them (nobody can read them) without profound sympathy. But his humorous verses have still a pleasant ring about them. There is a contagion in the enthusiasm with which he celebrates the virtues of Oxford ale. When he imagines himself discommuned for his indulgence, and unable even to get longer 'tick' at the pothouse, he daringly compares himself to Adam exiled from Paradise. In another poem we have the characteristic triumph of the steady don, who has stuck to a bachelor life, over the misguided victim to matrimony and a college living. Thus will the poor fellow lament as butchers' bills and school fees become heavier year by year:—