Page:Poetical works (IA poeticalworks00grayrich).pdf/27
strokes."[1] The language resembles rather that of Rowe or Addison, than of Shakespeare; though it is more highly wrought, and more closely compacted. If finished, it would, I think, have delighted the scholar in the closet; but it is too descriptive to have pleased upon the stage. Baoráζονται δὲ οἱ ἀναγνωστικοί ...... Καὶ παραβαλλό oi μενοι, οἱ μὲν τῶν γραφικῶν, ἐν τοῖς ἀγῶσι στενοί φαίνονται.[2]
Gray now employed himself in the perusal of the ancient authors. He mentions that he was reading Thucydides, Theocritus, and Anacreon. He translated some parts of Propertius with great elegance of language and versification, and selected for his Italian studies the poetry of Petrarch. He wrote an Heroic Epistle in Latin, in imitation of the manner of Ovid; and a Greek Epigram, which he communicated to West: to whom also in the summer, when he retired to his family at Stoke, be sent
- ↑ I have said that Gray kept an attentive eye upon Racine during the composition of his tragedy; an assertion, I think, that the notes will serve to prove but the learned Mr. Twining, in his notes on Aristotle's Poetics, (p. 385, 4to.) says: "I have often wondered what it was that could attach Mr. Gray so strongly to a poet whose genius was so little analogous to his own. I must confess I cannot, even in the Dramatic Fragment given us by Mr. Mason, discover any other resemblance to Racine, than in the length of the speeches. The fault, indeed, is Racine's; its beauties are surely of a higher order," &c.
- ↑ Aristotelis Rhetorica, lib. γ. cap. xii.