Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Letters, Including the Correspondence of Gray and Mason, Vol. 1: Edited by Duncan C. Tovey
I could not refrain from illustrating even the references which Gray makes to current politics and history. If he was a literary recluse, he kept himself always well informed about the course of events, and on one notable occasion, the Trial of the Scotch Peers in the poet was actually present at a really dramatic scene and he was constantly in touch, after '45, with Horace Walpole. Walpole him self was engaged in politics rather ostensibly than actively, and both men have something of the Lucretian temper and attitude, and were amused spectators of ills from which they were exempt. It may be that among the greatest benefactors to posterity are some whom posterity brands as lacking earnestness: how seldom we echo the cries of the most eager combatants in battles long ago! It is the comfortable lookers on, or those who have never plunged too far into the dust and turmoil of the fray, to whom we lend our ears, not because they are great and good, but because they tell us without much passion so much that is definite and tangible.
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