His famous Elegy, expressing a meditative mood in language of the choicest perfection, is the representative poem of the second half of the 18th century, as the Rape of the Lock is of the first.

If elegiac poetry is the expression of subjective emotion, sentiment, and thought, we might class this Persian masterpiece as elegy; but an elegy is a sustained train of connected imagery and reflection.

In spite of the fact that Matthew Arnold and other admirers have declared that the "Elegy" was not Gray's masterpiece, yet it was this poem that brought a man who accomplished but a small amount of work into such lasting fame.

His elegy on Mary, Queen of Scots, is also a vision, but it is better managed, at once mournful and sweet.

This elegy is the work of a celebrated sheik of Tlemcen, Mahomet-Ben-Sahla, whose period was the first half of the eighteenth century.

An elegy is a lyric pervaded by the feeling of grief or melancholy.

If Gray's "Elegy" is but "a mosaic of the felicities" of those who went before, let it be remembered that had he not laboriously pieced together that mosaic, these "felicities" would have been a sealed book to the majority of Englishmen.

Richard perhaps, and the immediate friends of the deceased Protector, with such of Dryden's relations as were attached to his memory, may have thought, like the tinker at the Taming of the Shrew, that this same elegy was "marvellous good matter."

[Footnote 1: The above elegy is an Assyrian fragment remarkably similar to one of the psalms of the Jewish bible, and I believe it belongs to the Irdubar epic (W.A. I. IV.

[Footnote 1: The elegy alluded to, was probably the effusion of some Jacobite royalist.

Gray's Elegy was not a more perfect composition.