The 5th stanza is as follows: .
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For the readings of the Wrightson MS. we have had to depend on Mason, Mitford,and other editors of the poem, and on the article in the orth American Review,already referred to. The readings of the Pembroke MS. are taken from the engravedfac-simile in Mathias’s edition. The two stanzas of which a fac-simile is given on page 73 are from the PembrokeMS., but the wood-cut hardly does justice to the feminine delicacy of the poet’s hand-writing. > ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD. 79 ‘‘For ever sleep: the breezy call of morn,Or swallow twitt’ring from the straw-built shed,Or Chanticleer so shrill, or echoing horn,No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.” In 8th stanza, ‘Their rustic joys,” etc.In 1oth stanza, the first two lines read, “Forgive, ye proud, th’ involuntary fault,If memory to these no trophies raise.’’ In 12th stanza,“ Hands that the vezzs of empire,” etc.In 13th stanza, ‘‘ Chill Penury depress’d,” etc.The 14th stanza reads thus: ‘‘Some village Cato, who, with dauntless breast,The little tyrant of his fields withstood ;Some mute inglorious Tully here may rest,Some Cesar guililess of his country’s blood.’’* In 18th stanza, “ Or crowz the shrine,” etc.After this stanza, the MS. has the following four stanzas, now omitted : ““The thoughtless world to Majesty may bow, -Exalt the brave, and idolize success ;But more to innocence their safety oweThan Pow’r, or Genius, e’er conspir’d to bless. * The Saturday Review for June 19, 1875, has a long article on the change made byGray in this stanza, entitled, ‘‘ A Lesson from Gray’s Elegy,’’ from which we cull thefollowing paragraphs: ‘Gray, having first of all put down the names of three Romans as illustrations of hismeaning, afterwards deliberately struck them out and put the names of three Englishmeninstead. This is a sign ofa change in the taste of the age, a change with which Grayhimself had a good deal todo. The deliberate wiping out of the names of Cato, Tully,and Cesar, to put in the names of Hampden, Milton, and Cromwell, seems to us so ob-viously a change for the better that there seems to be no room for any doubt about it. Itis by no means certain that Gray’s own contemporaries would have thought the matterequally clear. We suspect that to many people in his day it must have seemed a daringnovelty to draw illustrations from English history, especially from parts of English his-tory which, it must be remembered, were then a great deal more recent than they arenow. To be sure, in choosing English illustrations, a poet of Gray’s time was in rathera hard strait. If he chose illustrations from the century or two before his own time, hecould only choose names which had hardly got free from the strife of recent politics. If,in a poem of the nature of the Elegy, he had drawn illustrations from earlier times of.a history, he would have found but few people in his day likely to understand_ “*The change which Gray made in this well-known stanza is not only an improvementin a particular poem, it is a sign of a general improvement in taste. He wrote first ac-cording to the vicious taste of an earlier time, and he then changed it according to hisown better taste. And of that better taste he was undoubtedly a prophet to others.Gray’s poetry must have done a great deal to open men’s eyes to the fact that they wereEnglishmen, and that on them, as Englishmen, English things had a higher claim thanRoman, and that to them English examples ought to be more speaking than Roman ones.But there is another side of the case not to be forgotten. Those who would have re-gretted the change from Cato, Tully, and Cesar to Hampden, Milton, and Cromwell,those who perhaps really did think that the bringing in of Hampden, Milton, and Crom-well was a degradation of what they would have called the Muse, were certainly not thosewho had the truest knowledge of Cato, Tully, and Czsar. The ‘classic’ taste from whichGray helped to deliver us was a taste which hardly deserves to be called a taste.’ Par-_ donable perhaps in the first heat of the Renaissance, when ‘classic’ studies and objects had the charm of novelty, it had become by his day a mere silly fashion.”
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