Goldsmith's The Deserted Village Author:Oliver Goldsmith Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION TO GRAY'S ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD Birth and Early Education. Thomas Gray, the son of Philip Gray, an exchange broker and scrivener, was bor... more »n in London, December 26, 1716. His father, a man of some wealth, was brutal and extravagant in temperament, and neglected and ill used his family. Gray owed him little, unless the musical element in his poetry; for Philip Gray, like the father of Milton, was a skilled musician. The young Gray was indebted for the care of his bringing up and for his support at school almost wholly to his mother, to whom he remained tenderly attached all his life. His mother's brother, Robert Antrobus, taught at Eton, and here the poet had his preparatory education, afterwards attending Cambridge. When his father refused to educate him, Gray's mother maintained him at school and in the university, supporting herself and her children — there were twelve in all, but none but Gray reached maturity — by engaging for many years in the millinery business with a sister. This was despite her husband's attempts to secure her earnings for his own purposes. Gray studied classical literature, history, and language, at Cambridge, but shunned the study of mathematics. Intending later to read law, he left the university in 1738, not yet having his degree, and the next year set out to tour France and Italy with his school friend, Horace Walpole, son of the prime minister and later a prominent if somewhat dilettante man of letters of the day. Gray remained abroad about two years, although not all of the time was passed with Walpole. Life at Cambridge. Gray's father died in 1741, having wasted a large part of his fortune, and Gray returned in 1742, with but a small income of his own, to Cambridge, where he went into residence, giving up his earlier intent...« less