Gray Author:Edmund Gosse 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: CHAPTER III. STOKK-POGIS. DEATH OP WEST. FIRST ENGLISH POEMS. On his return from Italy Gray found his father lying very ill, exhausted by successive attack... more »s of gout, and unable to rally from tbem. Two months later, o,n the 6th of November, 1741, he died in a paroxysm of the disease. His last act had been to squander his fortune, which seems to have remained until that time.almost unimpaired, on building a country-house at Wanstead. Not only had he not written to tell his son of this adventure, but he had actually contrived to conceal it from his wife. Mason is not correct in saying that it became necessary to sell this house immediately after Philip Gray's death, or that it fetched 2000/. less than it had cost; it remained in the possession of Mrs. Gray. With the ruins of a fortune Mrs. Gray and her sister, Mary Antrobus, seem to have kept house for a year in Cornhill, till, on the death of their brother-in-law, Mr. Jonathan Rogcrs, on the 21st of October, 1742, they joined their widowed sister Anna in her house at Stoke-Pogis, in Buckinghamshire. During these months they wound up their private business in Corn- hill, and disposed of their shop on tolerably advantageous terms; and apparently Gray first imagined that the family property would be enough to provide amply for himalso. Accordingly he began the study of the law, that being the profession for winch he had been originally intended. For six months or more he seems to have stayed in London, applying himself rather languidly to common law, and giving his real thoughts and sympathies to those who demanded them most, his mother and his unfortunate friend, Richard West. The latter, indeed, he found in a miserable condition. In June, 1740, that young man, having lived at the Temple till he was sick of it, left chambers, fi...« less