Thomas Gray to William Mason, 17 March 1762

I send your Reverence the lesson, wch is pure good-nature on my part, knowing already as I do, that you don't like it. no sooner do people feel their income increase than they want amusement! why what need have you of any other, than to sit like a Japonese Divinity with your hands folded on your fat belly wrap'd & (as it were) annihilated in the contemplation of your own corpses and revenues? the Pentagrapher is gone to Town, so you have nothing to do but to go & multiply in your own vulgar way: only don't fall to work, & forget to say grace.

The Laureat has honour'd me, (as a Friend of yours, for I know no other reason) with his new Play & his Charge to the Poets, the first very middleing; the second I am pleased with, chiefly with the sense, & sometimes with the verse & expression: and yet the best thing he ever wrote was that Elegy against Friendship you once shew'd me, where the sense was detestable; so that you see it is not at all necessary a Poet should be a good sort of Man, no, not even in his writings. Bob Lloyd has publish'd his works in a just quarto volume, containing among other things a Latin Translation of my Elegy; an Epistle in wch is a very serious compliment to me by name, particularly on my Pindaric accomplishments; & the very two Odes you saw before, in which we were abused; & a note to say, they were written in concert with his Friend Mr Coleman: so little value have poets for themselves, especially when they would make up a just volume. Mr Delap is here & has brought his cub to Trinity. he has pick'd up again purely since his misfortune, & is fat & well, all but a few bowels. he says, Mrs Pritchard spoilt his Hecuba with sobbing so much; & that she was really so moved, that she fell in fits behind the scenes. I much like Dr Lowth's Grammar: it is concise, clear, & elegant. he has selected his Solecisms from all the best Writers of our Tongue. I hear Mr Hurd is seriously writing against Fingal by the instigation of the Devil & the B:p. can it be true? I have exhausted all my litterary news, & I have no other.