THE SELECTED LETTERS OF THOMAS GRAY (170 pp.)Edited by Joseph Wood KrutchFarrar, Sfraus & Young ($3.75).
He was only, he said, "a little waddling Freshman" (of Peterhouse, Cambridge) who was interested in the arts but had no unusual talent for them. He was a bosom friend of the Prime Minister's son, Horace Walpole, and might have climbed in 18th century London's brightest society. But Thomas Gray, author of one of the most celebrated poems in the English language, had no ambition to shine.
Unlike such contemporaries as James Boswell and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Gray not...
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