The biographers of Gray (and for a man who lived such an uneventfullife he has had a great many) give much space to his early letters to Walpole and their two friends of the 'Quadruple Alliance' at Eton. This partiality is not hard to understand: the letters of Gray, Walpole, West, and Ashton bring back the friendships of one's own school days, or, rather, glorify them; what other schoolboys ever put into letters so much humour, criticism, sentiment, and affection? These precocious boys-of whom one was to write the most beloved poem of the century and another to give posterity the history of...