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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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Thomas Gray
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(1716–1771) Poet of exceptionally small output, whose Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard (1751, commonly known as *Gray's Elegy) is a precursor of the *Romantic movement. He was a schoolboy at *Eton, where his two close friends were Horace *Walpole and Richard West. The death of the latter, in 1742, prompted Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College (published 1747), an early example of Gray's wistful melancholy. Walpole was indirectly responsible for another often quoted poem, Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes (1747); the unfortunate Selima, immortalized in this ode, was a cat which had toppled into a Chinese vase at Strawberry Hill.
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Gray lived an extremely secluded life at Cambridge, lodging in Peterhouse until 1756. In that year he was the butt of a practical joke by undergraduates, who knew of his terror of fire and placed a barrel of water under his window before raising a false alarm; he moved as a result to Pembroke. His mother lived from 1742 at Stoke Poges, in Buckinghamshire. Gray is buried beside her in the churchyard.
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