Excerpt from The Works of Thomas Gray in Prose and Verse, Vol. 1 of 4: Poems, Journals, and Essays IT is a great privilege to be entrusted with the collee tion of the writings of a classic, but the more pleasure is united with such a labour, the heavier is the responsibility. The preparation of this issue of the entire Works of Thomas Gray has been no holiday task, and I relinquish it to the printers with no certainty that the aim of so much assiduous labour has been reached. In the first place, I have to record a disappointment. In undertaking to collect for the first time the whole writings of Gray, I was buoyed up by a sanguine hope that I should be able to add very considerably to the bulk of those writings. Tradition has whispered for the last forty years of unprinted verses and unexamined letters by the exquisite author of the Elegy, and it was my con fident expectation that I should be able to unearth the majority of these. For the last four years, by all the public and private means in my power, I have been endeavouring to lay my hand upon these manuscripts. But I am bound to say that I have slowly become convinced that no such treasures exist, and that we know the limits of Gray's literary production. Again and again I have seemed on the brink of discovery, and each time the prose has proved a cloud, the poems a mirage. Of matter actually unprinted before, in some form or other, these volumes contain comparatively little. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.