Addisons "Campaign" and Grays "Elegy".

Addison's "Campaign" and Gray's "Elegy". (Joseph Addison)(Thomas Gray) Rodney Stenning Edgecombe.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2004 Heldref Publications

In the meditation set at the heart of the "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," which he completed in 1750, Gray notes that deprivation curtails opportunities for evil as well as for good. Chief amongst these is violent individual ambition, which Gray deplores (in marked contrast to Addison's "Campaign" of 1704, which had celebrated the military success of the Duke of Marlborough):

The applause of listening senates to command,

The threats of pain and ruin to despise.

To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land,

And read their history in a nation's eyes,

Their lot forbade: nor circumscribed alone

Their growing virtues, but their crimes confined;

Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne,

And shut the gates of mercy on mankind,

The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide,

To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame,

Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride

With incense kindled at the Muse's flame.

(Gray, Collins, and Goldsmith 129-30)

These strophes also figured in an earlier version of the "Elegy," the "Stanza's Wrote in a Country Church-yard" (ca. 1742), in which Gray chose figures from Roman rather than English history to make his points:

Some Village Cato [that] with dauntless Breast

The little Tyrant of his Fields withstood;

Some mute inglorious Tully here may r...