Early Book Collections | Literature

Among the collections at the Evergreen Mansion that were bequeathed to Johns Hopkins University by John Work Garret (1872—1942) is a group of manuscripts by Thomas Gray which were in the mid/late nineteenth century tipped into a finely bound folio volume.

The book is known as containing Gray’s fair copy of his poem The Long Story, Lady Schaub’s note left on Gray’s table that was the catalyst for the poem, and Henrietta Jane Speed’s letter acknowledging its receipt. What has not been recorded is that after the material related to The Long Story and a letter of 23 October 1766 from Gray to the Rev. James Brown, there are sixteen pages on twelve leaves containing Gray’s accounts of paintings and sculpture seen by him on his Grand Tour in the palaces, churches and galleries of Italy, and then nineteen pages on another ten leaves on prints and books of prints acquired by him in Italy.

These pages may have been overlooked as they largely consist of lists—a catalogue of pictures seen and books and prints acquired—but they provide important new evidence of the Grand Tour that Gray undertook in 1739–41 with Horace Walpole, illustrating what he saw, how he built up his library, and how he recorded this.

There are three known sources for Gray’s Grand Tour apart from the letters he wrote on his travels. These are the John Murray notebook, being Gray’s notes through France and on to Bologna, with notes on Florence; the Eton College manuscript, being some notes of France, then the Pitti Palace at Florence, and a descriptive account of his trip from Rome to Naples, with the environs of Naples, originally published by Duncan Tovey in 1890; and detailed notes on Rome published by John Mitford in his edition of Gray’s Works in 1836 from a manuscript that is now lost. What the Garrett volume supplies is notes of buildings, paintings and sculpture that Gray saw in Siena, Florence, Rome, Naples, Verona and Milan, though not bound into the volume in that order. They support the known image of Gray as a dedicated sightseer, carefully listing in his precise hand the works of art and antiquities he had examined while Walpole enjoyed the social life that his position as son to Britain’s first minister gave him access. But they are also important in two respects.

Firstly, they give us for the first time details of what Gray saw on his return home across northern Italy after his acrimonious separation from Walpole at Reggio in May 1741, in particular the time he spent in Milan inspecting the pictures at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana and other sites. Secondly, they confirm Tovey’s suggestion that Gray kept two sets of notes: one is cursory, the other more detailed and descriptive and more neatly written. This is reflected in the paper he used, which for the cursory notes tends to be on smaller sheets. His cursory notes on the Palazzo Barberini and Palazzo del Cardinal Giudice in Rome can be compared with the descriptive version, which was published by Mitford. The Garrett volume includes descriptive notes on the design of the facades and on the sculpture at the Palazzo Farnese and on the sculpture at the Villa Mattei in Rome, the paintings of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana and the Archbishop’s palace in Milan, and the paintings of the royal chapel of the Cathedral in Naples, detailing colouring, pose, and in many cases Gray’s assessment of them.

The most exciting secret of the manuscripts is embedded in Gray’s notes on Naples, which are written around a previously unknown twelve-line Latin poem Saxa Pulchra Cajetæ, a reflection in Sapphic stanzas on the Bay of Gaeta, where he and Walpole had reached the sea on their journey south from Rome to Naples. This increases the number of Latin poems Gray is known to have written on his Grand Tour from seven to eight. It adapts his response to the prospect, which he described in prose in the Eton manuscript, and a passage in a letter to his friend Richard West where he thinks back fondly to the views of the Thames, and combines them in a quietly contemplative elegiac poem.

The remaining manuscript pages are devoted to the prints and books of prints that Gray bought in Italy, together with a list completed after his return of 168 books, largely books of prints, in his library. This supplements Gray’s early catalogue of his library complied between 1734 and 1742, as printed in William Powell Jones’s Thomas Gray, Scholar (Harvard, 1937). There is also an annotated printed list of the engravings that Gray bought in Rome from the prominent printmaker and publisher Giacomo or Jacob Frey (1681–1752), with a note that they were to be delivered to him where he and Walpole were staying near the church of Trinità dei Monti; and a further sheet endorsed “Sent to Leghorn the beginning of July 1740”, listing thirty-six books and sets of prints sent home to England. This includes the engravings bought from Frey and numerous other prints, views of Rome, books of engravings of Roman palaces, Bartoli’s illustrated accounts of the Trajan and Antonine columns, and books of engravings of Roman antiquities such as Rossi’s Insignium Romæ Templorum Prospectus (Rome, 1684) and Bartoli and Bellori’s Admiranda Romanarum antiquitatum (Rome, 1693), each of the prints from which Gray had listed, along with the engravings bought from Frey, on other pages bound in to the Garrett volume. The rich material in this volume adds to the modest canon of Gray’s Latin poetry, expands our knowledge of the paintings and sculpture he saw on his Grand Tour and his reaction to them, and shows how he acquired many of the books and prints that in his rooms at Cambridge were to remind him of his Italian travels.

—Stephen Clarke, Guest Lecturer, Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book, June 2023