![GRAY, Thomas (1716-1771). Autograph manuscript poem, ‘Satire upon the Heads, or Never a barrel the better Herring’, n.d. [?c.1764].](https://www.christies.com/img/LotImages/2017/CKS/2017_CKS_14301_0031_000(gray_thomas_autograph_manuscript_poem_satire_upon_the_heads_or_never_a024204).jpg?w=1)
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GRAY, Thomas (1716-1771). Autograph manuscript poem, ‘Satire upon the Heads, or Never a barrel the better Herring’, n.d. [?c.1764].
38 lines on one page, 228 x 196mm, docket in another hand on verso ‘Verses on the Heads of Houses at Cambridge/ 10.7.’ (scattered small holes at creases, mostly repaired on verso, one horizontal crease displaying wear). Laid down on an album leaf. Provenance: Sotheby’s, 4 August 1854, lot 229, bought by – Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton (1809-1885; poet, politician, and literary patron) – Robert Crewe-Milnes, 1st Marquess of Crewe (1858-1945) – by descent.
Gray’s satirical critique of the Masters of the Cambridge colleges. The opening shot – ‘Oh Cambridge, attend/ To the Satire I’ve pen’d/ On the Heads of thy Houses/ Thou Seat of the Muses!’ – is followed by 16 couplets, each treating another of the Masters, equal in their awfulness. No college or its master is spared, Gray starts ‘Know, the Master of Jesus/ Does hugely displease us’ and continues in this vein – refusing to grant his approval to any single Master from the roster of 16 colleges that existed in the 18th century – before ending with a rather opaque post-script: ‘As to Trinity Hall/ We say nothing at all.’
Thomas Gray passed the majority of his adult life at Cambridge, first arriving in 1734 as a seventeen-year-old undergraduate alongside his great childhood friends Horace Walpole and Thomas Ashton, and returning in 1742 after a not-entirely-successful Grand Tour undertaken at the invitation of the former. Gray had spent his undergraduate years at Peterhouse, and now returned there as a fellow-commoner – despite previously naming his destination as Trinity Hall, pre-eminent for the study of civil law in which he was to engage, in an letter to the architect John Chute – before moving to Pembroke College in 1756 in the wake of a prank played on him by the Peterhouse undergraduates, a false alarm of fire designed to embarrass the pyrophobic poet. The outrages of university life were not to end there: in 1764, the selection of the notorious libertine, the Earl of Sandwich, for the high stewardship of Cambridge prompted Gray to write the most successful of his satirical poems, The Candidate, to which the present manuscript bears some resemblance in its motivation.
38 lines on one page, 228 x 196mm, docket in another hand on verso ‘Verses on the Heads of Houses at Cambridge/ 10.7.’ (scattered small holes at creases, mostly repaired on verso, one horizontal crease displaying wear). Laid down on an album leaf. Provenance: Sotheby’s, 4 August 1854, lot 229, bought by – Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton (1809-1885; poet, politician, and literary patron) – Robert Crewe-Milnes, 1st Marquess of Crewe (1858-1945) – by descent.
Gray’s satirical critique of the Masters of the Cambridge colleges. The opening shot – ‘Oh Cambridge, attend/ To the Satire I’ve pen’d/ On the Heads of thy Houses/ Thou Seat of the Muses!’ – is followed by 16 couplets, each treating another of the Masters, equal in their awfulness. No college or its master is spared, Gray starts ‘Know, the Master of Jesus/ Does hugely displease us’ and continues in this vein – refusing to grant his approval to any single Master from the roster of 16 colleges that existed in the 18th century – before ending with a rather opaque post-script: ‘As to Trinity Hall/ We say nothing at all.’
Thomas Gray passed the majority of his adult life at Cambridge, first arriving in 1734 as a seventeen-year-old undergraduate alongside his great childhood friends Horace Walpole and Thomas Ashton, and returning in 1742 after a not-entirely-successful Grand Tour undertaken at the invitation of the former. Gray had spent his undergraduate years at Peterhouse, and now returned there as a fellow-commoner – despite previously naming his destination as Trinity Hall, pre-eminent for the study of civil law in which he was to engage, in an letter to the architect John Chute – before moving to Pembroke College in 1756 in the wake of a prank played on him by the Peterhouse undergraduates, a false alarm of fire designed to embarrass the pyrophobic poet. The outrages of university life were not to end there: in 1764, the selection of the notorious libertine, the Earl of Sandwich, for the high stewardship of Cambridge prompted Gray to write the most successful of his satirical poems, The Candidate, to which the present manuscript bears some resemblance in its motivation.
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