Who Was Thomas Gray?

Thomas Gray was born in the heart of London, where his father was a 'money – scrivener' – a dealer in promissory notes and such like documents relating to loans and credits.  The only one of the twelve children to survive infancy, he was, understandably, over protected by his mother and his aunts, and his rather solitary early child hood fostered in him two qualities he was never to lose a devotion to books and timidity towards the more practical affairs of life.  

Two of his uncles were masters at Eton and they rescued him form his loneliness at home by arranging his admission to that great public school.  There one of his closest friends was Horace Walpole, the future author of 'The Castle of Otranto' and youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole, the prime minister.

In 1739, he accepted Horace Walpole's invitation to accompany him on 'the grand tour', a prolonged excursion, through the main social and cultural centres of Europe which often concluded the education of the son of the rich.  After two years of this tour he quarreled with Walpole and returned home alone.  In 1742, he returned to Cambridge where he took a degree at last, that of Bachelor of Civil Laws.

He lived the rest of his life quietly at Cambridge, as a fellow first of Peter House College and then Pembroke Hall.  He eventually obtained, in 1768, the University Chair of Modern History, but such a professorship was normally regarded as a mere sinecure, and he never delivered any lectures.  Certainly, the great reforms at Oxford and Cambridge in the following century were long overdue.