22. Ply her evening care. Mitford says, "To ply a care is an expression that is not proper to our language, and was probably formed for the rhyme share." Hales remarks: "This is probably the kind of phrase which led Wordsworth to pronounce the language of the Elegy unintelligible. Compare his own

23. No children run, etc. Hales quotes Burns, Cotter's Saturday Night, 21:

 

24. Among Mitford's MS. variations we find "coming kiss." Wakefield compares Virgil, Geo. ii. 523:

and Mitford adds from Dryden,

Cf. Thomson, Liberty, iii. 171:

 

26. The stubborn glebe. Cf. Gay, Fables, ii. 15:

Broke=broken, as often in poetry, especially in the Elizabethan writers. See Abbott, Shakes. Gr. 343.

 

27. Drive their team afield. Cf. Lycidas, 27: "We drove afield;" and Dryden, Virgil's Ecl. ii. 38: "With me to drive afield."

28. Their sturdy stroke. Cf. Spenser, Shep. Kal. Feb.:

and Dryden, Geo. iii. 639:

30. As Mitford remarks, obscure and poor make "a very imperfect rhyme;" and the same might be said of toil and smile.

33. Mitford suggests that Gray had in mind these verses from his friend West's Monody on Queen Caroline:

Hurd compares Cowley:

35. Awaits. The reading of the ed. of 1768, as of the Pembroke (and probably the other) MS. Hour is the subject, not the object, of the verb.

36. Hayley, in the Life of Crashaw, Biographia Britannica, says that this line is "literally translated from the Latin prose of Bartholinus in his Danish Antiquities."

 

39. Fretted. The fret is, strictly, an ornament used in classical architecture, formed by small fillets intersecting each other at right angles. Parker (Glossary of 

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