ABSTRACT
Gray (1716-71) drafted a scheme of English versification in which he cited Donne's Satyres as an example of a free decasyllabic movement. He commented that Spenser affords 'an instance of the decasyllabic measure with an unusual liberty in its feet' in the opening of the August Eclogue of The Shepheards Calendar, but that Donne goes reprehensibly further (Gray's Essays and Criticisms, ed. C. S. Northup, 1904, pp. 37 and 48). Gray referred'to Donne's Satyres again in a letter to Thomas Warton. when he compared them with HaIl's Virgidemiarum (ibid .• p. 175). In the year before his death Gray sent Warton a sketch 'of a design. I once had to give a history of English poetry'. Donne and his followers appear in it as 'A third Italian School', presumably derived from such poets as Guarini and Marino (The Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. P. Toynbee and 1. Whibley, Oxford, 1935, iii, pp. II 22-4).
