Two Quiet Lives: Dorothy Osborne and Thomas Gray

London: Constable. Very Good/Very Good. 1965. Reprint. Hard Cover. 8vo 009452890X Dust jacket price clipped. Previous owner's details on ffep. xi, 194 pages clean and tight. The two quiet lives are Dorothy Osborne, writer of the famous love letters to William Temple, and Thomas Gray, poet, Cambridge don and friend of Horace Walpole. They lived a century apart, but as David Cecil shows, were temperamentally akin. Both were reserved, introspective and prone to melancholy: both appeared awkward and difficult save to the few to whom they opened their hearts: both commanded a fund of humour and imagination and possessed an instinctive feeling for style: and both enjoyed an inner life which was vivid, strong and exciting. David Cecil's subtle and sympathetic study of two remarkable natures is a sustained piece of exquisite scholarship which reads as engagingly now as it did when first published in 1948. .