Author of An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1747), Thomas Gray was born in London in 1716. He was educated at Eton, the inspiration for his An Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College (1747), and Cambridge. Except for a tour of the Continent, taken in part with friend Horace Walpole, he spent most of his life in Cambridge, where he became professor of history and modern languages in 1768. He died in 1768 and is buried at Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, the home of his mother and the inspiration for his famous elegy.
