GRAY'S Elegy is perhaps the most famous poem in the English language. Certainly it has given more quotations to the vocabulary of the average educated man than any other poem ; its flowing and felicitous diction falls naturally into phrases easy to remember and apt to apply. Were it not for the Elegy, Gray might be no better known nowadays than his contemporary, William Collins , who wrote some fine odea in the Indian Summer of classicism, before the romantic reaction set in. His ' Ode to Evening' will form, with the Elegy, the matter of the reading this afternoon.