Disbelief in Historical Examples

The Hampden-Milton-Cromwell Passage in Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

Abstract

This paper discusses the different conventions of literary didacticism in Gray’s Elegy from almost medieval allegorical teaching, replete with capitalized moral qualities (“Ambition,” “Grandeur,” etc.), through the humanist model of exemplary history (teaching through the powerful rhetorical presentation of turning points in the lives of great men) to a modern model of teaching that is not directed at action but at sympathy evoked through the understanding of socio-economic and cultural forces. The analysis focuses on the transactions between exemplary history and the “annals of the poor” in the poem.