probably declined since then. It has had several kinds of influence. Poetic parallels In choosing an "English" over a Classical setting, Gray provided a model for later poets wishing to describe England and the English countryside during the second half of the 18th century. Once Gray had set the example, any occasion would do to give a sense of the effects of time in a landscape, as for instance in the passage of the seasons as described in John Scott’s Four Elegies, descriptive and moral (1757). Other imitations, though avoiding overt verbal parallels, chose similar backgrounds to signal their parentage. One favourite theme was a meditation among ruins, such as John Langhorne's Written among the ruins of Pontefract Castle (1756), Edward Moore's “An elegy, written among the ruins of a nobleman's seat in Cornwall" (1756) and John Cunningham's "An elegy on a pile of ruins" (1761). Gray's friend William Mason chose an actual churchyard in south Wales for his Elegy VI (1787), adding a reference to the poet in the text. He also provided a final note explaining that the poem was written "to make it appear a day scene, and as such to contrast it with the twilight scene of my excellent Friend's Elegy". A kinship between Gray's Elegy and Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village has been recognised, although the latter was more openly political in its treatment of the rural poor and used heroic couplets, where the elegist poets kept to cross-rhymed quatrains. At first it was collected in various editions along with Gray's poem and other topographical works, but from 1873 a number of editions appeared which contained just the Elegy and The Deserted Village, though sometimes with the inclusion of Goldsmith's The Traveller or some other single work as well. At that period an anonymous review in The Academy (12 December 1896) claimed that "Gray's 'Elegy' and Goldsmith's 'The Deserted Village' shine forth as the two human poems in a century of artifice." The Elegy's continued influence in the 19th century provoked a response from the Romantic poets, who often attempted to define their own beliefs in reaction to Gray's. Percy Bysshe Shelley, for example, who as a schoolboy was given the exercise of translating part of the Elegy into Latin, eventually wrote his own meditation among the graves in 1815. His "A Summer Evening Churchyard, Lechlade, Gloucestershire" is metrically more inventive and written in a