to confirm. One of the earliest, John Duncombe’s “An evening contemplation in a college” (1753), frequently reprinted to the end of the 18th century, was included alongside translations of the Elegy into Latin and Italian in the 1768 and 1775 Dublin editions and 1768 Cork edition of Gray's works. In the case of the American The Political Passing Bell: An Elegy. Written in a Country Meeting House, April 1789; Parodized from Gray for the Entertainment of Those Who Laugh at All Parties by George Richards (d.1804) and published from Boston MA, the parody was printed opposite Gray's original page by page, making the translation to the political context more obvious. A shift in context was the obvious starting point in many of these works and, where sufficiently original, contributed to the author's own literary fortunes. This was the case with Edward Jerningham's The Nunnery: an elegy in imitation of the Elegy in a Churchyard, published in 1762. Profiting by its success, Jerningham followed it up in successive years with other poems on the theme of nuns, in which the connection with Gray's work, though less close, was maintained in theme, form and emotional tone: The Magdalens: An Elegy (1763); The Nun: an elegy (1764); and “An Elegy Written Among the Ruins of an Abbey” (1765), which is derivative of the earlier poems on ruins by Moore and Cunningham. At the opposite extreme, Gray's poem provided a format for a surprising number that purport to be personal descriptions of life in gaol, starting with An elegy in imitation of Gray, written in the King's Bench Prison by a minor (London 1790), which is close in title to William Thomas Moncrieff’s later "Prison Thoughts: An elegy, written in the King's Bench Prison", dating from 1816 and printed in 1821. In 1809, H. P. Houghton wrote An evening's contemplation in a French prison, being a humble imitation of Gray's Elegy while he was a prisoner at Arras during the Napoleonic wars (London 1809). It was followed next year by the bitter Elegy in Newgate, published in The Satirist in the character of the recently imprisoned William Cobbett. An obvious distinction can be made between imitations meant to stand as independent works within the elegiac genre, not all of which followed Gray's wording closely, and those with a humorous or satirical purpose. The latter filled the columns in newspapers and comic magazines for the