English poet and scholar Thomas Gray was BOTD in 1716. Born in London to working-class parents, he was the fifth of twelve and the only child to survive infancy. He attended Eton College, where he befriended notorious homosexual Horace Walpole. Described as a delicate and scholarly boy, Gray spent his time reading and avoiding athletics. After attending Cambridge University, he and Walpole travelled through Europe, falling out over Walpole’s love of parties. Gray spent most of his life as a Cambridge academic, though began writing poetry in 1742, penning a sonnet to commemorate the death of his Eton classmate (and possible lover) Richard West. A severe self-critic, Gray only published 13 poems in his lifetime. He is best known for his 1751 poem Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, a poignant tribute to the forgotten ordinary people of history, featuring the oft-quoted lines “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen/And waste its sweetness on the desert air”. Elegy also coined the phrases “some mute inglorious [Milton]”, “the paths of glory”, “kindred spirit” and “far from the madding crowd” (the latter borrowed by Thomas Hardy for his 1874 novel), while his poem Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College introduced the expression “ignorance is bliss”. A confirmed bachelor, Gray lived for most of his adult life with his mother, cultivating a friendship circle of pretty young male undergraduates at Cambridge. He fell deeply in love with his student Charles de Bonstetten, to whom he wrote passionate letters and planned walking tours in the Swiss Alps. Before they could be reunited, Gray died, aged 55. He was buried next to his mother in St Giles Church in Stokes Poses, the reputed setting for Elegy.