LIFE OF SHENSTONE.

WILLIAM SHENSTONE, the son of Thomas Shenstone, of the Leasowes, in Hales Owen, a portion of Shropshire, though perhaps thirty miles distant, was born in November, 1714. Being early taught to read by an old lady, whom he has celebrated in the Schoolmistress, he soon conceived such a taste for study, that he expected a new book every time that any of the family went to market; and, as he was accustomed to carry each new acquisition to bed with him, whenever it happened, that the book was forgotten, his mother, it is said, would wrap up a small piece of board to quiet him for the night. Increase of years did not abate his zeal; and he was sent first to a grammar school in Hales Owen, and afterwards to a Mr. Crumpton, of Sholihuc.

When he lost his mother, is not told; but, being deprived of his father at ten, and of his grandfather two years after, the care of his brother and himself devolved upon his grandmother. She managed the estate, until about 1732; when it passed, by her death, into the hands of the Rev. Mr. Dolman, of Brome, in Staffordshire, who appears to have been truly in loco parentis. It was in the same year, that our author was removed to Pembroke Col

lege, in Oxford; where, though he took no degree, he kept his name in the book for ten years. At the end of the first four, he assumed the gown of a civilian; but his occupation was poetry, and not law; and, in 1737, he published an anonymous Miscellany of verse.

Shenstone did not write from necessity; and, having the means, he soon found the disposition, to acquaint himself with the world, by flying, with the other birds of passage, to London, or Bath, or any other place of fashionable resort. But a man, once a poet, is always a poet. Erasmus says, that one habit supercedes another as one nail is driven out by another; but we have never known any thing, which could drive out a habit of writing verses. Shenstone published the Judgment of Hercules, in 1741; and the Schoolmistress, in the following year.

His career of amusement was cut short, by the death of Mr. Dolman, in 1745; and, though he strove, for some time, to elude the monotonous duties of superintending his own estate, the impracticability of any other arrangement at last compelled him to submit. We do not suppose, with Dr. Johnson, that his delight in rural pleasures' was now, for the first time, 'excited.' He appears to have had an innate fondness for perpetual change of life and scenery; and it was, as we suppose, to gratify this propensity, that he wandered about,' in the language of Johnson, from one part of the country to another. Under the necessity of manag. ing his own estate, he could no longer travel abroad to find this delight; and we may conclude, that he intended, in some measure, to supply it at home.

But, whatever may have been his motives, no person will deny Shenstone the merit of superiority among those, who have undertaken to beautify nature, by levelling the protuberances of her surface, altering the disposition of her woods, and

shifting the current of her streams. His whole care now was to improve his grounds. To the delight of his eye the gratification of all his other senses was sacrificed; and, though his house might admit the wind and the rain, for the want of repairs, he felt no inconvenience, if he had gained a new prospect, or achieved a new turn. There is a gravity in the thought and style of Johnson, which is ill suited to the treatment of such subjects; and the reader can hardly forbear some merriment, when he solemnly institutes the following question: "whether,' says he, 'to plant a walk in undulating curves, and to place a bench at every turn where there is an object to catch the view; to make the water run where it will be heard, and to stagnate where it will be seen; to leave intervals where the eye will be pleased, and to thicken the plantation where there is something to be hidden; demands any great powers of mind, I will not enquire: perhaps a sullen and surly speculator may think such performances rather the sport than the business of human reason.' A speculator still more surly might ask, what has human reason to do at all, with planting walks, or placing benches? Whoever heard of a logical prospect, or a syllogism of trees?

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Not satisfied with fixing a standard of moral excellence for the employment of Shenstone, Dr. Johnson extends his surly speculation to his neighbour, Mr. Lyttleton; whose' empire, spacious and opulent,' he says, 'looked with disdain on the petty state that appeared behind it. For a while, the inhabitants of Hagley affected to tell their acquaintance of the little fellow that was trying to make himself admired; but, when by degrees the Leasowes forced themselves into notice, they took care to defeat the curiosity which they could not suppress, by conducting their visitants perversely to inconvenient points of view, and introducing them

at the wrong end of a walk to detect a deception ; injuries of which Shenstone would heavily complain. Where there is emulation, there will be vanity; and where there is vanity there will be folly.'

It may be truly said of Johnson himself, that, in estimating human actions, he perversely leads us to the unfavourable points of view, and conducts us into the wrong end of the walk. When he has found a bad motive, he takes it for granted, that there can be no other; or, if he finds different motives, he always chooses the worst. We can hardly suppose Shenstone to have been on terms of friendship, with a person, who thus ruined his prospects. Yet Johnson himself tells us, that he supported Mr. Lyttleton's election with great warmth' in 1741: he wrote verses to him in 1748; and two respectable writers, Mr. Potter and Mr. Graves, not only represent him as the friend of the family,-but expressly contradict this tale of inroads upon his 'petty estate.' The truth is, according to Mr. Graves, the family of Lyttletons, receiving much company, and having a good deal of leisure, found frequent occasion to wander in the grounds of their neighbour; and, being loth to call him from other pursuits, at every visit, they undertook to be their own conductors, and probably entered the walks at the wrong end, more from ignorance than malice.

But Dr. Johnson has made another observation concerning Shenstone, in the disproof of which the fond admirers of the latter have not been so sucessful. Being careless of every thing but his grounds, his expenses, in time', says Johnson, brought clamours about him, that overpowered the lamb's bleat and the linnet's song; and his groves were haunted by beings very different from fawns and fairies.' Mr. Graves is anxious to refute an imputation so injurious to the memory of his friend; and he tells us,

therefore, that Mr. Shenstone was too much respected' to be treated with rudeness, and had too much spirit' not to keep a few hundreds in anticipation. But a sheriff's officer is not apt to treat any man with much respect; and men of more spirit than Shenstone have brought themselves into contact with a sheriff's officer. No mode of refutation is so cheap as that of pronouncing a man too good, or too wise, to incur evil, or commit a fault. It begs every thing in dispute; for the very ques tion is, whether he was too good, or too wise.

Shenstone died of a putrid fever, on the 11th of February, 1763; and was buried in the churchyard of Hales Owen.

He is said to have been a man above the middle

stature; somewhat clumsy in his appearance; careless in his dress, as of every thing else but his grounds and his hair; which latter he adjusted in a particular manner, in defiance of fashion;-kind to his domestics, and generous to strangers; slow to take offence, and slow to forgive it. He was never married; and, though his Elegy on Jesse was supposed by the world to celebrate a guilty adventure of his own, it is said, by his friends, to have been a version of Miss Godfrey's tale in the Pamela of Richardson. Gray tells us, that he lived in retirement against his will; was always wishing for money, and fame, and other distinctions; never enjoyed his estate, except when people came to see and commend it; and held a correspondence with two or three neighbouring clergymen, in which he talks of nothing but his place and his poetry.

He seems, indeed, to have cultivated both with equal fondness and assiduity; and the products of his labour, in the two departments, were analagous to to each other. His grounds were encumbered with nothing solid; and he never tasked his mind for the graver species of poetry. He has written, indeed, what he calls Moral Pieces; but they are not