William Shenstone.
Shenstone was one of the many poets who owe their reputation to their luck in being contemporaries of their biographer, Dr. Johnson. No Johnson could keep records of all the versifiers of the nineteenth century who have occasionally written good things. William Shenstone was born in November, 1714, at the Leasowes, in Halesowen. His life was much devoted to landscape gardening; and his harmless taste made him a noted character in his day. "He learned to read of an old dame," and pleasantly described her, or some other old dame, in "The School Mistress," an agreeable idyll in the Spenserian measure.
In 1732 Shenstone went to Johnson's college, his "nest of singing birds," Pembroke, in Oxford. He took no degree, he rhymed, printed his rhymes, and "The School Mistress" appeared in 1742. Thenceforth he landscape-gardened, being so little of an angler that he was indignant, says Johnson, when asked if there were any trout in his purely ornamental water. His expenses in gardening brought the haunting forms of bailiffs into his groves, but Johnson informs us gravely that "his life was unstained by any crime". He died in February, 1763. Several of his innocent poems, such as
I have found out a gift for my fair,
I have found where the wood pigeons breed,
are still familiar to many memories: they are from the "Pastoral Ballad". He perceived the demerits of the rhyming heroic couplet (as it was then written), as "apt to render the expression either scanty or constrained," and preferred the verse of four lines with alternate rhymes. Thus, on the death of Pope
Now sadly lorn, from Twit'nam's widow'd bow'r
The drooping muses take their casual way,
And where they stop a flood of tears they pour,
And where they weep, no more the fields are gay.
Of such matter are Shenstone's Elegies composed: his ballad on Jemmy Dawson, a martyr of the Jacobite cause, was celebrated and popular; poor Jemmy's lady-love died of grief and horror at his execution.
[1] Posthumously published in 1748. See Mr. W. P. Ker's "Warton Lecture on English Poetry," "Proceedings of the British Academy," Vol. IV.