In every village mark'd with little spire,
Embower'd in trees, and hardly known to fame,
There dwells in lowly shed and mean attire,
A matron old, whom we schoolmistress name.
The eighth stanza, in the first edition, runs,
The gown, which o'er her shoulders thrown she had,
Was russet stuff (who knows not russet stuff?)
Great comfort to her mind that she was clad
In texture of her own, all strong and tough;
Ne did she e'er complain, ne deem it rough, &c.
More elegantly descriptive is the dress as now delineated:—
A russet stole was o'er her shoulders thrown,
A russet kirtle fenced the nipping air;
'Twas simple russet, but it was her own:
'Twas her own country bred the flock so fair,
'Twas her own labour did the fleece prepare, &c.
The additions made to the first edition consist of the 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15th stanzas, in which are so beautifully introduced the herbs and garden stores, and the psalmody of the schoolmistress; the 29th and 30th stanzas were also subsequent insertions. But those lines which give so original a view of genius in its infancy,
A little bench of heedless bishops here,
And there a chancellor in embryo, &c.
were printed in 1742; and I cannot but think that the far-famed stanza in Gray's Elegy, where he discovers men of genius in peasants, as Shenstone has in children, was suggested by this original conception:
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood,
is, to me, a congenial thought, with an echoed turn of expression of the lines from the School-Mistress.