[48] Plunder, observed Mr. Douce, is pure Dutch or Flemish—Plunderen, from Plunder, which means property of any kind. May tells us it was brought by those officers who had returned from the wars of the Netherlands.
[49] One of the best collections of political songs written during the great Civil War, is entitled “The Rump,” and has a curious frontispiece representing the mob burning rumps as described above.
[50] The “History of the Tories and Rapparees” was a popular Irish chapbook a few years ago, and devoted to the daring acts of these marauders.
[51] These curious particulars I found in a manuscript.
[52] Lord Shelburne was named “Malagrida,” and Lord Sandwich was “Jemmy Twitcher;” a name derived from the chief of Macheath’s gang in the Beggar’s Opera.
THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF A POET.—SHENSTONE VINDICATED.
The dogmatism of Johnson, and the fastidiousness of Gray, the critic who passed his days amidst “the busy hum of men,” and the poet who mused in cloistered solitude, have fatally injured a fine natural genius in Shenstone. Mr. Campbell, with a brother’s feeling, has (since the present article was composed) sympathised with the endowments and the pursuits of this poet; but the facts I had collected seemed to me to open a more important view. I am aware how lightly the poetical character of Shenstone is held by some great contemporaries—although this very poet has left us at least one poem of unrivalled originality. Mr. Campbell has regretted that Shenstone not only “affected that arcadianism” which “gives a certain air of masquerade in his pastoral character,” adopted by our earlier poets, but also has “rather incongruously blended together the rural swain with the disciple of virtù.” All this requires some explanation. It is not only as a poet, possessing the characteristics of poetry, but as a creator in another way, for which I claim the attention of the reader. I have formed a picture of the domestic life of a poet, and the pursuits of a votary of taste, both equally contracted in their endeavours, from the habits, the emotions, and the events which occurred to Shenstone.
Four material circumstances influenced his character, and were productive of all his unhappiness. The neglect he incurred in those poetical studies to which he had devoted his hopes; his secret sorrows in not having formed a domestic union, from prudential motives, with one whom he loved; the ruinous state of his domestic affairs, arising from a seducing passion for creating a new taste in landscape gardening and an ornamented farm; and finally, his disappointment of that promised patronage, which might have induced him to have become a political writer; for which his inclinations, and, it is said, his talents in early life, were alike adapted: with these points in view, we may trace the different states of his mind, show what he did, and what he was earnestly intent to have done.
Why have the “Elegies” of Shenstone, which forty years ago formed for many of us the favourite poems of our youth, ceased to delight us in mature life? It is perhaps that these Elegies, planned with peculiar felicity, have little in their execution. They form a series of poetical truths, devoid of poetical expression; truths,—for notwithstanding the pastoral romance in which the poet has enveloped himself, the subjects are real, and the feelings could not, therefore, be fictitious.