He paints himself:—
| Observe Florelio’s mien; Why treads my friend with melancholy step That beauteous lawn? Why pensive strays his eye O’er statues, grottos, urns, by critic art Proportion’d fair? or from his lofty dome Returns his eye unpleased, disconsolate? |
The cause is, “criminal expense,” and he exclaims—
| Sweet interchange Of river, valley, mountain, woods, and plains, How gladsome once he ranged your native turf, Your simple scenes how raptured! ere Expense Had lavish’d thousand ornaments, and taught Convenience to perplex him, Art to pall, Pomp to deject, and Beauty to displease. Economy. |
While Shenstone was rearing hazels and hawthorns, opening vistas, and winding waters;
| And having shown them where to stray, Threw little pebbles in their way; |
while he was pulling down hovels and cowhouses, to compose mottos and inscriptions for garden-seats and urns; while he had so finely obscured with a tender gloom the grove of Virgil, and thrown over, “in the midst of a plantation of yew, a bridge of one arch, built of a dusty-coloured stone, and simple even to rudeness,”[58] and invoked Oberon in some Arcadian scene,
| Where in cool grot and mossy cell The tripping fauns and fairies dwell; |
the solitary magician, who had raised all these wonders, was, in reality, an unfortunate poet, the tenant of a dilapidated farm-house, where the winds passed through, and the rains lodged, often taking refuge in his own kitchen—