| Far from all resort of mirth, Save the cricket on the hearth! |
In a letter[59] of the disconsolate founder of landscape gardening, our author paints his situation with all its misery—lamenting that his house is not fit to receive “polite friends, were they so disposed;” and resolved to banish all others, he proceeds:
“But I make it a certain rule, ‘arcere profanum vulgus.’ Persons who will despise you for the want of a good set of chairs, or an uncouth fire-shovel, at the same time that they can’t taste any excellence in a mind that overlooks those things; with whom it is in vain that your mind is furnished, if the walls are naked; indeed one loses much of one’s acquisitions in virtue by an hour’s converse with such as judge of merit by money—yet I am now and then impelled by the social passion to sit half an hour in my kitchen.”
But the solicitude of friends and the fate of Somerville, a neighbour and a poet, often compelled Shenstone to start amidst his reveries; and thus he has preserved his feelings and his irresolutions. Reflecting on the death of Somerville, he writes—
“To be forced to drink himself into pains of the body, in order to get rid of the pains of the mind, is a misery which I can well conceive, because I may, without vanity, esteem myself his equal in point of economy, and consequently ought to have an eye on his misfortunes—(as you kindly hinted to me about twelve o’clock, at the Feathers.)—I should retrench—I will—but you shall not see me—I will not let you know that I took it in good part—I will do it at solitary times as I may.”
Such were the calamities of “great taste” with “little fortune;” but in the case of Shenstone, these were combined with the other calamity of “mediocrity of genius.”
Here, then, at the Leasowes, with occasional trips to town in pursuit of fame, which perpetually eluded his grasp; in the correspondence of a few delicate minds, whose admiration was substituted for more genuine celebrity; composing diatribes against economy and taste, while his income was diminishing every year; our neglected author grew daily more indolent and sedentary, and withdrawing himself entirely into his own hermitage, moaned and despaired in an Arcadian solitude.[60] The cries and the “secret sorrows” of Shenstone have come down to us—those of his brothers have not always! And shall dull men, because they have minds cold and obscure, like a Lapland year which has no summer, be permitted to exult over this class of men of sensibility and taste, but of moderate genius and without fortune? The passions and emotions of the heart are facts and dates only to those who possess them.
To what a melancholy state was our author reduced, when he thus addressed his friend:—
“I suppose you have been informed that my fever was in a great measure hypochondriacal, and left my nerves so extremely sensible, that even on no very interesting subjects, I could readily think myself into a vertigo; I had almost said an epilepsy; for surely I was oftentimes near it.”