William Shenstone was born in 1714 at the Leasowes in Hales-Owen, a spot upon which he afterwards expended his skill as a landscape gardener. In 1732 he went up to Pembroke College, Oxford, and remained there for some years without taking a degree. Those years appear to have been devoted to poetry. In 1737 Shenstone published a small volume anonymously. This was followed by the Judgment of Hercules (1741), and by the Schoolmistress (1742). In 1745 he undertook the management of his estate, and began, to quote Dr. Johnson's quaint description, 'to point his prospects, to diversify his surface, to entangle his walks, and to wind his waters; which he did with such judgment and such fancy, as made his little domain the envy of the great and the admiration of the skilful; a place to be visited by travellers and copied by designers.' On this estate, with its lakes and cascades, its urns and poetical inscriptions, its hanging woods, and 'wild shaggy precipice,' Shenstone appears to have spent all his fortune. He led the life of a dilettante, and died unmarried at the age of fifty. His elegies and songs are dead, and whatever vitality remains in his verse will be found in the Pastoral Ballad and the Schoolmistress.
The ballad written in anapæstic verse has an Arcadian grace, against which even Johnson's robust intellect was not proof. For the following lines he says, 'if any mind denies its sympathy it has no acquaintance with love or nature':
'When forced the fair nymph to forego,
What anguish I felt in my heart!
Yet I thought—but it might not be so—
'Twas with pain that she saw me depart.
She gazed as I slowly withdrew,
My path I could hardly discern;
So sweetly she bade me adieu,
I thought that she bade me return.
The Schoolmistress, written in imitation of Spenser, has the merits of simplicity and homely humour. The village dame is a life-like character, and the urchins whom she is supposed to teach, and does sometimes teach by chastisement, are cunningly portrayed.
From the verses Written at an Inn in Henley three stanzas may be quoted. The last will be already known to readers familiar with their Boswell:
'I fly from pomp, I fly from plate,
I fly from falsehood's specious grin!
Freedom I love, and form I hate,
And choose my lodgings at an inn.
'Here, waiter! take my sordid ore,
Which lacqueys else might hope to win;
It buys what courts have not in store,
It buys me freedom at an inn!
'Whoe'er has travelled life's dull round,
Where'er his stages may have been,
May sigh to think he still has found
The warmest welcome at an inn.'
Unhappily this final verse, which Johnson is said to have repeated 'with great emotion,' has lost its application. The modern traveller, instead of being warmly welcomed at an inn, loses his identity and becomes a number.
Mark Akenside (1721-1770).