Thomson’s “Eastbury”—
Seat serene and plain
Where simple Nature reigns,
is as bad, in its way, as Pitt’s “Eden”—serenity, plainness, and simple nature being the most unlikely characteristics of Dodington,[68] whose heavy figure was arrayed in gorgeous brocades; and whose equally magnificent State bed was “garded and re-garded” with gold and silver embroideries showing by the remains of pocket-holes, button-holes and loops that they came from old coats and breeches. This great house, after Dodington’s death, was taken down all but one wing and sold piecemeal by Earl Temple, his heir.
Henry Fielding, one of the Eastbury circle—he dedicated to Dodington an epistle on “True Greatness”—was brought up as a boy in the manor-house at East Stower,[69] where he was taught by the Reverend Mr. Oliver, curate of the neighbouring village of Motcombe, said to have been the original of Trulliber, a portrait drawn “in resentment of some punishment inflicted on him,” according to Hutchins.[70] Fielding was fortunate in another portrait, for it is generally admitted that the prototype of Parson Abraham Adams was William Young, Incumbent of West Stower, who had many of Adams’ eccentricities. As an instance of Young’s absence of mind, it is said that when chaplain to a regiment in Flanders he “wandered in a reverie into the enemy’s camp, and was only aroused from his error by his arrest. The commanding officer, perceiving the good man’s simplicity, allowed him to return to his friends.”
At East Stower, too, Fielding lived for a time with his first wife.
William Crowe, though like Fielding only a short time resident in Dorset, is admitted on the strength of his topographical poem, Lewesdon Hill, of which Rogers thought so much that when travelling in Italy he made two authors his constant study for versification, Milton and Crowe.[71] Crowe’s Lewesdon Hill is a perfect example of an eighteenth century didactic and descriptive poem, with all the heaviness due to the requirements of an age which, like Horace Walpole, called for “edification” in its art. As in Goldsmith’s Traveller the person who speaks the verses sits pensively on an Alpine height, so Crowe in his poem is supposed to be walking on the top of the hill on a May morning—a hill, it has been suggested, that Fuller[72] may have climbed before him, and where the wide prospect, “standing where Moses stood when the Lord showed him all the land,” may have prompted the title of his book, A Pisgah Sight of Palestine, which he wrote when at Broadwindsor. Upon this hill, where
The lonely thorn
Bends from the rude south-east with top cut sheer,
Crowe surveys the outspread map of the county—Shipton Hill, Burton Cliff, Eggardon Hill, the rich Marshwood Vale—in winter