Shenstone was a poet of refined tastes. His fancy was polished, and he had trained himself well in the art of expression—if expression can be called an art. Like his brother poets, he worshipped at the shrine of love—often mingling the myrtle with the cypress. His Delia was no creature of the imagination. And like the Althea of Lovelace—like the nameless bringer of "wilde unrest" to Shakspeare—like her who was as a long-toothed viper at the heart of poor Lope de Vega; in fine, without multiplying "likes," Delia, if we are to judge from the poet's tone and life, did not love where she was best loved. Alas! when was woman as the rose which the nightingale serenades? When opened she her heart to song? Dante sung to Beatrice—Tasso made the name of Leonora D'Este famous on earth—Petrarch spun his heart into melody, and immortalized his Laura—Wyatt rhymed to Anne Boleyn. And how ended their wooings? Some worse—none better than that of Shenstone.
The letters of our author were thought by himself his best writings. Those to his friend Mr. Whistler, which he wrote with most care, were (to the poet's bitter regret) destroyed by Whistler's brother, "a Goth of a fellow."
William Shenstone died in February, 1763.
He is said to have been a man above the middle stature; somewhat clumsy in his appearance; careless in his dress, "as in every thing else but his grounds and his hair," which latter he adjusted in a particular manner in defiance of fashion; kind to his domestics; generous to strangers; slow to take offence, and slow to forgive it.
His tomb is in the churchyard of Hales Owen.
IV. "Thomas Gray, eminent for a few poems that he has left, was born in London in 1716, and died in 1771. He was perhaps the most learned man in Europe, equally acquainted with the elegant and profound parts of science. A new arrangement of his poems, with notes and additions, was made and printed in 8vo. in 1799."
V. I pass over several great names, and come to one whose life was too short for the attainment of the fame to which nature gave him a title. Thomas Chatterton, "the marvellous boy," realized the fable of the nightingale, and sang with his breast against a thorn; but he grew weary of the world at eighteen, and removed himself from it. And we can hardly wonder that he should have done so, when we remember the sad end to which his boyish dreamings came among the garrets and filthy alleys of London. To fall at once from the high atmosphere, whither a poet's early longings draw him as with a golden chain—to find one's castles in air tumbling about one's ears—to feel the veins ache for want of a little bread—to be driven by that ache to the very cellars and stews of literature—to rake from some foul corner wherewithal to support life—are enough to break a spirit stouter even than that of Chatterton. It did break his spirit, and subvert the pure principles with which he began life. What stronger proof do we need of this, than that most amusing yet villainous instance of his calculating powers, in which he feels "thirteen shillings and sixpence worth of joy at the Lord Mayor's death?" A charity student in Bristol; an apprentice sleeping up in an attic with a foot-boy—"the marvellous youth" had dreams, and adventured to London in search of their fulfilment. Here he published a volume of poems purporting to be the remains of "one Rowley." These were full of crabbed spelling and black-letter phrases, and had so much the appearance of genuine antiquity, that the world was long divided upon the question of their origin. These poems are certainly known at the present day to have been forgeries by Chatterton. He wrote many other poems, chiefly characterized by a reckless and fiery tone of feeling—by a restless yearning after "a something to fill the void of a hurt spirit withal"—and by a dark melancholy, only at rare times lighted up by a gleam of his wild heart's yet wilder hopes. In London he entered upon the field of politics, and soon became a caterer for a party newspaper. Then followed the grinding meanness of booksellers and editors; and maddened by the consciousness that his genius was poured out only as water on the dust—that the exertions which he had trusted would make him great among men, did not suffice to clothe him and allay hunger,—maddened with the knowledge of these sad truths, are we to marvel that poor Chatterton should "have done his own death?"
Chatterton was not unlike Byron. The morbid misanthropy hanging unfixedly about the former—fully developed in the latter—was in both but a retort upon their fellows. Both had hearts which only detraction or cold neglect could harden into a hatred of humanity. Both threw out venom against their enemies. But whence came this venom? The affections of both were at one time as pure as the sap of the fabled honey-tree. It was only by a fermentation produced by the hot atmosphere of hostility or cruel slight, that the sap, once blander than honey, became a bitter poison.
Chatterton was like Byron too in many other respects,—in his hunger after immortality—in his alternations of excess and abstinence—in his self-consciousness of genius—and in the most dark and deistic views of death. Need I, after all that I have said of his ambition, his struggles, and his most reckless tone of writing, say that Chatterton's was a fiery and determined spirit? "His affections were subordinate to the sterner leanings of the brain. He had the stout soul and the tender heart of the old-time troubabour; but his heart was less tender than his soul was stout."
Chatterton could never have been happy. The presence of ambition—that brain-ache—would have made him miserable, had he lived beyond the green season of youth even to its gratification. But why do I say that he could have never been happy? There are surely more kinds of happiness than the one quiet kind of which Darby and Joan are a fit instance. Is there not a thunder-storm kind? The mysterious joy which we see thrown from the heart to the face in the picture of "Byron on the sea-shore," is surely a species of happiness. Chatterton, with hope to support him, might have been happy in the darkest struggles of a dark career. With hope to support him! But "that was the misery." Despair came to him and he died, (not out of his boyhood) with no thought of future renown—with no thought but of present obscurity and present wretchedness.