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William Shenstone

1714-1763

William Shenstone (1714-63), born at the Leasowes, Hales Owen, Worcestershire, studied at Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1737 published anonymously "Poems upon various Occasions," in 1741 "The Judgment of Hercules," and next year "The Schoolmistress. In 1745 he succeeded his father in the Leasowes. His success in beautifying his little domain attracted visitors from all quarters, and brought him more fame than his poetry, but involved him in pecuniary embarrassments. "The Schoolmistress" has secured for him a permanent if humble place among English poets. His other works are mostly insignificant; but his "Pastoral Ballad" has touches of exquisite tenderness. See Life by Dr. Johnson prefixed to Shenstone's "Essays on Men and Manners" (new ed. 1868), and that by G. Gilfillan to an edition of his "Poems" (1854).-PATRICK AND GROOME, eds., 1897, Chambers's Biographical Dictionary, p. 851.

PERSONAL

His appearance surprised me, for he was a large, heavy, fat man, dressed in white clothes and silver lace, with his gray hairs tied behind and much powdered, which, added to his shyness and reserve, was not at first prepossessing. His reserve and melancholy (for I could not call it pride) abated as we rode along, and by the time we left him at the Admiral's, he became good company,-Garbett, who knew him well, having whispered him, that though we had no great name, he would find us not common men.-CARLYLE, ALEXANDER, 1758, Autobiography, ch. ix.

He was no economist; the generosity of his temper prevented him from paying a proper regard to the use of money: he exceeded, therefore, the bounds of his paternal fortune, which, before he died, was considerably encumbered. But when one recollects the perfect paradise he had raised around him, the hospitality with which he lived, his great indulgence to his servants, his charities to the indigent, and all done with an estate not more than three hundred pounds a year, one should rather be led to wonder that he left anything behind him than to blame his want of economy. He left, however, more than sufficient to pay his debts; and by his will appropriated his whole estate for that purpose.-DODSLEY, RICHARD, RICHARD, 1764-69, ed. Shenstone's Works, Preface. I have read an octave volume of Shenstone's "Letters;" poor man! He was always wishing for money, for fame, and other distinctions; and his whole philosophy consisted in living against his will in retirement, and in a place which his taste had adorned, but which he only enjoyed when people of note came to see

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resented by his friend Dodsley as a man of great tenderness and generosity, kind to all who were within his influence, but if once offended not easily appeased; inattentive to economy, and careless of his expenses: in his person he was larger than the middle size, with something clumsy in his form; very negligent of his clothes, and remarkable for wearing his grey hair in a particular manner; for he held that the fashion was no rule of dress, and that every man was to suit his appearance to his natural form. His mind was not very comprehensive, nor his curiosity active; he had no value for those parts of knowledge which he had not himself cultivated. JOHNSON, SAMUEL, 1779-81, Shenstone, Lives of the English Poets.

Dr. Warton, in his "Essay on Pope," has mentioned that three of our celebrated poets died singular deaths. He might have added Shenstone to the number. He had a housekeeper who lived with him in the double capacity of maid and mistress; and being offended with her on some occasion, he went out of the house and set all night in his post-chaise in much agitation, in consequence of which he caught which he caught a cold that eventually caused his death.-MALONE, EDMOND, 1783, Maloniana, ed. Prior, p. 340.

Mr. Shenstone was too much respected in the neighbourhood to be treated with rudeness and though his works (frugally as they were managed), added to his manners of living, must necessarily have made him exceed his income, and, of course, he might sometimes be distressed for money, yet he had too much spirit to expose himself to insults from trifling sums, and guarded against any great distress by anticipating a few hundreds; which his estate could very well bear, as appeared by what remained to his executors after the payment of his debts and his legacies to his friends, and annuities of thirty pounds a year to one servant, and six pounds to another: for his will was dictated with equal justice and generosity. -GRAVES, RICHARD, 1788, Recollections of Some Particulars of the Life of William Shenstone.

He was not formed to captivate; his person was clumsy, his manners disagreeable, and his temper feeble and vacillating. The Delia who is introduced into his elegies, and the Phillis of his pastoral ballad, was Charlotte Graves, sister to the Graves who wrote the "Spiritual Quixotte." There was nothing warm or earnest in his admiration, and all his gallantry is as vapid as his character. He never gave the lady who was supposed, and supposed herself, to be the object of his serious pursuit, an opportunity of accepting or rejecting him; and his conduct has been blamed as ambiguous and unmanly. His querulous declamations against women in general, had neither cause nor excuse; and his complaints of infidelity and coldness are equally without foundation. He died unmarried.JAMESON, ANNA BROWNELL, 1829, The Loves of the Poets, vol. ii, p. 311.

The Leasowes now belongs to the Attwood family, and a Miss Attwood resides. there occasionally; but the whole place bears the impress of desertion and neglect. The house has a dull look; the same heavy spirit broods over the lawns and glades; and it is only when you survey it from a distance, as when approaching Halesowen from Hagley, that the whole presents an aspect of unusual beauty. It is said to be the favorite resort of the members of the Society of Friends. -HOWITT, WILLIAM, 1846, Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets, vol. I.

THE SCHOOLMISTRESS
1742

The "Schoolmistress" is excellent in its kind and masterly.-GRAY, THOMAS, 1751, Letter to Horace Walpole, Works, ed. Gosse, vol. ii, p, 219.

This poem is one of those happinesses in which a poet excels himself, as there is nothing in all Shenstone which any way approaches it in merit; and, though I dislike the imitations of our English poets in general, yet, on this minute subject, the antiquity of the style produces a very ludicrous solemnity.-GOLDSMITH, OLIVER, 1767, The Beauties of English Poetry.

The inimitable "School-Mistress" of Shenstone is one of the felicities of genius; but the purpose of this poem has been entirely misconceived.

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The "School-Mistress" of Shenstone has been admired for its simplicity and tenderness, not for its exquisitely ludicrous turn! This discovery I owe to the good fortune of possessing the original edition of "The School-Mistress," which the author printed under his own directions, and to his own fancy. To this piece of LUDICROUS POETRY, as he calls it, "lest it should be mistaken," he added a LUDICROUS INDEX, "purely to show fools that I am in jest." But "the fool," his subsequent editor, who, I regret to say, was Robert Dodsley, thought proper to surpress this amusing "ludicrous index," and the consequence is, as the poet foresaw, that his aim has been "mistaken.’ -DISRAELI, ISAAC, 1791-1824, Shenstone's School-Mistress, Curiosities of Literature.

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Shenstone's "Schoolmistress" has not indeed the point and condensation of Goldsmith's "Schoolmaster," but its spirit is the same; and there is besides about it a certain soft, warm, slumberous charm, as if reflected from the good dame's kitchen fire. The very stanza seems murmuring in its sleep.-GILFILLAN, GEORGE, 1854, ed., The Poetical Works of William Shenstone, p. xxiii.

Owes much of its attraction to its archaisms. MARSH, GEORGE P., 1860, Lectures on the English Language, p. 540.

PASTORAL BALLAD

1743

Mr. Shenstone's pastoral ballad, in four parts, may justly be reckoned, I think, one of the most elegant poems of this kind

which we have in English.-BLAIR, Hugh, 1783, Lectures on Rhetoric and BellesLettres, ed. Mills, Lecture xxxix.

The "Pastorals" of Shenstone were singularly popular in their day, and are still admired by the young. Whatever charm they possess is owing to their smooth and easy language, their simple equable fluency, and also to the true but slender vein of natural sentiment, which makes us forget their intolerable mawkishness and the absurd affectation of the persons and manners of their shepherds and shepherdesses.-SHAW, THOMAS B., 1847, Outlines of English Literature, p. 299.

This picture of the old dame is very real, but better than "The Schoolmistress" I like a pastoral by Shenstone, which, although written in a jingling, rather common-place measure has a taste of the old ballad in it and recalls the fresh days of poetry. This pastoral is in four parts-Absence, Hope, Solicitude, Disappointment, and is addressed to Phylis, by the Shepherd Corydon. RICHARDSON, ABBY SAGE, 1881, Familiar Talks on English Literature, p. 301.

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execution. They form a series of poetical truths, devoid of poetical expression; truths, for notwithstanding the pastoral romance in which the poet has enveloped himself, the subjects are real, and the feelings could not, therefore, be fictitious.

These Elegies, with some other poems, may be read with a new interest, when we discover them to form the true Memoirs of Shenstone. Records of querulous but delightful feelings! whose subjects spontaneously offered themselves from passing incidents; they still perpetuate emotions, which will interest the young poet, and the young lover of taste.-DISRAELI, ISAAC, 1791-1824, Shenstone Vindicated, Curiosities of Literature.

His Letters show him to have lived in a continual fever of petty vanity, and to have been a finished literary coquet. He seems always to say, "You will find nothing in the world so amiable as Nature and me: come, and admire us."—HAZLITT, WILLIAM, 1818, Lectures on the English Poets, Lecture vi.

His genius is not forcible, but it settles in mediocrity without meanness. His pieces of levity correspond not disagreeably with their title. His "Ode to Memory'is worthy of protection from the power which it invokes. Some of the stanzas of his "Ode to Rural Elegance" seem to recall to us the country-loving spirit of Cowley, subdued in wit, but harmonized in expression. From the commencement of the stanza in that ode, "O sweet disposer of the rural hour," he sustains an agreeable and peculiarly refined strain of poetical feeling. The ballad of "Jemmy Dawson," and the elegy on "Jessy," are written with genuine feeling. With all the beauties of the Leasowes in our minds, it may be still regretted, that instead of devoting his whole soul to clumping beeches, and projecting mottoes for summer-houses, he had not gone more into living nature for subjects, and described her interesting realities with the same fond and naïve touches which give so much delightfulness to his portrait of the "School-mistress."-CAMPBELL, THOMAS, 1819, Specimens of the British Poets.

Shenstone's pathetic and affecting ballad of "Jemmy Dawson" has drawn tears from every person of sensibility, or possessing the feelings of humanity; and it

will continue to be admired as long as the English language shall exist.-COLLET, STEPHEN, 1823, Relics of Literature, p. 159.

Surely it is an accomplishment to utter a pretty thought so simply that the world is forced to remember it; and that gift was Shenstone's, and he the most poetical of country gentlemen. May every shrub on the lawn of Leasowes be evergreen to his brow!-BROWNING, ELIZABETH BARRETT, 1842-63, The Book of the Poets.

Shenstone was naturally an egotist, and, like Rousseau, scarce ever contemplated a landscape without some tacit reference to the space occupied in it by himself.MILLER, HUGH, 1847, First Impressions of England and Its People, p. 129.

Shenstone was deficient in animal spirits, and condescended to be vexed when people did not come to see his retirement; but few men had an acuter discernment of the weak points of others and the general mistakes of mankind, as anybody may see by his "Essays;" and yet in those "Essays" he tells us, that he never passed a town or village, without regretting that he could not make the acquaintance of some of the good people that lived there. -HUNT, LEIGH, 1848, A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla, p. 173.

Nothing can appear more flat than many of Shenstone's pathetic verses. They are written usually in that sing-song, die-away measure, of which "Pity the sorrows of a poor old man" is the everlasting type. Here and there a happy epithet or wellchosen image relieves the insipidity of the strain; but in general a thorough LauraMatildaish tone, so admirably satirised in "Rejected Addresses," palls upon the ear with a dulcet but senseless monotone.

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Some of his essays are pleasing, but devoted to quiet moralising or some insignificant theme.-TUCKERMAN, HENRY T., 1849, Characteristics of Literature, p. 40.

There is much sweetness and grace in the verses of Shenstone; they formed part of the intellectual food which nourishes the strong soul of Burns.— ARNOLD, THOMAS, 1878, English Literature, Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition.

Shenstone is our principal master of what may perhaps be called the artificialnatural style in poetry; and the somewhat

lasting hold which some at least of his poems have taken on the popular ear is the best testimony that can be produced to his merit. It is difficult to

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believe that Shenstone ever gave much study to his work, or that he possessed any critical faculty. His elegies, though not always devoid of music, are but dreary stuff, and his more ambitious poems still drearier. His attempts at the style of Prior and Gay are for the most part valueless. Yet when all this is discarded, "My banks they are furnished with bees," and a few other such things, obstinately recur to the memory and assert that their author after all was a poet. As concerns the formal part of poetry, his management of the anapaestic trimeter is unquestionably his chief merit. In the Spenserian stanza he is commendable, and dates fortunately prevent the charge that if "The Castle of Indolence" had not been written neither would "The Schoolmistress." His anapaests are much more original. The metre is so incurably associated with sing-song and doggerel, that poems written in it are exposed to a heavy disadvantage, yet in the first two pastoral ballads at any rate this disadvantage is not much felt. Shenstone taught the metre to a greater poet than himself, Cowper, and these two between them have written almost everything that is worth reading in it, if we put avowed parody and burlesque out of the question.SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1880, The English Poets, ed. Ward, vol. III, pp. 271, 272.

Most of his verse is artificial and unreal, and has rightly been forgotten, but what remains is of permanent interest. He is best known by the "Schoolmistress," a burlesque imitation of Spenser, which was

highly praised by Johnson and by Goldsmith; but many will value equally, in its way, the neatly turned "Pastoral Ballad, in four parts," written in 1743, which is supposed to refer to the author's disappointment in love, or the gently satirical "Progress of Taste," showing "how great a misfortune it is for a man of small estate to have much taste." Burns warmly eulogised Shenstone's elegies, which are also to some extent autobiographical, though it is difficult to say how far they are sincere.-AITKEN, GEORGE A., 1897, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. LII, p. 50.

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