st of low
humour in a facetious style with jingling rhymes, to which form we
attach our idea of a burlesque poem. There is a refined species of
ludicrous poetry, which is comic yet tender, lusory yet elegant, and
with such a blending of the serious and the facetious, that the result
of such a poem may often, among its other pleasures, produce a sort of
ambiguity; so that we do not always know whether the writer is laughing
at his subject, or whether he is to be laughed at. Our admirable
Whistlecraft met this fate![319] "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 edition of
"The School-Mistress," which the author printed under his own
directions, and to his own fancy.[320] 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 suppress this amusing "ludicrous index," and the
consequence is, as the poet foresaw, that his aim has been "mistaken."

The whole history of this poem, and this edition, may be traced in the
printed correspondence of Shenstone. Our poet had pleased himself by
ornamenting "A sixpenny pamphlet," with certain "seemly" designs of his,
and for which he came to town to direct the engraver; he appears also to
have intended accompanying it with "The deformed portrait of my old
school-dame, Sarah Lloyd." The frontispiece to this first edition
represents the "Thatched-house" of his old schoolmistress, and before it
is the "birch-tree," with "the sun setting and gilding the scene." He
writes on this, "I have the first sheet to correct upon the table. I
have laid aside the thoughts of fame a good deal in this unpromising
scheme; and fix them upon the landskip which is engraving, the red
letter which I propose, and the fruit-piece which you see, being the
most seemly ornaments of the first sixpenny pamphlet that was ever so
highly honoured. I shall incur the same reflection with Ogilby, of
having nothing good but my decorations. I expect that in your
neighbourhood and in Warwickshire there should be twenty of my poems
sold. I print it myself. I am pleased with Mynde's engravings."

On the publication Shenstone has opened his idea on its poetical
characteristic. "I dare say it