oved to be surrounded by the
finest spirits of his time. There is a pleasant anecdote of the company
at his table agreeing to see which amongst them could produce the best
impromptu. Dryden was appointed arbitrator. Dorset handed a slip of
paper to Dryden, and when all the attempts were collected, Dryden
decided without hesitation that Dorset's was the best. It ran thus: "_I
promise to pay Mr. John Dryden, on demand, the sum of L500. Dorset_."

[022] This is generally put into the mouth of Pope, but if we are to
believe Spence, who is the only authority for the anecdote, it was
addressed to himself.

[023] It has been said that in laying out the grounds at Hagley, Lord
Lyttelton received some valuable hints from the author of _The Seasons_,
who was for some time his Lordship's guest. The poet has commemorated
the beauties of Hagley Park in a description that is familiar to all
lovers of English poetry. I must make room for a few of the concluding
lines.

Meantime you gain the height, from whose fair brow,
The bursting prospect spreads immense around:
And snatched o'er hill, and dale, and wood, and lawn,
And verdant field, and darkening heath between,
And villages embosomed soft in trees,
And spiry towns by surging columns marked,
Of household smoke, your eye excursive roams;
Wide stretching from the hall, in whose kind haunt
The hospitable genius lingers still,
To where the broken landscape, by degrees,
Ascending, roughens into rigid hills;
O'er which the Cambrian mountains, like far clouds,
That skirt the blue horizon, dusky rise.

It certainly does not look as if there had been any want of kindly
feeling towards Shenstone on the part of Lyttelton when we find the
following inscription in Hagley Park.

To the memory of
William Shenstone, Esquire,
In whose verse
Were all the natural graces.
And in whose manners
Was all the amiable simplicity
Of pastoral poetry,
With the sweet tenderness
Of the elegiac.

There is also at Hagley a complimentary inscription on an urn to
Alexander Pope; and, on an octagonal building called _Thomson's Seat_,
there is an inscription to the author of _The Seasons_. Hagley is kept
up with great care and is still in possession of the descendants of the
founder. But a late visitor (Mr. George Dodd) expresses a doubt whether
the Leasowes, even in its comparative decay, is not a finer bi