f Milton, out of the admirable essays of Addison, out of the
hints of Pope, out of the designs of Kent, and which was stimulated by
Gilpin, by Horace Walpole, and, still more, by the delightful little
landscapes of Gainsborough.

Enough will be found of Mr. Brown, and of his style, in the professional
treatises, upon whose province I do not now infringe. I choose rather,
for the entertainment of my readers, if they will kindly find it, to
speak of that sad, exceptional man, William Shenstone, who, by the
beauties which he made to appear on his paternal farm of Leasowes,
fairly rivalled the best of the landscape-gardeners,--and who, by the
graces and the tenderness which he lavished on his verse, made no mean
rank for himself at a time when people were reading the "Elegy" of Gray,
the Homer of Pope, and the "Cato" of Addison.

I think there can hardly be any doubt, however, that poor Shenstone was
a wretched farmer; yet the Leasowes was a capital grazing farm, when he
took it in charge, within fair marketable distance of both Worcester and
Birmingham. I suspect that he never put his fine hands to the
plough-tail; and his plaintive elegy, that dates from an April day of
1743, tells, I am sure, only the unmitigated truth:--

"Again the laboring hind inverts the soil;
Again the merchant ploughs the tumid wave;
Another spring renews the soldier's toil,
_And finds me vacant in the rural cave_."

Shenstone, like many another of the lesser poets, was unfortunate in
having Dr. Johnson for his biographer. It is hard to conceive of a man
who would show less of tenderness for an elaborate parterre of flowers,
or for a poet who affectedly parted his gray locks on one side of his
head, wore a crimson waistcoat, and warbled in anapaestics about kids and
shepherds' crooks. Only fancy the great, snuffy, wheezing Doctor, with
his hair-powder whitening half his shoulders, led up before some
charming little extravaganza of Boucher, wherein all the nymphs are
simpering marchionesses, with rosettes on their high-heeled slippers
that out-color the sky! With what a "Faugh!" the great gerund-grinder
would thump his cane upon the floor, and go lumbering away! And
Shenstone, or rather his memory, caught the besom of just such a sneer.

But other critics were more kindly and appreciative; among them, Dodsley
the bookselling author, who wrote "The Economy of Human Life," (the
"Proverbial Philosophy" of its day,) and Whate