who also managed the estate. In 1732, he was sent to Pembroke College, Oxford,—a college celebrated for having reared Dr Johnson, Sir William Blackstone, and many other distinguished men, and which Johnson, in allusion to this, called a "nest of singing-birds.' About this time his grandmother died, and the management of his affairs devolved on the Rev. Mr Dolman of Brome, in Staffordshire, who approved himself a kind and faithful guardian.

At college Shenstone appears to have been happier than at any other period of his life. He intermingled social enjoyments with regular if not hard study, and became the centre of a little circle of youths of similar pursuits. Such were Whistler and Graves, the latter of whom became a very accomplished person, and has left some interesting, although short and slight reminiscences of his friend the poet. Pembroke College, like all other colleges, in times past and present, was subdivided into a number of smaller societies. or clubs, collected through the attraction of common mental or physical tastes. Mr Graves gives rather a picturesque account of these little societies: one being a "very sober little party, who amused themselves in the evening with reading Greek and drinking water;" another, a "set of jolly, sprightly young fellows, who drank ale, smoked tobacco, punned, and sung bacchanalian catches the whole evening; a third, consisting of gentlemen commoners, who (like the bear-leader in Goldsmith, who detested everything low, and made his bear dance only to the "genteelest tunes ") "considered the abovementioned as very Low company (on account of the liquor they drank), and treated their novices with port-wine and arrack punch, keeping late hours, and drinking their favourite toasts on their knees; and a fourth, which formed a sort of flying squadron of plain, sensible, matter-of-fact men, confined to no club, but associating occasionally with each party.” Mr Graves met Mr Shenstone in each of these clubs (except that of the water-drinkers!) by turns, and gradually became intimate with him, as well as with Mr Whistler, who gave some promise at that time of becoming a tolerable poet. The three were inseparable—read plays and Spectators, sipped Florence

wine, and from writing satirical characters of each other, began to shut themselves up, and lampoon the whole college-conduct which transpired, and made them anything but popular.

Shenstone took no honours, nor even a degree, at college, although he employed himself in the usual studies of mathematics, logic, natural and moral philosophy, with considerable assiduity and success. He made few acquaintances, besides Graves, Whistler, and Jago, who became afterwards well known as a minor poet--author of a pathetic elegy on Blackbirds, a poem on Edgehill, and some other ingenious pieces. Shenstone himself was chiefly remarkable for what was then counted the odd practice of wearing his own hair, which, being coarse in quality, little tended or dressed by its owner, and floating down over a large, ungainly person, excited some ridicule, and constituted him one of the characters in the college. After attending at Pembroke for four years, he put on the civilian's gown, but never went further in that direction. He continued his name on the college books for a considerable number of years after he had left, whether with any purpose of again resuming a university life we cannot tell. It was, we think, a pity for himself that he did not subside permanently into a Fellow. In this case, he would have written quite as much poetry, and been a happier man than when cultivating in the country his whims, his melancholy, and his Leasowes; only we should have lost that beautiful creation!

At the age of nineteen he had commenced his literary career, by writing a little mock-heroic poem, entitled "The Diamond "one of a whole fry of productions which at that time were seeking in vain to imitate the inimitable "Rape of the Lock." Pope, indeed, might have filled another Dunciad with the names of his then rivals in that limited but exquisitely elegant and perfect circle of art which he first drew, with a magic wand. Shenstone's poem was neither better nor worse than its neighbours. In 1737, when not more than twenty-three, he published, at Oxford, a Miscellany of small pieces, without his name, which, like the famous treatises on Monogamy by the Vicar of Wakefield, were only read by

as

"the happy few" of his personal friends; and if they did not lose, certainly did not gain him either reputation or money. Somewhere about this time, too, he drew the first sketch of his "Schoolmistress; " but, deeming the subject low, delayed to publish it, applied himself to "The Judgment of Hercules " instead, as to a loftier theme, and completed and printed it in 1740.

Previous to this he had come of age, and, of course, to the possession of his paternal property, the Leasowes; of his patrimony by the mother's side; and, through the unexpected death of his maternal uncle, to another moiety of the Harborough estate-the whole constituting what would even now be considered a decent competence for a private gentleman. Going down, he found the house at the Leasowes occupied by the tenant of the farm, and, instead of lodging or boarding there, or in the neighbourhood, he rather prematurely set up house at Harborough. The house there, an old and timber-built structure of the Elizabethan period, was situated amidst ancient oaks and elms, skirted by the waters of a large pond, and surrounded by a colony of rooks, whose perpetual cawings served to feed that gentle melancholy which pervaded Shenstone's amiable, but sluggish nature. Here he lingered so long, that when the session of college came round, he had not the resolution to return; and, indeed, seldom trode the courts of Pembroke College any more. He might now be seen instead, with his long hair and heavy visage, loitering in his garden, or half-sleeping beneath the shade of his old oaks, a pocket-copy of Terence lying before him on the ground, or scrawling verses on the wall of his summer-house. Mr Graves visited him at this time, and they spent a month very agreeably in helping each other to be idle. We quote the following lively little anecdote from that gentleman's volume :

"We were one day engaged in a warm debate, in which I think I had the upper hand, and drove my antagonist to a painful dilemma, and with exultation pursued my advantage so far, that Mr Shenstone grew angry; and our trifling dispute terminated on each side in a sullen silence, to which, as Mr Shenstone would not vouchsafe to break first, I, from a youth

ful spirit of independence, disdained to submit; so that, although we ate and drank together, this pouting humour continued, and we never spoke to each other for two days. At last, as I was never much addicted to taciturnity, and it was pain and grief to me to keep silence, I wrote upon the wall in a summer-house in the garden a line from Anac· Θέλω θέλω μανῆναι·

reon:

which I translated

'I will, I will be witty.'

Under this, Mr Shenstone wrote this distich :

'Matchless on earth I thee proclaim,

Whose will and power I find the same.'

This produced a reply on my side; that a rejoinder on his; till at last the ill-fated wall was scribbled from top to bottom; which the next morning was succeeded by a laugh at each other's folly, and a cordial reconciliation."

We may parody a well known saying thus, "When Cupid finds a man idle, he straightway gives him work." Shenstone about this time, having little else to do, chose to fall in love. His passion, for some time, seems to have veered between various heroines. One (a Miss M-) he admired and sung for her dancing. Another, a Miss Utrecia Smith ("Phoebus, what a name!") daughter of a clergyman, he admired and sung for her not dancing. A Miss G, too, took him captive for some time. Finally, however, his fickle heart was first tickled, and then fastened to a Miss C, whom he met at Cheltenham, and for a number of years afterwards he strove hard to convince himself and the world, by sundry elegies and so forth, that he loved her to desperation. Dr Johnson breaks down the romance of this story by asserting, that the lover might have married his lady if he had chosen; and perhaps Shenstone, at the close, like uncle John in Salmagundi, consoled himself by saying to his companions, " Boys, I might have had her;" but we are tempted to suspect that a nature so sluggish, self-complacent, and fond of serious trifling as his,

was incapable of a grand passion, and that all his raptures and sorrows, as reflected in the "Pastoral Ballad," were as fictitious in substance as in form-as much a make-believe in actual experience as in verbal expression. Mr Graves, on the other hand, asserts that he never could have dreamed of securing Miss C whose sister had married a baronet, and who moved in the highest circles, as his wife.

Meanwhile, besides his musings under his old elms, and his visits to his inamorata, he was occasionally taking little trips, now to London, and now to Bath, to acquaint himself with the men and the manners of his time. In 1740, he had published, as we have seen, his "Judgment of Hercules,” dedicated to Lord Lyttelton, who was his neighbour, and whom he had strongly supported at an election. This was followed the next year by the completion and publication of his delectable "Schoolmistress." His "Pastoral Ballad " he had sketched while in love with Miss G; but, after his Juliet, Miss C, had supplanted his Rosalind, he contrived at once to accommodate the poem to her, and to stretch out its very elastic materials into its present four parts. In 1745, Mr Dolman, whose kind providence had saved Shenstone all trouble in the management of his estate, dying, the whole of its care fell upon the poetical landlord. After seeking for a while to evade the burden, and trying to live with his tenants, he was compelled to take the whole estate into his own hands, and proceeded to show how a poet can improve and embellish a landed property.

Shenstone, indeed, is more remembered as the beautifier of the Leasowes than he is admired as the author of the

"Pastoral Ballad." As Augustus boasted that he found Rome brick and left it marble, so our poet found his property a mass of commonplace confusion, and left it a garden of Alcinous. The place, indeed, originally possessed two great elements of beauty, wood and water, but they were utterly disorganized and irregular till this master-spirit-for in landscape-gardening so he was-proceeded to arrange, combine, and embellish them. "From this time," says Johnson, “he began to point his prospects, to diversify his surface, to en