SHENSTONE, William (1714-1763), is one of the best-known minor poets of the 18th century. He owes such distinction as he has at least as much to his choice of subjects and to the peculiarity of his life as to the felicity of his verse. Coming after a generation whose leading poets wrote for fashionable society, he shut himself up in the country, tried to follow the life Arcadian, and wrote in the spirit of a recluse. He inherited the small estate of Leasowes, in the parish of Hales-Owen, Worcestershire. He was born at Leasowes in 1714, and after passing through Pembroke College, Oxford, retired there to realize Pope’s ideal in the Ode to Solitude, turned his paternal estate into an elaborate landscape garden, and lived there till his death in 1763. From the time that the management of the estate fell into his own hands, “he began,” Johnson says, “to point his prospects, to diversify his surface, to entangle his walks, and to wind his waters,—which he did with such judgment and such fancy as to make his little domain the envy of the great and the admiration of the skilful.” From this it will be seen that he did not anticipate late sentiment in his love of natural scenery; he was a true child of the Queen Anne time in his liking for “Nature to advantage dressed.” And it would appear from his letters that he was not a contented recluse, but was weakly desirous of the notice of the world in his Arcadian retreat. Still there is a certain air of sincerity in his references to natural beauty and grandeur. Burns wrote of him in the preface to his first issue of poems as a poet “whose divine elegies do honour to our language.” Shenstone practised the elegiac form assiduously, and some of his elegies are not without a certain imposing pomp and dignity of ...