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The honour of a prude is rage and storm,
'Tis ugliness in its most frightful form;
Fiercely it stands, defying gods and men,
As fiery monsters guard a giant's den.
Seek to be good, but aim not to be great;
A woman's noblest station is retreat;
Her fairest virtues fly from public sight,
Domestic worth, that shuns too strong a light.

Prologue to the Tragedy of Coriolanus.
I come not here your candour to implore
For scenes whose author is, alas! no more;
He wants no advocate his cause to plead ;
You will yourselves be patrons of the dead.
No party his benevolence confined,

No sect-alike it flowed to all mankind.
He loved his friends-forgive this gushing tear :
Alas! I feel I am no actor here-

He loved his friends with such a warmth of heart,
So clear of interest, so devoid of art,
Such generous friendship, such unshaken zeal,
No words can speak it, but our tears may tell.
O candid truth! O faith without a stain!
O manners gently firm, and nobly plain !
O sympathising love of others' bliss-
Where will you find another breast like his!
Such was the man: the poet well you know;
Oft has he touched your hearts with tender woe;
Oft in this crowded house, with just applause,
You heard him teach fair Virtue's purest laws;
For his chaste muse employed her heaven-taught lyre
None but the noblest passions to inspire;
Not one immoral, one corrupted thought,
One line which, dying, he could wish to blot.
O may to-night your favourable doom
Another laurel add to grace his tomb:
Whilst he, superior now to praise or blame,
Hears not the feeble voice of human fame.
Yet if to those whom most on earth he loved,
From whom his pious care is now removed,
With whom his liberal hand, and bounteous heart,
Shared all his little fortune could impart :
If to those friends your kind regard shall give
What they no longer can from his receive,
That, that, even now, above yon starry pole,
May touch with pleasure his immortal soul.

To the Castle of Indolence Lyttelton contributed the stanza with the famous portrait of Thomson, whose 'ditties sweet,' however, Lyttelton did not hesitate to alter and curtail in editions of Thomson's works published in 1750 and 1752; but the liberties thus taken with the poet's text disappeared from later editions. The friendly and playful penportrait of a friend runs thus:

A bard here dwelt, more fat than bard beseems,
Who, void of envy, guile, and lust of gain,
On virtue still, and nature's pleasing themes,
Poured forth his unpremeditated strain :
The world forsaking with a calm disdain,
Here laughed he careless in his easy seat;
Here quaffed encircled with the joyous train,
Oft moralising sage : his ditty sweet

He loathed much to write, ne cared to repeat.

An edition of Lyttelton's collected works in prose and verse appeared in 1774, and was reissued in 1775 and 1776; and in 1845 Sir R. Phillimore published his Memoirs and Correspondence.

John Armstrong (1709?-79), the friend of Thomson, of Mallet, Wilkes, and other public and literary characters of that period, is now only known as the author of an unread didactic poem, the Art of Preserving Health. A son of the minister of Castleton, a pastoral parish in Liddesdale, he studied medicine in Edinburgh, and took his M.D in 1732. Three years later he was practising in London, and became known by the publication of several fugitive pieces and medical essays. A nauseous anonymous poem, the Economy of Love (1736), gave promise of poetical powers, but marred his practice as a physician. In 1744 appeared his Art of Preserving Health, which was followed by two other poems, Benevolence (1751) and Taste (1753), and a pseudonymous volume of Sketches or Essays (1758). In 1760 he was appointed physician to the forces in Germany; and on the peace in 1763 he returned to London, where he practised, but with little success, till his death, 7th September 1779. Armstrong seems to have been an indolent and splenetic but kind-hearted man - shrewd, caustic, and careful: he left £3000, saved out of a small income. His portrait in the Castle of Indolence is in Thomson's happiest manner:

With him was sometimes joined in silent walk
(Profoundly silent, for they never spoke)
One shyer still, who quite detested talk :
Oft stung by spleen, at once away he broke
To groves of pine and broad o'ershadowing oak;
There, inly thrilled, he wandered all alone,
And on himself his pensive fury wroke,

Nor ever uttered word, save when first shone The glittering star of eve-‘Thank Heaven, the day is done." Warton praised the Art of Preserving Health for its classical correctness and closeness of style, and its numberless poetical images. In general, however, it is stiff and laboured, with occasional passages of tumid extravagance; and the similes are not infrequently echoes of those of Thomson and other poets. Of these two extracts from the Art of Preserving Health (from the close of the second and third books respectively), the second, the most energetic passage in the whole poem and not least characteristic of its medical author, describes the 'sweating sickness' which appeared in London in September 1485, after the victorious entry of the troops of Henry VII. who had a week or two before fought at Bosworth field.

Wrecks and Mutations of Time. What does not fade? The tower that long had stood The crush of thunder and the warring winds, Shook by the slow but sure destroyer Time, Now hangs in doubtful ruins o'er its base, And flinty pyramids and walls of brass Descend. The Babylonian spires are sunk ; Achaia, Rome, and Egypt moulder down. Time shakes the stable tyranny of thrones, And tottering empires crush by their own weight. This huge rotundity we tread grows old ; And all those worlds that roll around the sun,

The sun himself shall die, and ancient night Again involve the desolate abyss,

Till the great Father, through the lifeless gloom, Extend his arm to light another world,

And bid new planets roll by other laws.

The Sweating Sickness.

Ere yet the fell Plantagenets had spent
Their ancient rage at Bosworth's purple field;
While, for which tyrant England should receive,
Her legions in incestuous murders mixed
And daily horrors; till the fates were drunk

With kindred blood by kindred hands profused:
Another plague of more gigantic arm
Arose, a monster never known before,
Reared from Cocytus its portentous head;
This rapid fury not, like other pests,
Pursued a gradual course, but in a day

Rushed as a storm o'er half the astonished isle,
And strewed with sudden carcasses the land.

First through the shoulders, or whatever part
Was seized the first, a fervid vapour sprung;
With rash combustion thence the quivering spark
Shot to the heart, and kindled all within ;
And soon the surface caught the spreading fires.
Through all the yielding pores the melted blood
Gushed out in smoky sweats; but not assuaged
The torrid heat within, nor aught relieved
The stomach's anguish. With incessant toil,
Desperate of ease, impatient of their pain,

They tossed from side to side. In vain the stream
Ran full and clear; they burnt, and thirsted still.
The restless arteries with rapid blood

Beat strong and frequent. Thick and pantingly

The breath was fetched, and with huge labourings heaved.
At last a heavy pain oppressed the head,

A wild delirium came: their weeping friends
Were strangers now, and this no home of theirs.
Harassed with toil on toil, the sinking powers
Lay prostrate and o'erthrown; a ponderous sleep
Wrapt all the senses up: they slept and died.
In some a gentle horror crept at first
O'er all the limbs; the sluices of the skin
Withheld their moisture, till by art provoked
The sweats o'erflowed, but in a clammy tide ;
Now free and copious, now restrained and slow;
Of tinctures various, as the temperature

Had mixed the blood, and rank with fetid streams :
As if the pent-up humours by delay

Were grown more fell, more putrid, and malign.

Here lay their hopes (though little hope remained),

With full effusion of perpetual sweats

To drive the venom out. And here the fates
Were kind, that long they lingered not in pain.
For, who survived the sun's diurnal race,
Rose from the dreary gates of hell redeemed;
Some the sixth hour oppressed, and some the third.
Of many thousands, few untainted 'scaped ;

Of those infected, fewer 'scaped alive;
Of those who lived, some felt a second blow;
And whom the second spared, a third destroyed.
Frantic with fear, they sought by flight to shun
The fierce contagion. O'er the mournful land
The infected city poured her hurrying swarms :
Roused by the flames that fired her seats around,
The infected country rushed into the town.

Some sad at home, and in the desert some
Abjured the fatal commerce of mankind.
In vain ; where'er they fled, the fates pursued,
Others, with hopes more specious, crossed the main,
To seek protection in far-distant skies :

But none they found. It seemed the general air,
From pole to pole, from Atlas to the east,

Was then at enmity with English blood;
For but the race of England all were safe

In foreign climes; nor did this fury taste

The foreign blood which England then contained.
Where should they fly? The circumambient heaven
Involved them still, and every breeze was bane:
Where find relief? The salutary art
Was mute, and, startled at the new disease,
In fearful whispers hopeless omens gave.

To Heaven, with suppliant rites they sent their prayers;
Heaven heard them not. Of every hope deprived,
Fatigued with vain resources, and subdued

With woes resistless, and enfeebling fear,
Passive they sunk beneath the weighty blow.
Nothing but lamentable sounds were heard,
Nor aught was seen but ghastly views of death.
Infectious horror ran from face to face,
And pale despair. 'Twas all the business then
To tend the sick, and in their turns to die.
In heaps they fell; and oft one bed, they say,
The sickening, dying, and the dead contained.

Richard Glover (1712-85), a London merchant who sat in Parliament for Weymouth (1761-68), published two elaborate poems in blank verse, Leonidas and the Athenaid — the former on the defence of Thermopylæ, and the latter continuing the story of the war between the Greeks and Persians. The length of these poems, their want of sustained interest, and lack of genuine poetic quality have led to their being next to unknown in the present day. Leonidas (1737) was hailed with acclamations by the Opposition, or Prince of Wales's party, of which Glover was an active member. London, or the Progress of Commerce (1739), was a poem written to excite the national spirit against the Spaniards; and in 1742 Glover appeared before the bar of the House of Commons as delegate of the London merchants, complaining of the neglect of their interests. In 1744 he declined to join Mallet in writing a Life of the Duke of Marlborough, though his affairs had become somewhat embarrassed. A fortunate speculation in copper enabled him to retrieve his position, and he was returned to Parliament for Weymouth. He continued to maintain mercantile interests, and during his leisure enlarged his poem of Leonidas from nine to twelve books (1770). The Athenaid was published posthumously in 1787. His two tragedies, Boadicea (1753) and Medea (1761), are but indifferent performances. In 1726 a naval expedition against the Spanish West Indies had miscarried, and the commander, Admiral Hosier, whose orders prevented him from fighting, is said to have died of a broken heart. The disgrace was not wiped out till 1739, when, on the commencement of the 'War of Jenkins's Ear,'

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His godlike presence. Dignity and grace
Adorn his frame, where manly beauty joins
With strength Herculean. On his aspect shine
Sublimest virtue and desire of fame,
Where justice gives the laurel; in his eye
The inextinguishable spark, which fires
The souls of patriots; while his brow supports
Undaunted valour, and contempt of death.
Serene he cast his looks around, and spake :
'Why this astonishment on every face,
Ye men of Sparta? Does the name of death
Create this fear and wonder? O my friends!
Why do we labour through the arduous paths
Which lead to virtue? Fruitless were the toil.
Above the reach of human feet were placed
The distant summit, if the fear of death
Could intercept our passage. But a frown
Of unavailing terror he assumes

To shake the firmness of the mind which knows
That, wanting virtue, life is pain and woe;
That, wanting liberty, even virtue mourns,
And looks around for happiness in vain.
Then speak, O Sparta! and demand my life;
My heart, exulting, answers to thy call,
And smiles on glorious fate. To live with fame
The gods allow to many; but to die
With equal lustre is a blessing Jove
Among the choicest of his boons reserves,
Which but on few his sparing hand bestows.
Salvation thus to Sparta he proclaimed.
Joy, wrapt awhile in admiration, paused,
Suspending praise; nor praise at last resounds
In high acclaim to rend the arch of heaven;
A reverential murmur breathes applause.

Admiral Hosier's Ghost.

As near Portobello lying

On the gently swelling flood,
At midnight, with streamers flying,
Our triumphant navy rode;
There while Vernon sat all glorious
From the Spaniards' late defeat,
And his crews, with shouts victorious,
Drank success to England's fleet;
On a sudden, shrilly sounding,

Hideous yells and shrieks were heard ;
Then, each heart with fear confounding,
A sad troop of ghosts appeared;
All in dreary hammocks shrouded,

Which for winding-sheets they wore,
And, with looks by sorrow clouded,

Frowning on that hostile shore.

On them gleamed the moon's wan lustre,
When the shade of Hosier brave
His pale bands was seen to muster,
Rising from their watery grave:

O'er the glimmering wave he hied him, Where the Burford reared her sail, With three thousand ghosts beside him, And in groans did Vernon hail.

'Heed, oh heed our fatal story!
I am Hosier's injured ghost;
You who now have purchased glory
At this place where I was lost:
Though in Portobello's ruin,

You now triumph free from fears, When you think on our undoing,

You will mix your joys with tears.

'See these mournful spectres sweeping
Ghastly o'er this hated wave,

Whose wan cheeks are stained with weeping;
These were English captains brave.
Mark those numbers, pale and horrid,
Those were once my sailors bold;
Lo! each hangs his drooping forehead,
While his dismal tale is told.

'I, by twenty sail attended,

Did this Spanish town affright; Nothing then its wealth defended,

But my orders-not to fight! Oh! that in this rolling ocean

I had cast them with disdain, And obeyed my heart's warm motion,

To have quelled the pride of Spain!

'For resistance I could fear none
But with twenty ships had done
What thou, brave and happy Vernon,
Hast achieved with six alone.
Then the Bastimentos never
Had our foul dishonour seen,
Nor the seas the sad receiver
Of this gallant train had been.

'Thus, like thee, proud Spain dismaying,
And her galleons leading home,
Though condemned for disobeying,
I had met a traitor's doom :
To have fallen, my country crying,

"He has played an English part,"
Had been better far than dying
Of a grieved and broken heart.

Unrepining at thy glory,

Thy successful arms we hail; But remember our sad story,

And let Hosier's wrongs prevail. Sent in this foul clime to languish, Think what thousands fell in vain, Wasted with disease and anguish, Not in glorious battle slain.

'Hence with all my train attending,
From their oozy tombs below,
Through the hoary foam ascending,
Here I feed my constant woe.
Here the Bastimentos viewing,

We recall our shameful doom,
And, our plaintive cries renewing,

Wander through the midnight gloom.

'O'er these waves for ever mourning
Shall we roam, deprived of rest,
If, to Britain's shores returning,
You neglect my just request;
After this proud foe subduing,

When your patriot friends you see, Think on vengeance for my ruin,

And for England-shamed in me.'

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William Shenstone (1714-63), though author of 'elegies, odes and ballads, humorous sallies and moral pieces,' wanted, as Johnson said, 'comprehension and variety;' even more did he lack depth, spontaneity, true naturalness. Though ambitious of poetic fame, he spent much of his time and squandered most of his means on landscape gardening and ornamental agriculture. He essayed to lead a too romantic-idyllic life in an eighteenth-century artificial Arcadia, and reared up around him a sort of rural paradise, exercising his dilettante tastes and fancies in laying out and embellishing his grounds, till at length money difficulties and distresses threw a cloud over the fair prospect and darkened the latter days of the poet's life. The estate which he thus laboured to adorn was the Leasowes in the parish of Hales-Owen, Worcestershire, where he was born, and where, too, he died. He was taught to read at a dameschool, and has immortalised his venerable preceptress in his Schoolmistress. In 1732 he was sent to Pembroke College, Oxford, where he remained four years. In 1745 the paternal estate fell to his own care, and he began from this time, as Johnson characteristically describes it, 'to point his prospects, to diversify his surface, to entangle his walks, and to wind his waters; which he did with such judgment and fancy, as made his little domain the envy of the great and the admiration of the skilful; a place to be visited by travellers and copied by designers.' Descriptions of the Leasowes were penned by Dodsley, Goldsmith, and 'Jupiter' Carlyle; and Shenstone has a place in the history of landscape-gardening when by no means at its zenith. The property was altogether not worth more than £300 per annum, and Shenstone had devoted so much of his means to out-of-doors improvements that he was compelled to live in

a dilapidated house, not fit, as he acknowledges, to receive 'polite friends.' An unfortunate attachment and disappointed ambition conspired with his passion for landscape-gardening to bind him down to solitude and 'Shenstone's Folly,' as the Leasowes was called. He became querulous and dejected, pined at the unequal gifts of fortune, and even contemplated with a gloomy joy the prospect that terrified Swift when he spoke of being 'forced to die in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.' Yet Shenstone must often have experienced very

WILLIAM SHENSTONE.

From the Portrait by Edward Alcock in the National Portrait Gallery.

genuine pleasure in the Arcadian retreat which a century afterwards attracted pilgrims-it is described as 'an exquisite poem' by Hugh Miller in his First Impressions of England, and compared with Abbotsford in its disastrous consequences. The works

of a person that builds,' the owner said, 'begin immediately to decay, while those of him who plants begin directly to improve.' But Shenstone sighed for more than inward peace and satisfaction - he died in solitude a votary of the world.

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His works were collected and published after his death by his friend Dodsley, in three volumes (1764-69)— the first containing his poems, the second his prose essays, and the third his letters and other pieces. Gray remarks of his correspondence that it is 'about nothing else but the Leasowes, and his writings with two or three neighbouring clergymen who wrote verses too.' The essays display ease and grace of style united to judgment and discrimination. They have not the mellow thought and learning of Cowley's essays, but they resemble them. In poetry Shenstone tried different styles: his elegies, melodious enough in a fashion, barely reach mediocrity; his levities, or pieces of humour, are dull and spiritless. His highest effort is The Schoolmistress, published in 1742, but said to be 'written at college, 1736;' it was altered and enlarged after its first publication. This poem is a descriptive sketch offered as 'in imitation of Spenser' (really with elements of the burlesque, and earlier than Thomson's Castle of Indolence), delightfully quaint, yet true to nature. His Pastoral Ballad, in four parts, took rank as the finest English poem of that order. But his pathos is apt to become sentimentality; the

simplicity is not seldom artificial, like the poet's garden. Campbell sensibly enough regretted the affected Arcadianism of the pastoral pieces, which undoubtedly present an incongruous mixture of pastoral life and modern manners.

Johnson and Goldsmith both praised the Schoolmistress; but Walpole unkindly dubbed Shenstone 'the water-gruel bard.' His poetry, in spite of its many shortcomings and defects, has resemblances to Goldsmith's; his characteristic use of anapæstic verse was imitated by Cowper; and--though the other aspect of him is the more conspicuous-some critics have found in him touches that warrant them in linking him with Thomson as in some degree a herald of the 'return to nature.' One stanza of the Schoolmistress has the special interest of having probably suggested to Gray the thought in his Elegy about the 'mute inglorious Milton :'

Yet, nursed with skill, what dazzling fruits appear!
Even now sagacious foresight points to shew

A little bench of heedless bishops here,
And there a chancellour in embryo,

Or bard sublime, if bard may e'er be so,

As Milton, Shakespeare, names that ne'er shall die! Though now he crawl along the ground so low, Nor weeting how the Muse should soar on high, Wisheth, poor starveling elf! his paper-kite may fly.

Shenstone was an early favourite of Burns, who in a letter of 1783 names him first amongst his favourites, all of the sentimental order,' specially commending the elegies. And Shenstone's influence on Burns is too often clearly traceable.

From 'The Schoolmistress.'

Ah me! full sorely is my heart forlorn, To think how modest worth neglected lies; While partial fame doth with her blasts adorn Such deeds alone as pride and pomp disguise; Deeds of ill sort, and mischievous emprize; Lend me thy clarion, goddess! let me try To sound the praise of merit ere it dies; Such as I oft have chaunced to espy, Lost in the dreary shades of dull obscurity.

In every village marked with little spire,
Embowered in trees, and hardly known to fame,
There dwells, in lowly shed, and mean attire,
A matron old, whom we schoolmistress name;
Who boasts unruly brats with birch to tame:
They grieven sore, in piteous durance pent,
Awed by the power of this relentless dame ;
And ofttimes, on vagaries idly bent,

For unkempt hair, or task unconned, are sorely shent.

And all in sight doth rise a birchen tree, Which Learning near her little dome did stow; Whilome a twig of small regard to see, Though now so wide its waving branches flow, And work the simple vassals mickle woe; For not a wind might curl the leaves that blew, But their limbs shuddered, and their pulse beat low; And as they looked, they found their horror grew, And shaped it into rods, and tingled at the view.

Near to this dome is found a patch so green,
On which the tribe their gambols do display;
And at the door imprisoning board is seen,
Lest weakly wights of smaller size should stray;
Eager, perdie, to bask in sunny day!

The noises intermixed, which thence resound,
Do learning's little tenement betray;
Where sits the dame, disguised in look profound,
And eyes her fairy throng, and turns her wheel around.
Her cap, far whiter than the driven snow,
Emblem right meet of decency does yield :
Her apron dyed in grain, as blue, I trow,
As is the harebell that adorns the field;
And in her hand, for scepter, she does wield
Tway birchen sprays; with anxious fear entwined,
With dark distrust, and sad repentance filled;
And steadfast hate, and sharp affliction joined,
And fury uncontrolled, and chastisement unkind...
A russet stole was o'er her shoulders thrown;
A russet kirtle fenced the nipping air;
'Twas simple russet, but it was her own;
'Twas her own country bred the flock so fair;
'Twas her own labour did the fleece prepare;
And, sooth to say, her pupils ranged around,
Through pious awe, did term it passing rare;
For they in gaping wonderment abound,

And think, no doubt, she been the greatest wight on ground.
Albeit ne flattery did corrupt her truth,
Ne pompous title did debauch her ear;
Goody, good woman, gossip, n'aunt, forsooth,
Or dame, the sole additions she did hear;
Yet these she challenged, these she held right dear;
Ne would esteem him act as mought behove,
Who should not honoured eld with these revere;
For never title yet so mean could prove,
But there was eke a mind which did that title love.
One ancient hen she took delight to feed,
The plodding pattern of the busy dame ;
Which, ever and anon, impelled by need,
Into her school, begirt with chickens, came;
Such favour did her past deportment claim;
And, if neglect had lavished on the ground
Fragment of bread, she would collect the same;
For well she knew, and quaintly could expound,
What sin it were to waste the smallest crumb she found.

Herbs, too, she knew, and well of each could speak,
That in her garden sipped the silvery dew;
Where no vain flower disclosed a gaudy streak,
But herbs for use and physic, not a few,
Of gray renown, within those borders grew :
The tufted basil, pun-provoking thyme,
Fresh balm, and marygold of chearful hue:
The lowly gill, that never dares to climb;
And more I fain would sing, disdaining here to rhyme....

Here oft the dame, on Sabbath's decent eve, Hymned such psalms as Sternhold forth did mete; If winter 'twere, she to her hearth did cleave, But in her garden found a summer-seat : Sweet melody! to hear her then repeat How Israel's sons, beneath a foreign king, While taunting foemen did a song entreat, All for the nonce untuning every string, Uphung their useless lyres-small heart had they to sing.

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