The honour of a prude is rage and storm, Prologue to the Tragedy of Coriolanus. No sect-alike it flowed to all mankind. He loved his friends with such a warmth of heart, 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, 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 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 With kindred blood by kindred hands profused: Rushed as a storm o'er half the astonished isle, First through the shoulders, or whatever part They tossed from side to side. In vain the stream Beat strong and frequent. Thick and pantingly The breath was fetched, and with huge labourings heaved. A wild delirium came: their weeping friends Had mixed the blood, and rank with fetid streams : 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 Of those infected, fewer 'scaped alive; Some sad at home, and in the desert some But none they found. It seemed the general air, Was then at enmity with English blood; In foreign climes; nor did this fury taste The foreign blood which England then contained. To Heaven, with suppliant rites they sent their prayers; With woes resistless, and enfeebling fear, 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,' His godlike presence. Dignity and grace To shake the firmness of the mind which knows Admiral Hosier's Ghost. As near Portobello lying On the gently swelling flood, Hideous yells and shrieks were heard ; Which for winding-sheets they wore, Frowning on that hostile shore. On them gleamed the moon's wan lustre, 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! You now triumph free from fears, When you think on our undoing, You will mix your joys with tears. 'See these mournful spectres sweeping Whose wan cheeks are stained with weeping; '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 'Thus, like thee, proud Spain dismaying, "He has played an English part," 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, We recall our shameful doom, Wander through the midnight gloom. 'O'er these waves for ever mourning When your patriot friends you see, Think on vengeance for my ruin, And for England-shamed in me.' 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 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. 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! A little bench of heedless bishops here, 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, 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, The noises intermixed, which thence resound, And think, no doubt, she been the greatest wight on ground. Herbs, too, she knew, and well of each could speak, 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. |