monte has traced the taste of English gardening to Shenstone. A man of genius sometimes receives from foreigners, who are placed out of the prejudices of his compatriots, the tribute of posterity!

Amidst these rural elegancies which Shenstone was raising about him, his muse has pathetically sung his melancholy feelings

But did the Muses haunt his cell,
Or in his dome did Venus dwell?—
When all the structures shone complete,
Ah, me! 'twas Damon's own confession,
Came Poverty, and took possession.

The Progress of Taste.

The poet observes, that the wants of philosophy are contracted, satisfied with "cheap contentment," but

An original image illustrates that fatal want of economy which conceals itself amidst the beautiful appearances of taste::

Some graceless mark,

Some symptom ill-conceal'd, shall soon or late
Burst like a pimple from the vicious tide

Of acid blood, proclaiming want's disease

Amidst the bloom of show.

He paints himself:

Economy.

Observe Florelio's mien;

Why treads my friend with melancholy step
That beauteous lawn? Why pensive strays his eye

O'er statues, grottos, urns, by critic art
Proportion'd fair? or from his lofty dome
Returns his eye unpleased, disconsolate?

The cause is, "criminal expense," and he exclaims

While Shenstone was rearing hazels and hawthorns, opening vistas, and winding waters;

And having shown them where to stray,
Threw little pebbles in their way;

while he was pulling down hovels and cowhouses, to compose mottos and inscriptions for garden-seats and urns; while he had so finely obscured with a tender gloom the grove of Virgil, and thrown over, "in the midst of a plantation of yew, a bridge of one arch, built of a dusty-coloured stone, and simple even to rudeness,"* and invoked Oberon in some Arcadian scene,

Where in cool grot and mossy cell

The tripping fauns and fairies dwell;

the solitary magician, who had raised all these wonders, was, in reality, an unfortunate poet, the tenant of a dilapidated farm-house, where the winds passed through, and the rains lodged, often taking refuge in his own kitchen

Far from all resort of mirth,

Save the cricket on the hearth!

In a letter of the disconsolate founder of landscape gardening, our author paints his situation with all its miserylamenting that his house is not fit to receive "polite friends, were they so disposed;" and resolved to banish all others, he proceeds:

"But I make it a certain rule, 'arcere profanum vulgus.' Persons who will despise you for the want of a good set of chairs, or an uncouth fire-shovel, at the same time that they can't taste any excellence in a mind that overlooks those things; with whom it is in vain that your mind is furnished, if the walls are naked; indeed one loses much of one's acquisitions in virtue by an hour's converse with such as judge of merit by money-yet I am now and then impelled by the social passion to sit half an hour in my kitchen."

But the solicitude of friends and the fate of Somerville, a neighbour and a poet, often compelled Shenstone to start amidst his reveries; and thus he has preserved his feelings and his irresolutions. Reflecting on the death of Somerville, he writes

*

Wheatley, on "Modern Gardening," p. 172. Edition 5th.
+In "Hull's Collection," vol. ii. letter ii.

"To be forced to drink himself into pains of the body, in order to get rid of the pains of the mind, is a misery which I can well conceive, because I may, without vanity, esteem myself his equal in point of economy, and consequently ought to have an eye on his misfortunes-(as you kindly hinted to me about twelve o'clock, at the Feathers.)-I should retrench-I will-but you shall not see me I will not let you know that I took it in good part-I will do it at solitary times as I may."

Such were the calamities of "great taste" with "little fortune;" but in the case of Shenstone, these were combined with the other calamity of "mediocrity of genius."

Here, then, at the Leasowes, with occasional trips to town in pursuit of fame, which perpetually eluded his grasp; in the correspondence of a few delicate minds, whose admiration was substituted for more genuine celebrity; composing diatribes against economy and taste, while his income was diminishing every year; our neglected author grew daily more indolent and sedentary, and withdrawing himself entirely into his own hermitage, moaned and despaired in an Arcadian solitude.* The cries and the "secret sorrows" of Shenstone have come down to us-those of his brothers have not always! And shall dull men, because they have minds cold and obscure, like a Lapland year which has no summer, be permitted to exult over this class of men of sensibility and taste, but of moderate genius and without fortune? The passions and emotions of the heart are facts and dates only to those who possess them.

To what a melancholy state was our author reduced, when he thus addressed his friend :

"I suppose you have been informed that my fever was in a great measure hypochondriacal, and left my nerves so extremely sensible, that even on no very interesting subjects, I could readily think myself into a vertigo; I had almost said an epilepsy; for surely I was oftentimes near it."

The features of this sad portrait are more particularly made out in another place.

* Graves was supposed to have glanced at his friend Shenstone in his novel of "Columella; or, the Distressed Anchoret." The aim of this work is to convey all the moral instruction I could wish to offer here to youthful genius. It is written to show the consequence of a person of education and talents retiring to solitude and indolence in the vigour of youth. Nichols's "Literary Anecdotes," vol. iii. p. 134. Nash's "History of Worcestershire," vol. i. p. 528.

"Now I am come home from a visit, every little uneasiness is sufficient to introduce my whole train of melancholy considerations, and to make me utterly dissatisfied with the life I now lead, and the life which I foresee I shall lead. I am angry and envious, and dejected and frantic, and disregard all present things, just as becomes a madman to do. I am infinitely pleased (though it is a gloomy joy) with the application of Dr. Swift's complaint, that he is forced to die in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.' My soul is no more fitted to the figure I make, than a cable rope to a cambric needle; I cannot bear to see the advantages alienated, which I think I could deserve and relish so much more than those that have them."

There are other testimonies in his entire correspondence. Whenever forsaken by his company he describes the horrors around him, delivered up to winter, silence, and reflection ;" ever foreseeing himself "returning to the same series of melancholy hours." His frame shattered by the whole train of hypochondriacal symptoms, there was nothing to cheer the querulous author, who with half the consciousness of genius, lived neglected and unpatronised. His elegant mind had not the force, by his productions, to draw the celebrity he sighed after, to his hermitage.

Shenstone was so anxious for his literary character, that he contemplated on the posthumous fame which he might derive from the publication of his letters: see Letter lxxix., On hearing his letters to Mr. Whistler were destroyed; the act of a merchant, his brother, who being a very sensible man, as Graves describes, yet with the stupidity of a Goth, destroyed the whole correspondence of Shenstone, for "its sentimental intercourse."-Shenstone bitterly regrets the loss, and says, "I would have given more money for the letters than it is allowable for me to mention with decency. I look upon my letters as some of my chefs-d'œuvre--they are the history of my mind for these twenty years past." This, with the loss of Cowley's correspondence, should have been preserved in the article, "of Suppressors and Dilapidators of Manuscripts."

ex

Towards the close of life, when his spirits were hausted, and "the silly clue of hopes and expectations," as he termed them, was undone, the notice of some persons of rank began to reach him. Shenstone, however, deeply colours the variable state of his own mind-"Recovering from a nervous fever, as I have since discovered by many con

current symptoms, I seem to anticipate a little of that "vernal delight' which Milton mentions and thinks

able to chase

All sadness but despair

at least I begin to resume my silly clue of hopes and expectations."

In a former letter he had, however, given them up: "I begin to wean myself from all hopes and expectations whatever. I feed my_wild-ducks, and I water my carnations. Happy enough if I could extinguish my ambition quite, to indulge the desire of being something more beneficial in my sphere. Perhaps some few other circumstances would want also to be adjusted."

What were these "hopes and expectations," from which sometimes he weans himself, and which are perpetually revived, and are attributed to " an ambition he cannot extinguish"? This article has been written in vain, if the reader has not already perceived, that they had haunted him in early life; sickening his spirit after the possession of a poetical celebrity, unattainable by his genius; some expectations too he might have cherished from the talent he possessed for political studies, in which Graves confidently says, that "he would have made no inconsiderable figure, if he had had a sufficient motive for applying his mind to them." Shenstone has left several proofs of this talent. But his master-passion for literary fame had produced little more than anxieties and disappointments; and when he indulged his pastoral fancy in a beautiful creation on his grounds, it consumed the estate which it adorned. Johnson forcibly expressed his situation: His death was probably hastened by his anxieties. He was a lamp that spent its oil in blazing. It is said, that if he had lived a little longer, he would have been assisted by a pension."

SECRET HISTORY OF THE BUILDING OF BLENHEIM.

THE secret history of this national edifice derives importance from its nature, and the remarkable characters involved in the unparalleled transaction. The great architect, when obstructed in the progress of his work by the irregular pay

*See his "Letters" xl. and xli., and more particularly xlii. and xliii., with a new theory of political principles.