William Somerville

(1692-1742).

in blank verse.

Tickell had written some lines on hunting, which he published as a fragment. His contemporary Somerville, selecting the same subject, wrote The Chase (1735), a poem He was born at Edston, in Warwickshire, and was said, Dr. Johnson writes, 'to be of the first family in his county.' He was educated at Winchester and Oxford, and had the tastes of a scholar as well as of a country gentleman, which, among other accomplishments, included that of hard drinking. We know little about him, and what we do know is deplorable, for his friend Shenstone writes that he was plagued and threatened by low wretches, and 'forced to drink himself into pains of the body in order to get rid of the pains of the mind.' He died in 1742, the owner of a good estate, which, owing to a contempt for economy, he was never able to enjoy. I loved him for nothing so much,' said Shenstone, as for his flocci-naucinihili-pili-fication of money.'

In The Chase Somerville had the advantage of knowing his subject, but knowledge is not poetry, and the interest of the poem is not due to its poetical qualities. He deserves some credit for his skill in handling a variety of metres as well as blank verse, in which his principal poem is written. In an address To Mr. Addison, the couplet,

'When panting Virtue her last efforts made,

You brought your Clio to the virgin's aid,'

is praised by Johnson as one of those happy strokes which are seldom attained. In the same poem Shakespeare and Addison are brought together in a way that is far from happy:

'In heaven he sings; on earth your muse supplies
Th' important loss, and heals our weeping eyes,
Correctly great, she melts each flinty heart
With equal genius, but superior art.'

Praise can be too strong even for a poet's digestion, and Somerville, who writes a great deal more nonsense in the same strain, should have remembered that he was not addressing a fool. If the poetical adulation of the time is to be excused, it must be on the ground that a poet had to live by patronage and not by the public. In a pecuniary point of view his subservience to men in high position was often successful. An almost universal custom, it was not regarded as degrading; but the poet must have been peculiarly constituted who was not degraded by it.

In the last century any subject was deemed suitable for poetry, and the Welsh poet, John Dyer, who was John Dyer born about 1698, found in his later life poetical (1698(?)-1758). materials in The Fleece (1757), a poem in four books of blank verse. His genius for descriptive poetry and his passionate and intelligent delight in natural objects are seen more pleasantly in Grongar Hill (published in the same year as Thomson's Winter), a poem not without grammatical inaccuracies, one of which deforms the first couplet, but full of poetical feeling. In an ease of composition which runs into laxity he reminds us occasionally of George Wither. His chief merit is, that while independent of Thomson, he was inspired by the same love, and wrote with the same aim. Dyer is not content with bare description, but likes to moralize on the landscape he surveys. Thus, when looking on a ruined tower, the poet exclaims

'Yet time has seen, that lifts the low,

And level lays the lofty brow,

Has seen this broken pile compleat,

Big with the vanity of state;

But transient is the smile of fate !

A little rule, a little sway,
A sunbeam in a winter's day,
Is all the proud and mighty have
Between the cradle and the grave.'

Dyer who is best seen in the octosyllabic metre, chose it also for The Country Walk, a poem in which, notwithstanding an occasional lapse into the conventional diction of the period, the rural pictures are drawn from life. He takes the reader into the farm-yard and fields as he writes: 'I am resolved this charming day

In the open field to stray,

And have no roof above my head

But that whereon the gods do tread.
Before the yellow barn I see

A beautiful variety

Of strutting cocks, advancing stout,
And flirting empty chaff about;

Hens, ducks, and geese, and all their brood,

And turkeys gobbling for their food;
While rustics thrash the wealthy floor,
And tempt all to crowd the door.

And now into the fields I go,

Where thousand flaming flowers glow,
And every neighbouring hedge I greet
With honey-suckles smelling sweet;
Now o'er the daisy meads I stray
And meet with, as I pace my way,
Sweetly shining on the eye

A rivulet gliding smoothly by,

Which shows with what an easy tide
The moments of the happy glide.'

An Epistle to a Friend in Town, records his satisfaction with the country retirement in which his days are passed. In a rather awkward stanza he says that he is more than content, and is indeed charmed with everything, and the lines close with the moralizing that was dear to Dyer's heart:

'Alas! what a folly that wealth and domain
We heap up in sin and in sorrow!
Immense is the toil, yet the labour how vain!
Is not life to be over to-morrow?

'Then glide on my moments, the few that I have,
Smooth-shaded and quiet and even ;

While gently the body descends to the grave,
And the spirit arises to heaven.'

Dyer was an artist as well as a poet, and visited Italy, which suggested a poem in blank verse, The Ruins of Rome (1740). After his return to England he entered into holy orders, took a wife, who is said to have been a descendant of Shakespeare, and settled at Calthorp in Leicestershire, which he afterwards exchanged for a living in Lincolnshire. There is much to like in Dyer, and he has had the good fortune to win the applause of two great poets. Gray says, in a letter to Horace Walpole, that he had more of poetry in his imagination than almost any of our number,' and Wordsworth in a sonnet, To the Poet, John Dyer, writes:

*

'Though hasty Fame hath many a chaplet culled
For worthless brows, while in the pensive shade
Of cold neglect she leaves thy head ungraced,
Yet pure and powerful minds, hearts meek and still,
A grateful few, shall love thy modest Lay,
Long as the shepherd's bleating flock shall stray
O'er naked Snowdon's wide aerial waste;

Long as the thrush shall pipe on Grongar Hill ! '

• The true rustic style,' Charles Lamb writes, 'I think is to be found in Shenstone,' and he calls his Schoolmistress the ' prettiest of poems.'

William Shenstone (1714-1764).

6

William Shenstone was born in 1714 at the Leasowes in Hales-Owen, a spot upon which he afterwards expended his skill as a landscape gardener. In 1732 he went up to Pembroke College, Oxford, and remained there for some years without taking a degree. Those years appear to have been devoted to poetry. In 1737 Shenstone published

a small volume anonymously. This was followed by the Judgment of Hercules (1741), and by the Schoolmistress (1742). In 1745 he undertook the management of his estate, and began, to quote Dr. Johnson's quaint description, 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 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.' On this estate, with its lakes and cascades, its urns and poetical inscriptions, its hanging woods, and wild shaggy precipice,' Shenstone appears to have spent all his fortune. He led the life of a dilettante, and died unmarried at the age of fifty. His elegies and songs are dead, and whatever vitality remains in his verse will be found in the Pastoral Ballad and the Schoolmistress.

The ballad written in anapæstic verse has an Arcadian grace, against which even Johnson's robust intellect was not proof. For the following lines he says, 'if any mind denies its sympathy it has no acquaintance with love or nature':

"When forced the fair nymph to forego,
What anguish I felt in my heart!
Yet I thought-but it might not be so-
"Twas with pain that she saw me depart.
She gazed as I slowly withdrew,

My path I could hardly discern;

So sweetly she bade me adieu,

I thought that she bade me return.'

The Schoolmistress, written in imitation of Spenser, has the merits of simplicity and homely humour. The village dame is a life-like character, and the urchins whom she is supposed to teach, and does sometimes teach by chastisement, are cunningly portrayed.