d; 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--

"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.[60] 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 particular