y, halfway up the hillside, Miller saw a semi-octagonal temple
dedicated to the genius of Thomson. It stood in a grassy hollow which
commanded a vast, open prospect and was a favorite resting place of the
poet of "The Seasons." In a shady, secluded ravine he found a white
pedestal, topped by an urn which Lyttelton had inscribed to the memory of
Shenstone. This contrast of situation seemed to the tourist emblematic.
Shenstone, he says, was an egotist, and his recess, true to his
character, excludes the distant landscape. Gray, who pronounced "The
Schoolmistress" a masterpiece in its kind, made a rather slighting
mention of its author.[45] "I have read an 8vo volume of Shenstone's
letters; poor man! He was always wishing for money, for fame and other
distinctions; and his whole philosophy consisted in living, against his
will, in retirement and in a place which his taste had adorned, but which
he only enjoyed when people of note came to see and commend it." Gray
unquestionably profited by a reading of Shenstone's "Elegies," which
antedate his own "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751). He
adopted Shenstone's stanza, which Shenstone had borrowed from the love
elegies of a now forgotten poet, James Hammond, equerry to Prince
Frederick and a friend of Cobham, Lyttelton, and Chesterfield. "Why
Hammond or other writers," says Johnson, "have thought the quatrain of
ten syllables elegiac, it is difficult to tell. The character of the
elegy is gentleness and tenuity, but this stanza has been pronounced by
Dryden. . .to be the most magnificent of all the measures which our
language affords."[46]

Next after "The Schoolmistress," the most engaging of Shenstone's poems
is his "Pastoral Ballad," written in 1743 in four parts and in a tripping
anapestic measure. Familiar to most readers is the stanza beginning:

"I have found out a gift for my fair,
I have found where the wood-pigeons breed."

Dr. Johnson acknowledged the prettiness of the conceit:

"So sweetly she bade me adieu,
I thought that she bade me return;"

and he used to quote and commend the well-known lines "Written at an Inn
at Henley:

"Whoe'er has travell'd life's dull round,
Where'er his stages may have been,
May sigh to think he still has found
The warmest welcome at an inn."

As to Shenstone's blank verse--of which there is not much--the doctor
says: "His blank verses, those that can read them may probab