one began to embellish his
paternal acres, says that the Leasowes was the poet's most elaborate
poem, "the singularly ingenious composition, inscribed on an English
hillside, which employed for twenty long years the taste and genius of
Shenstone."

[44] See "Lady Luxborough's Letters to Shenstone," 1775, for a long
correspondence about an urn which _she_ was erecting to Somerville's
memory. She was a sister of Bolingbroke, had a seat at Barrels, and
exchanged visits with Shenstone.

[45] "Letter to Nichols," June 24, 1769.

[46] Dryden's "Annus Mirabilis," Davenant's "Gondibert," and Sir John
Davies' "Nosce Teipsum" were written in this stanza, but the universal
currency of Gray's poem associated it for many years almost exclusively
with elegiac poetry. Shenstone's collected poems were not published till
1764, though some of them had been printed in Dodsley's "Miscellanies."
Only a few of his elegies are dated in the collected editions (Elegy
VIII, 1745; XIX, 1743; XXI, 1746), but Graves says that they were all
written before Gray's. The following lines will recall to every reader
corresponding passages in Gray's "Churchyard":

"O foolish muses, that with zeal aspire
To deck the cold insensate shrine with bays!

"When the free spirit quits her humble frame
To tread the skies, with radiant garlands crowned;

"Say, will she hear the distant voice of Fame,
Or hearing, fancy sweetness in the sound?"
--_Elegy II_.

"I saw his bier ignobly cross the plain."
--_Elegy III_.

"No wild ambition fired their spotless breast."
--_Elegy XV_.

"Through the dim veil of evening's dusky shade
Near some lone fane or yew's funereal green," etc.
--_Elegy IV_.

"The glimmering twilight and the doubtful dawn
Shall see your step to these sad scenes return,
Constant as crystal dews impearl the lawn," etc.
--_Ibid_.

[47] "Life of Akenside."

[48] "Pleasures of Hope."

[49] _cf._ Wordsworth's

"Some casual shout that broke the silent air,
Or the unimaginable touch of time."
--_Mutability: Ecclesiastical Sonnets_, XXXIV.

CHAPTER V.

The Miltonic Group

That the influence of Milton, in the romantic revival of the eighteenth
century, should have been hardly second in importance to Spenser's is a
confirmation of our remark that Augustan literature was "classical" in a
way