from Isaac D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature: The Domestic Life of a Poet--Shenstone Vindicated

It was now that he entered into another species of poetry, working with too costly materials, in the magical composition of plants, water, and earth; with these he created those emotions, which his more strictly poetical ones failed to excite. He planned a paradise amidst his solitude.

When we consider that SHENSTONE, in developing his fine pastoral ideas in the Leasowes, educated the nation into that taste for landscape-gardening which has become the model of all Europe, this itself constitutes a claim on the gratitude of posterity. Thus the private pleasures of a man of genius may become at length those of a whole people. The creator of this new taste appears to have received far less notice than he merited. The name of SHENSTONE does not appear in the Essay on Gardening, by Lord Orford: even the supercilious Gray only bestowed a ludicrous image on these pastoral scenes, which, however, his friend Mason has celebrated; and the genius of Johnson, incapacitated by nature to touch on objects of rural fancy, after describing some of the offices of the landscape designer, adds, that "he will not inquire whether they demand any great powers of mind." Johnson, however, conveys to us his own feelings, when he immediately expresses them under the character of "a sullen and surly speculator." The anxious life of SHENSTONE would indeed have been remunerated, could he have read the enchanting eulogium of WHEATLEY on the Leasowes; which, said he, "is a perfect picture of his mind" simple, elegant, and amiable; and will always suggest a doubt whether the spot inspired his verse, or whether, in the scenes which he formed, he only realised the pastoral images which abound in his songs. Yes! SHENSTONE had been delighted could he have heard that Montesquieu, on his return home, adorned his Chateau Gothique, mais orne de bois charmans, dont j'ai pris ledee en Angleterre;and SHENSTONE, even with his modest and timid nature, had been proud to have witnessed a noble foreigner, amidst memorials dedicated to Theocritus and Virgil, to Thomson and Gesner, raising in his grounds an inscription, in bad English, but in pure taste, to SHENSTONE himself; for having displayed in his writings "a mind natural," and in his Leasowes "laid Arcadian greens rural;" and recently Pindemonte 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

"Taste alone requires
Entire profusion! days and nights, and hours,
Thy voice, hydropic Fancy! calls aloud
For costly draughts".

ECONOMY.
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."

ECONOMY.
He paints himself:

"Observe Florelio's mien;
Why treads my friend with melancholy step
That beauteous lawn? Why pensive strays his eye
O'er statues, grottoes, 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,

"Sweet interchange
Of river, valley, mountain, woods, and plains,
How gladsome once he ranged your native turf,
Your simple scenes how raptur'd! ere EXPENSE
Had lavish'd thousand ornaments, and taught
Convenience to perplex him, Art to pall,
Pomp to deject, and Beauty to displease."

ECONOMY.
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 mottoes and inscriptions for garden-seats and urns; while he had so finely obscured with a tender gloom the grove of Virgil, and thrown over, "n the midst of a plantation of yew, a bridge of one arch, built of a dusky-coloured stone, and simple even to rudeness," and invoked Oberon in some Arcadian scene;

"here 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 farmhouse, 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 misery--menting 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."