For the “artificial-natural” was a trait of Shenstone’s gardening no less than of his poetry.  He closed every vista and emphasized every opening in his shrubberies and every spot that commanded a prospect with come object which was as an exclamation point on the beauty of the scene:  a rustic bench, a root-house, a Gothic alcove, a grotto, a hermitage, a memorial urn or obelisk dedicated to Lyttelton, Thomson, Somerville,[44] Dodsley, or some other friend.  He supplied these with inscriptions expressive of the sentiments appropriate to the spot, passages from Vergil, or English or Latin verses of his own composition.  Walpole says that Kent went so far in his imitation of natural scenery as to plant dead trees in Kensington Garden.  Walpole himself seems to approve of such devices as artificial ruins, “a feigned steeple of a distant church or an unreal bridge to disguise the termination of water.”  Shenstone was not above these little effects:  he constructed a “ruinated priory” and a temple of Pan out of rough, unhewn stone; he put up a statue of a piping faun, and another of the Venus dei Medici beside a vase of gold fishes.

Some of Shenstone’s inscriptions have escaped the tooth of time.  The motto, for instance, cut upon the urn consecrated to the memory of his cousin, Miss Dolman, was prefixed by Byron to his “Elegy upon Thyrza”:  “Heu quanto minus est cum reliquis versari quam tui meminisse!” The habit of inscription prevailed down to the time of Wordsworth, who composed a number for the grounds of Sir George Beaumont at Coleorton.  One of Akenside’s best pieces is his “Inscription for a Grotto,” which is not unworthy of Landor.  Matthew Green, the author of “The Spleen,” wrote a poem of some 250 lines upon Queen Caroline’s celebrated grotto in Richmond Garden.  “A grotto,” says Johnson, apropos of that still more celebrated one at Pope’s Twickenham villa, “is not often the wish or pleasure of an Englishman, who has more frequent need to solicit than exclude the sun”; but the increasing prominence of the mossy cave and hermit’s cell, both in descriptive verse and in gardening, was symptomatic.  It was a note of the coming romanticism, and of that pensive, elegiac strain which we shall encounter in the work of Gray, Collins, and the Wartons.  It marked the withdrawal of the muse from the world’s high places into the cool sequestered vale of life.  All through the literature of the mid-century, the high-strung ear may catch the drip-drip of spring water down the rocky walls of the grot.

At Hagley, 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.