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 probably find to be like the blank verses of his neighbors.”  Shenstone encouraged Percy to publish his “Reliques.”  The plans for the grounds at Abbotsford were somewhat influenced by Didsley’s description of the Leasowes, which Scott studied with great interest.

In 1744 Mark Akenside, a north country man and educated partly in Scotland, published his “Pleasures of Imagination,” afterwards rewritten as “The Pleasures of the Imagination” and spoiled in the process.  The title and something of the course of thought in the poem were taken from Addison’s series of papers on the subject (Spectator, Nos. 411-421).  Akenside was a man of learning and a physician of distinction.  His poem, printed when he was only twenty-three, enjoyed a popularity now rather hard to account for.  Gray complained of its obscurity and said it was issued nine years