This edition is now lying before me, with its splendid “red-letter,” its “seemly designs,” and, what is more precious, its “Index.”  Shenstone, who had greatly pleased himself with his graphical inventions, at length found that his engraver, Mynde, had sadly bungled with the poet’s ideal.  Vexed and disappointed, he writes, “I have been plagued to death about the ill-execution of my designs.  Nothing is certain in London but expense, which I can ill bear.”  The truth is, that what is placed in the landskip over the thatched-house, and the birch-tree, is like a falling monster rather than a setting sun; but the fruit-piece at the end, the grapes, the plums, the melon, and the Catharine pears, Mr. Mynde has made sufficiently tempting.  This edition contains only twenty-eight stanzas, which were afterwards enlarged to thirty-five.  Several stanzas have been omitted, and they have also passed through many corrections, and some improvements, which show that Shenstone had more judgment and felicity in severe correction than perhaps is suspected.  Some of these I will point out.[321]

In the second stanza, the first edition has,

    In every mart that stands on Britain’s isle,
    In every village less reveal’d to fame,
    Dwells there in cottage known about a mile,
    A matron old, whom we schoolmistress name.

Improved thus:—­

    In every village mark’d with little spire,
    Embower’d in trees, and hardly known to fame,
    There dwells in lowly shed and mean attire,
    A matron old, whom we schoolmistress name.

The eighth stanza, in the first edition, runs,

    The gown, which o’er her shoulders thrown she had,
    Was russet stuff (who knows not russet stuff?)
    Great comfort to her mind that she was clad
    In texture of her own, all strong and tough;
    Ne did she e’er complain, ne deem it rough, &c.

More elegantly descriptive is the dress as now delineated:—­

    A russet stole was o’er her shoulders thrown,
    A russet kirtle fenced the nipping air;
    ’Twas simple russet, but it was her own: 
    ’Twas her own country bred the flock so fair,
    ’Twas her own labour did the fleece prepare, &c.

The additions made to the first edition consist of the 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15th stanzas, in which are so beautifully introduced the herbs and garden stores, and the psalmody of the schoolmistress; the 29th and 30th stanzas were also subsequent insertions.  But those lines which give so original a view of genius in its infancy,

    A little bench of heedless bishops here,
    And there a chancellor in embryo, &c.

were printed in 1742; and I cannot but think that the far-famed stanza in Gray’s Elegy, where he discovers men of genius in peasants, as Shenstone has in children, was suggested by this original conception: 

Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood,