Of the rest of the group mentioned above, Shenstone[112] is the earliest, the most isolated, and the least directly affected by the mediæval influence. Yet he, too, must have felt it to have engaged, as we know he did, with Percy in that enterprise of the _Reliques_ which his early death cut him off from sharing fully. From his pretty generally known poems no one need have inferred much tendency of the kind in him: for his Spenserian imitation, _The Schoolmistress_, has as much of burlesque as of discipleship in it. Nor are indications of the kind extremely plentiful in his prose works. But the remarkable _Essays on Men and Manners_, which give a much higher notion of Shenstone’s power than his excursions into the rococo, whether versified or hortulary, are full of the new germs. Even here, however, he is, after the prevailing manner of his century, much more ethical than literary, and shows deference, if not reverence, to not a few of its literary idols. The mixed character of his remarks on Pope[113] (which are, however, on the whole very just) may be set down by the Devil’s Advocate to the kind of jealousy commonly entertained by the “younger generations who are knocking at the door”; and his objection to the plan of Spenser is neo-classically purblind. But his remarks on Prosody[114] breathe a new spirit, which, a little later, we shall be able to trace in development. His preference for rhymes that are “long” in pronunciation over snip-snaps like “cat” and “not”; his discovery—herald of the great Coleridgean reaction—that “there is a vast beauty in emphasising in the eighth and ninth place a word that is virtually a dactyl”; the way in which he lays stress on harmony of period and music of style as sources of literary pleasure; and above all the fact, that when examining the “dactylic” idea just given, he urges the absurdity of barring trisyllabic feet in _any_ place, and declares that a person ignorant of Latin can discern Virgil’s harmony, show us the new principles at work. Perhaps his acutest critical passage is the maxim, “Every good poet includes a critic: the reverse will not hold”; his most Romantic, “The words ‘no more’ have a singular pathos, reminding us at once of past pleasure and the future exclusion of it.”[115] [Sidenote: _Percy._]