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. 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. .