'Alas! what a folly that wealth and domain We heap up in sin and in sorrow! Immense is the toil, yet the labour how vain! Is not life to be over to-morrow? Then glide on my moments, the few that I have, Smooth-shaded and quiet and even; While gently the body descends to the grave, And the spirit arises to heaven.' Dyer was an artist as well as a poet, and visited Italy, which suggested a poem in blank verse, _The Ruins of Rome_ (1740). After his return to England he entered into holy orders, took a wife, who is said to have been a descendant of Shakespeare, and settled at Calthorp in Leicestershire, which he afterwards exchanged for a living in Lincolnshire. There is much to like in Dyer, and he has had the good fortune to win the applause of two great poets. Gray says, in a letter to Horace Walpole, that he had 'more of poetry in his imagination than almost any of our number,' and Wordsworth in a sonnet, _To the Poet, John Dyer_, writes: 'Though hasty Fame hath many a chaplet culled For worthless brows, while in the pensive shade Of cold neglect she leaves thy head ungraced, Yet pure and powerful minds, hearts meek and still, A grateful few, shall love thy modest Lay, Long as the shepherd's bleating flock shall stray O'er naked Snowdon's wide aerial waste; Long as the thrush shall pipe on Grongar Hill!' [Sidenote: William Shenstone (1714-1764).] 'The true rustic style,' Charles Lamb writes, 'I think is to be found in Shenstone,' and he calls his _Schoolmistress_ the 'prettiest of poems.' William Shenstone was born in 1714 at the Leasowes in Hales-Owen, a spot upon which he afterwards expended his skill as a landscape gardener. In 1732 he went up to Pembroke College, Oxford, and remained there for some years without taking a degree. Those years appear to have been devoted to poetry. In 1737 Shenstone published a small volume anonymously. This was followed by the _Judgment of Hercules_ (1741), and by the _Schoolmistress_ (1742). In 1745 he undertook the management of his estate, and began, to quote Dr. Johnson's quaint description, 'to point his prospects, to diversify his surface, to entangle his walks, and to wind his waters; which he did with such judgment and such fancy, as made his little domain the envy of the great and the admiration of the skilful; a place to be visited by travellers and copied by designers.' On this estate, with its lakes and cascades, its urns and poetical inscriptions, its hanging woods, and 'wild shaggy precipice,' Shenstone appears to have spent all his fortune. He led the life of a dilettante, and died unmarried at the age of fifty. His elegies and songs are dead, and whatever vitality remains in his verse will be found in the _Pastoral Ballad_ and the _Schoolmistress_.