III. William Shenstone, of the Leasowes, in Hales Owen, a detached portion of Shropshire, was born in November, 1714. In early youth he manifested a great fondness for books--a fondness which increased upon him with years. Shenstone did not write from necessity; and until summoned by the death, in 1745, of Mr. Dolman--a gentleman who appears to have been _in loco parentis_--to the management of his own estate, he lived "a restless life, flying to places of fashionable resort, and from one to another of these." Four years before the death of Mr. Dolman, he had published two poems--The Judgment of Hercules, and The Schoolmistress--the latter of considerable merit. After retiring to his estate in Hales Owen, he wrote his elegies, odes, ballads, levities, &c. &c, the first of which have, more than any thing else, gained him his renown as a poet. Shenstone passed many years of his life in embellishing his grounds at the Leasowes. Improving on the admirable lessons of Lord Bacon, he formed an Utopia at the foot of the Wrekin, and "became famous even on the continent for his taste in gardening." But with Shenstone as a gardener I have nothing to do. Of his poems, the Schoolmistress is the most amiable and natural. We find the simplicity of this combined with a querulous tenderness in his elegies. I scarcely know of any thing in the elegiac order so pretty and touching as the little poem in which he refers to the murder of Kenelm the Saxon boy, by a sister who had been his nurse, and who had doted on him--until an ambitious yearning after the crown of Mercia, and the words of a paramour, made her, while hunting among the Clent hills, "do murder on him"--on him whom an old chronicler has quaintly yet touchingly styled "the sunnye hayred brotherr of her hearte." Shenstone was a poet of refined tastes. His fancy was polished, and he had trained himself well in the art of expression--if expression can be called an art. Like his brother poets, he worshipped at the shrine of love--often mingling the myrtle with the cypress. His Delia was no creature of the imagination. And like the Althea of Lovelace--like the nameless bringer of "wilde unrest" to Shakspeare--like her who was as a long-toothed viper at the heart of poor Lope de Vega; in fine, without multiplying "likes," Delia, if we are to judge from the poet's tone and life, did not love where she was best loved. Alas! when was woman as the rose which the nightingale serenades? When opened she her heart to song? Dante sung to Beatrice--Tasso made the name of Leonora D'Este famous on earth--Petrarch spun his heart into melody, and immortalized his Laura--Wyatt rhymed to Anne Boleyn. And how ended their wooings? Some worse--none better than that of Shenstone.