[022] This is generally put into the mouth of Pope, but if we are to believe Spence, who is the only authority for the anecdote, it was addressed to himself.
[023] It has been said that in laying out the grounds at Hagley, Lord Lyttelton received some valuable hints from the author of _The Seasons_, who was for some time his Lordship's guest. The poet has commemorated the beauties of Hagley Park in a description that is familiar to all lovers of English poetry. I must make room for a few of the concluding lines.
Meantime you gain the height, from whose fair brow, The bursting prospect spreads immense around: And snatched o'er hill, and dale, and wood, and lawn, And verdant field, and darkening heath between, And villages embosomed soft in trees, And spiry towns by surging columns marked, Of household smoke, your eye excursive roams; Wide stretching from the hall, in whose kind haunt The hospitable genius lingers still, To where the broken landscape, by degrees, Ascending, roughens into rigid hills; O'er which the Cambrian mountains, like far clouds, That skirt the blue horizon, dusky rise.
It certainly does not look as if there had been any want of kindly feeling towards Shenstone on the part of Lyttelton when we find the following inscription in Hagley Park.
To the memory of William Shenstone, Esquire, In whose verse Were all the natural graces. And in whose manners Was all the amiable simplicity Of pastoral poetry, With the sweet tenderness Of the elegiac.
There is also at Hagley a complimentary inscription on an urn to Alexander Pope; and, on an octagonal building called _Thomson's Seat_, there is an inscription to the author of _The Seasons_. Hagley is kept up with great care and is still in possession of the descendants of the founder. But a late visitor (Mr. George Dodd) expresses a doubt whether the Leasowes, even in its comparative decay, is not a finer bit of landscape, a more delightful place to lose one-self in, than even its larger and better preserved neighbour.
[024] Coleridge is reported to have said--"There is in Crabbe an absolute defect of high imagination; he gives me little pleasure. Yet no doubt he has much power of a certain kind, and it is good to cultivate, even at some pains, a catholic taste in literature." Walter Savage Landor, in his "Imaginary Conversations," makes Porson say--"Crabbe wrote with a two-penny nail and scratched rough truths and rogues' facts on mud walls." Horace Smith represents Crabbe, as "Pope in worsted stockings." That there is merit of some sort or other, and that of no ordinary kind, in Crabbe's poems, is what no one will deny. They relieved the languor of the last days of two great men, of very different characters--Sir Walter Scott and Charles James Fox.