me that Charles Wightwick, then Vicegerent, used to preach, in his day, fifteen-minute sermons out of a book. Dr. Jeune preached there on one occasion; but sermons had then been dropped. The services had not always been said nakedly and plainly. In the sixties a voluntary choir and a harmonium produced some music, and ritualistic innovations began to alarm those in authority'. HERBERT AUGUSTUS SALWEY, however, early in 1868 was allowed to introduce a choir of boys on Sunday evenings. Though subsidized by the College it was not of long continuance. It was the custom until the Mastership of Dr. Evans to bring the Holy Sacrament to the communicants kneeling in their places. With the arrangement of the seats usual in a college chapel, such a practice was painfully inconsistent with reverence. It is very unlikely, however, to have been a puritan survival, and savours rather of monasticism. The custom was only this last year (1896) abolished at St. Mary's, but is retained at Christ Church, once in each month. A mere Calvinistic illegality would scarcely have escaped the vigilance of such a Visitor as Laud; nor, if introduced by Langley, would it have outlived the Restoration. If invented by Bishop Hall could it have survived the migration to the new Chapel under high-church Dr. Panting? A photograph of the Chapel, as it was, was taken in 1884. It was amid such surroundings that Johnson humbly worshipped on his visits to the College, in his later years, while the Chapel was crowded with sightseers who had flocked thither to gaze at him. Bishop Jeune told Mr. Burgon that aged persons in his time remembered this. 1 See below, in a later chapter, under 'Minutes.' 2 Referred to, perhaps, as my friend the Rev. ROBErt George LivINGSTONE (late Tutor and Vicegerent, formerly curate of St. Mary's, under Burgon) reminds me, in Keble's lines: 'Sweet, awful hour! the only sound One gentle footstep gliding round.' Laud, Dec. 19, 1636, put a stop to the Eucharist being celebrated in the body of the Church of St. Mary's. We find Bishop Juxon complaining that the communicants expected the priest to forsake his place and bring the Sacrament to them. Archdeacon Bostock, in 1640, says: "They sit still in their seats or pews to have the blessed Body and Blood of our Saviour go up and down to seek them all the church over.' A college chapel, however, resembles the chancel of a church; and the rubrick clearly expects those that are minded to receive the holy Communion' to be 'conveniently placed' there, apart from 'the people.' So Cosin, in his Regni Angliae Religio Catholica (1652), says, 'The Exhortation ended, those who are about to communicate enter the choir.' The Prayer Book of 1549 ordered noncommunicants to depart out of the quire. Bishop Ridley went further, and in 1551 caused 'the vaile to be drawen that no person should see but those that receaved, and he closed the iron gates of the quire on the north and south side that non might remain in the quire' (Wriothesley's Chronicle). B b CHAPTER XXVIII. THE SINGING BIRDS. WHEN Johnson told Miss More that Pembroke had been in or about his time a nest of singing birds, he included some, perhaps, of but a small pipe. Not theirs the 'enchanting shell,' 'sovereign of the willing soul, parent of sweet and solemn-breathing airs.' Of WILLIAM SHENSTONE, however, Burns said: 'His divine Elegies do honour to our language, our nation, and our species.' In the more measured words of a modern critic, Shenstone added some pleasing pastoral and elegiac strains to our national poetry. His highest effort is the Schoolmistress, a quaint and ludicrous sketch in the manner of Spenser, vivid as a picture by Teniers or Wilkie. His Pastoral Ballad is the finest English poem in that order. No modern poet has approached Shenstone in the simple tenderness and pathos of pastoral song.' There is, of course, some affected Arcadianism in his poetry. He was a Tibullus, playing with verse. Shenstone, eldest son of a plain uneducated country gentleman,' was born at Halesowen1. His mother was one of the Worcestershire Penns. The dame who gave him his first schooling is pourtrayed in the Schoolmistress. The child so delighted in books that when any of the family went marketing he or she was expected to bring back reading for William, who carried it off to bed and laid it by him. Once, when there was none for him, his mother induced him to sleep by putting under his pillow a piece of wood wrapped up to resemble a book. Leaving Halesowen Grammar School, aged seventeen, Shenstone matriculated on May 25, 1732, from Pembroke: a society,' Johnson adds with pardonable partiality, 'which for half a century has been eminent for English poetry and elegant literature. Here it appears he found delight and advantage, for he continued his name there ten 'His matriculation entry, however, appears as 'Gul. Shenstone, 17, Tho. fil: Wickstone in com. Leicest. Gen. fil.' 2 Chalmers, mistaking Johnson, says, 'for half a century had been eminent,' which is not correct. years, though he took no degree. After the first four years he put on the civilian's gown, but without shewing any intention to engage in the profession... At Oxford he employed himself upon English poetry, and in 1737 published a small miscellany, without his name.' This was a sheaf of verses described as 'Poems upon Various Occasions, written for the Entertainment of the Author, and printed for the Amusement of a few Friends, prejudiced in his Favour.' Shenstone took such pains to suppress this undergraduate attempt that the price of the duodecimo went up to £151. He gave himself at College to logic, natural and moral philosophy, and the mathematics, in which he attained considerable proficiency, and to which he frequently in his writings alludes. The author of the Spiritual Quixote says: 'Mr. Shenstone made but few acquaintance in the University. A degree of bashfulness from his confined education, joined with a consciousness of his own real abilities, made him not inclined to make advances to strangers; indeed, though those that knew him highly loved and esteemed him, yet the singularity of his appearance rather prejudiced some people against him. . . . According to the unnatural taste which then prevailed, every school-boy, as soon as he was entered at the University, cut off his hair, whatever it was; and, without any regard to his complexion, put on a wig, black, white, brown, or grizzle, as "lawless fancy" suggested. This fashion no consideration could at that time have induced Mr. Shenstone to comply with. He wore his hair, however, almost in the graceful manner which has since generally prevailed; but, as his person was rather large for so young a man and his hair coarse, it often exposed him to the ill-natured remarks of people who had not half his sense; insomuch that his friends were often in pain for the unfavourable opinion which strangers sometimes expressed of him, and were under a necessity of vindicating him, as Horace is supposed to have done Virgil, by allowing his foibles and balancing them with his more valuable good qualities. 'Mr. Shenstone had one ingenious and much-valued friend in Oxford, Mr. Jago, his Schoolfellow, whom he could only visit in private, as he wore a servitor's gown; it being then deemed a great disparagement for a commoner to appear in public with one in that situation; which, by the way, would make one wish, with Dr. Johnson, that there were no young people admitted, in that servile state, in a place of liberal education 2. 1 See Isaac d'Israeli's Shenstone Vindicated (Curiosities of Literature, vol. iii. p. 95). Dodsley says he was accounted a Beau at Oxford. " He asks, 'What good end can it answer in these times when every genteel profession is so overstocked, to rob our agriculture or our manufactures of so many useful hands, by encouraging every substantial farmer or mechanical tradesman to breed his son to the Church?... Mr. Jago, however, who was the son of a clergyman 'Though Mr. Shenstone obtained no academical honours nor took any degree in the University, he did not, like many young coxcombs of more parts perhaps than application, or who, from too large an allowance from wealthy parents, have bid defiance to the established discipline, speak contemptuously of the fruit to which he was too indolent to climb up. On the contrary he was fond of an academical life and greatly approved of its institution; and, as his fortune was a very sufficient foundation for a genteel profession, he intended to have taken his degrees and to have proceeded in the study of physic.' His coming into the estate at Leasowes took him away, however, from nursing his flame' by 'list'ning Cherwell's osier banks.' 'He prolonged his stay in the country beyond what the business of the college regularly admitted. And having once neglected to return to the University at the proper season, he deferred it from time to time, till at length he felt a reluctance to returning at all.' After a short 'beating about literary coffee-houses' in town, Shenstone settled down to rural rêverie, as the father of landscape gardening'.' The Leasowes became famous in Shenstone's hands as an elaborated Arcadian toy. Its winding waters, bijou lakes, and murmuring cascades spanned by a Chinese bridge, its tiny groves, mæandering walks and miniature prospects, were contrived with taste and skill, attracting numberless visitors. Shenstone delighted to show them round, but was irritated when asked if there were any fish in his streams and pools. He so lived in his demesnes that he neglected his house, and if the rain came in could find no money to patch the roof. Johnson says: 'In time his expences brought clamours about him, that overpowered the lamb's bleat and the linnet's song; and his groves were haunted by in Warwickshire, with a large family, and who could not otherwise have given his son a liberal education, may be thought an instance in favour of this institution. 'But I make no doubt that a respectable clergyman, as Mr. Jago's father was, might, by a very slight application to the head or fellows of almost any College, have procured some scholarship or exhibition for a youth of genius and properly qualified; which, with a very small additional expence, might have supported him in the University without placing him in so humiliating a situation; which, in some future period of his life (when perhaps his parts might have raised him to some eminence in the world) might put it in the power of any purse-proud fellow collegian to boast that he had waited on him in the College; though perhaps all the obligation he had lain under to such a patron was the receiving sixpence a week, not as an act of generosity but as a tribute imposed on him by the standing rules of the society.' 1 Is it not thus? You may either look at a house or from a house. If the former, you make your garden formal and architectural. When architecture and man himself became uninteresting, people looked out of window, and landscape gardening came in. We love Nature because we have lost Art. Had we anything of human interest to gaze at, we should put scenery' back into its proper place as the beautiful frame of Man and his handiwork. beings very different from fawns and fairies. He spent his estate in adorning it, and his death was probably hastened by his anxieties. He was a lamp that spent its oil in blazing.' The delubra deorum had better have remained cowhouses. Shenstone laments in The Progress of Taste: 'But did the Muses haunt his cell, Or in his dome did Venus dwell? He was Shenstone died at the Leasowes of a putrid fever on February 11, 1763, and lies in Halesowen Church under a plain stone. unmarried, but not heart-whole. Dodsley describes him as a man of much tenderness and generosity, large, clumsy, and heavy-looking, except when his face was lit up by some sprightly sentiment. His hair was grey very early. He seldom wore anything, summer or winter, but a plain blue coat and scarlet waistcoat with a broad gold lace. He is thus painted in the portrait in the College Bursary. There is an urn erected to his memory at Hagley by his friend and neighbour, Lord Lyttelton, and Montesquieu inscribed to him in bad English but in pure taste,' amid memorials dedicated to Virgil and Theocritus, a garden seat at Ermenouville, 'the Leasowes of France',' as was done by others elsewhere. If he incongruously blended the rural swain with the disciple of virtù,' at any rate his were not the counterfeited pastorals of a Fleet Street poet, but transcriptions of real sentiments and places. Gray (who is said to have borrowed from the Schoolmistress the idea of the famous line 'Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest') had no patience with Shenstone's sentimentalities about nature and the country and simplicity. He goes hopping along his own gravel walks, and never deviates from the beaten path for fear of being lost.' He pictures him exchanging endless letters and verses with neighbouring clergymen of a poetical turn. As a writer, however, no one can deny to Shenstone skill and fastidious grace, though he is delicate and tender rather than bracing. When forced from dear Hebe' will always live wedded to Arne's delicious air. Boswell records Johnson's emotion at Henley when recalling the lines: 'Whoe'er has travell'd life's dull round, Where'er his stages may have been, The warmest welcome at an Inn.' 'Château gothique, mais orné de bois charmans, dont j'ai pris l'idée en Angleterre.' |