1. William Shenstone was an English poet and one of the earliest practitioners of landscape gardening through the development of his estate, The Leasowes.
12 Facts About William Shenstone
1. 2.
William Shenstone went up to Pembroke College, Oxford in 1732 and made another firm friend there in Richard Graves, the author of The Spiritual Quixote.
3.
William Shenstone took no degree, but, while still at Oxford, he published Poems on various occasions, written for the entertainment of the author.
4.
William Shenstone tried hard to suppress it but in 1742 he published anonymously a revised draft of The Schoolmistress, a Poem in imitation of Spenser.
5.
The inspiration of the poem was Sarah Lloyd, teacher of the village school where William Shenstone received his first education.
6.
William Shenstone inherited the Leasowes estate, and retired there in 1745 to undertake what proved the chief work of his life, the beautifying of his property.
7.
William Shenstone embarked on elaborate schemes of landscape gardening which gave The Leasowes a wide celebrity, but sadly impoverished the owner.
8.
William Shenstone desired constant admiration of his gardens, and he never ceased to lament his lack of fame as a poet.
9.
In 1759, William Shenstone made the acquaintance of James Woodhouse, a shoe-maker from nearby Rowley Regis who had started writing poetry.
10.
William Shenstone encouraged Woodhouse's literary efforts, allowing him access to the library at the Leasowes and including one of Woodhouse's works in a collection of poems published in 1762.
11.
William Shenstone's Schoolmistress was admired by Oliver Goldsmith, with whom Shenstone had much in common, and his Elegies written at various times and to some extent biographical in character won the praise of Robert Burns who, in the preface to Poems, chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, called him.
12.
The word shrubbery is first recorded by the OED in a letter of Lady Luxborough in 1748 to William Shenstone: "Nature has been so remarkably kind this last Autumn to adorn my Shrubbery with the flowers that usually blow at Whitsuntide".