Noted for his radicalism, he was a friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, William Wordsworth, Robert Southey and Thomas de Quincey; and was widely attacked by conservative publicists in the aftermath of the French Revolution for poems such as his 1798 Blank Verse, celebrating "the promis'd time … when equal man / Shall deem the world his temple".[37] Henry Francis Cary, a translator best known for his version of Dante's Divine Comedy, was educated at grammar schools in Sutton Coldfield and Birmingham during the 1780s and published a volume of Odes & Sonnets in 1788 while at the latter.[38] The poet William Shenstone had houses in Birmingham and Quinton as well as his famous estate The Leasowes to the west of Birmingham near Halesowen.[39] He lay at the centre of the Shenstone Circle – a group of writers and poets from the Birmingham area that included Richard Jago, John Scott Hylton, John Pixell, Richard Graves, Mary Whateley and Joseph Giles – a role that saw him described as the "Maecenas of the Midlands".[40]