IT is to be regretted that no one of Mason's friends has thought fit to pay the same tribute of respect to his memory, which he had himself paid to that of his two poetical friends, Gray and Whitehead. In this dearth of authentic biography, we must be contented with such information concerning him, as either his own writings, or the incidental mention made of him by others, will furnish.

William Mason was born on the 23d of February, 1725, at Hull, where his father, who was vicar of St. Trinity, resided. Whether he had any other preceptor in boyhood, except his parent, is not known. That this parent was a man of no common attainments, appears from a poem which his son addressed to him when he had attained his twenty-first year, and in which he acknowledged with gratitude the instructions he had received from him in the arts of painting, poetry, and music. In 1742, he was admitted of St. John's College, Cambridge; and there, in 1744, the year in which Pope died, he wrote Museus, a monody on that poet; and Il Bellicoso and Il Pacifico, a very juvenile imitation, as he properly calls it, of the Allegro and Penseroso. In 1745, he took his degree of Bachelor of Arts; and in the ensuing year, with a heavy heart, and with some fear lest he should grow old in northern clime,' bade farewell to Granta in an Ode, which commemorates the virtues of his tutor Dr. Powell. He soon, however, returned; by his father's permission visited London; and removing from St. John's College to Pembroke Hall, was unexpectedly nominated Fellow of that society in 1747, when, by the advice of Dr. Powell, he published Museus. His fourth Ode expresses his delight at the prospect of being restored to the banks of the Cam. In a letter to a friend written this year, he boasts that his poem had already passed through three impressions. At the same time, he wrote his Ode to a

Water Nymph, not without some fancy and elegance, in which his passion for the new style of gardening first showed itself; as his political bias did the year after in Isis, a poem levelled against the supposed Toryism of Oxford, and chiefly valuable for having called forth the Triumph of Isis, by Thomas Warton. To this he prefixed an advertisement, declaring that it would never have appeared in print, had not an interpolated copy, published in a country newspaper, scandalously misrepresented the principles of the author. Now commenced his intimacy with Gray, who was rather more than eight years his senior, a disparity which, at that period of life, is apt to prevent men at college from uniting very closely. His friend described him to Dr. Wharton as having much fancy, little judgment, and a good deal of modesty. "I take him," continued Gray, "for a good and well-meaning creature; but then he is really in simplicity a child, and loves every body he meets with: he reads little or nothing, writes abundance, and that with a design to make his fortune by it." On reviewing this character of himself twenty-five years after, he confessed, what cannot be matter of surprise, that this interval had made a considerable abatement in his general philanthropy; but denied having looked for more emolument from his publications than a few guineas to take him to a play or an opera. Gray's next report of him, after a year's farther acquaintance, is, that he grows apace into his good graces, as he knows him more; that "he is very ingenious, with great good nature and simplicity; a little vain, but in so harmless and so comical a way, that it does not offend one at all; a little ambitious, but withal so ignorant in the world and its ways, that this does not hurt him in one's opinion; so sincere and so undisguised, that no mind with a spark of generosity would ever think

of hurting him, he lies so open to injury; but so indolent, that if he cannot overcome this habit, all his good qualities will signify nothing at all." At this time, he published an Ode on the Installation of the Duke of Newcastle, which his friend, who was a laughing spectator of the ceremony, considers" the only entertainment that had any tolerable elegance," and thinks it, "with some little abatements, uncommonly well on such an occasion:" it was, however, very inferior to that which he himself composed when the Duke of Grafton was installed.

His next production (in 1751) was Elfrida, written on the model of the ancient Greek Tragedy; a delicate exotic, not made to thrive in our "cold septentrion blasts," and which, when it was long after transferred to the theatre by Colman, was unable to endure the rough aspect of a British audience. The poet complained of some trimming and altering that had been thought requisite by the manager on the occasion; and Colman, it is said, in return, threatened him with a chorus of Grecian washerwomen. Matters were no better when Mason himself undertook to prepare it for the stage.

In 1752, we find him recommended to Lord Rockingham, by Mr. Charles Yorke, who thought him, said Warburton, likely to attach that Lord's liking to him, as he was a young nobleman of elegance, and loved painting and music. In the following year he lost his father, in the disposition of whose affairs he was less considered than he thought himself entitled to expect. What the reason for this partiality was, it would be vain to conjecture; nor have we any means of knowing whether the disappointment determined him to the choice of a profession which he made soon after (in 1754), when he entered into the church. From the following passage, in a letter of Warburton's, it appears that the step was not taken without some hesitation. "Mr. Mason has called on me. I found him yet unresolved whether he would take the living. I said, was the question about a mere secular employment, I should blame him without reserve if he refused the offer. But as I regarded going into

orders in another light, I frankly owned to him he ought not to go unless he had a call; by which I meant, I told him, nothing fanatical or su perstitious, but an inclination, and on that a resolution, to dedicate all his studies to the science of religion, and totally to abandon his poetry: he entirely agreed with me in thinking that decency, reputation, and religion, all required this sacrifice of him, and that if he went into orders he intended to give it." This was surely an absurd squeamishness in one of the same profession, as Warburton was, who had begun his career by translations in prose and verse from Latin writers, had then mingled in the literary cabals of the day, and afterwards did not think his time misemployed in editing and commenting on Shakspeare and Pope. Yet he was unreasonable enough to continue his expectations that Mason should do what he had, without any apparent compunction, omitted to do himself; for after speaking of Brown, the unfortunate author of Barbarossa, who was also an ecclesiastic, he adds; "How much shall I honour one, who has a stronger propensity to poetry, and has got a greater name in it, if he performs his promise to me of putting away these idle baggages after his sacred espousal." After all, this proved to be one of the vows at which Jove laughs. The sacred espousal did not lessen his devotion to the idle baggages; and it is very doubtful whether he discharged his duties as King's Chaplain or Rector of Aston (for both which appointments he was indebted to the kindness of Lord Holdernesse) at all the worse for this attachment, which he was indeed barefaced enough to avow two years after by the publication of some of his odes. At his Rectory of Aston, in Yorkshire, he continued to live for great part of his remaining life, with occasional absences in the metropolis, at Cambridge, or at York, where he was made Precentor and Canon of the Cathedral, and where his residence was therefore sometimes required. I have not learnt whether he had any other preferment. Hurd, in a letter written in 1768, mentions that the death of a Dr. Atwell threw a good living into his hands. Be this as it

might, he was rich enough, and had an annual income of about fifteen hundred pounds at his death. Lord Orford says of him somewhere in his letters, that he intended to have refused a bishopric if it had been offered him. He might have spared himself the pains of coming to this resolution; for mitres, "though they fell on many a critic's head," and on that of his friend Hurd among the rest, did not seem adapted to the brows of a poet. When the death of Cibber had made the laurel vacant, he was informed that "being in orders he was thought merely on that account less eligible for the office than a layman." "A reason," said he, "so politely put, I was glad to hear as signed; and if I had thought it a weak one, they who know me will readily believe that I am the last man in the world who would have attempted to controvert it." Of the laurel, he probably was not more ambitious than of the mitre; though he was still so obstinate as to believe that he might unite the characters of a clerk and a poet, to which he would fain have superadded that of a statist also. Caractacus, another tragedy on the ancient plan, but which made a better figure on the stage, appeared in 1759; and in 1762, three elegies. In 1769, Harris heard him preach at St. James's early prayers, and give a fling at the French for the invasion of Corsica. Thus politics, added his hearer, have entered the sanctuary. The sermon is the sixth in his printed collection. A fling at the French was at all times a favourite topic with him. In the discourse delivered before George III. on the Sunday preceding his Coronation, he has stretched the text a little that he may take occasion to descant on the blessings of civil liberty, and has quoted Montesquieu's opinion of the British government. In praising our religious toleration, he is careful to justify our exception of the church of Rome from the general indulgence. Nor was it in the pulpit only that he acted the politician. He was one of those, as we are told in the Biographical Dictionary, who thought the decision of Parliament on the Middlesex election a violation of the rights of the people; and when the counties began, in 1779,

to associate for parliamentary reform, he took an active part in assisting their deliberations, and wrote several patriotic manifestos. In the same year appeared his Ode to the Naval Officers of Great Britain, on the trial of Admiral Keppel, in which the poetry is strangled by the politics. His harp was in better tune, when, in 1782, an Ode to Mr. Pitt declared the hopes he had conceived of the son of Chatham; for like many others, who espoused the cause of freedom, he had ranged himself among the partizans of the youthful statesman, who was then doing all he could to persuade others, as he had no doubt persuaded himself, that he was one of the number.

In the mean time Gray, who, if he had lived longer, might, perhaps, have restrained him from mixing in this turmoil, was no more. The office which he performed of biographer, or rather of editor, for his deceased friend, has given us one of the most delightful books in its kind that our language can boast. It is just that this acknowledgment should be made to Mason, although Mr. Mathias has recently added many others of Gray's most valuable papers, which his former editor was scarcely scholar enough to estimate as they deserved; and Mr. Mitford has shown us, that some omissions, and perhaps some alterations, were unnecessarily made by him in the letters themselves. As to the task which the latter of these gentlemen imposed on himself, few will think that every passage which he has admitted, though there be nothing in any to detract from the real worth of Gray, could have been made public consistently with those sacred feelings of regard for his memory by which the mind of Mason was impressed, and that reluctance which he must have had to conquer, before he resolved on the publication at all. The following extract from a letter, written by the Rev. Edward Jones, brings us into the presence of Mason, and almost to an acquaintance with his thoughts at this time, and on this occasion. "Being at York in September 1771," (Gray died on the thirtieth of July preceding,) "I was introduced to Mr. Mason, then in residence. On my first