only for the gifted eye of Burke to foresee the storm that was impending. At the same time he recommended the cause of the enslaved negroes from the pulpit. The abolition of the slave trade was one of the few political subjects the introduction of which seemed to be allowable in that place. In 1788, appeared also his Memoirs of William Whitehead, attached to the posthumous works of that writer; a piece of biography, as little to be compared in interest to the former, as Whitehead himself can be compared to Gray. His old age glided on in solitude and peace amid his favourite pursuits, at his rectory of Aston, where he had taught his two acres of garden to command the inequalities of "hill and dale," and to combine "use with beauty." The sonnet in which he dedicated his poems to his patron, the Earl of Holdernesse, describes in his best manner the happiness he enjoyed in this retreat. He was not long permitted to add to his other pleasures the comforts of a connubial life. In 1765, he had married Mary, daughter of William Shermon, Esq., of Kingston-uponHull, who in two years left him a widower. Her epitaph is one of those little poems to which we can always return with a melancholy pleasure. I have heard that this lady had so little regard for the art in which her husband excelled, that on his presenting her with a copy of verses, after the wedding was over, she crumpled them up and put them into her pocket unread. When he had entered his seventieth year, Hurd, who had been his first friend, and the faithful monitor of his studies from youth, confined him "to a sonnet once a year, or so;" warning him, that "age, like infancy, should forbear to play with pointed tools." He had more latitude allowed in prose; for in 1795 he published Essays Historical and Critical on English Church Music. In the former part of his subject, he is said, by those who have the best means of knowing, to be well informed and accurate; but in the latter to err on the side of a dry simplicity, which, in the present refined state of the art, it would not answer any good purpose to introduce into the music of our churches. In speaking of a wind instrument, which William of Malmsbury seems to describe as being acted on by the vapour arising from hot water, he has unfortunately gone out of his way to ridicule the projected invention of the steam-boat by Lord Stanhope. The atrocities committed during the fury of the French revolution had so entirely cured him of his predilection for the popular part of our government, that he could not resist the opportunity, however ill-timed, of casting a slur on this nobleman, who was accused of being over-partial to it. In the third essay, on Parochial Psalmody, he gives the preference to Merrick's weak and affected version over the two other translations that are used in our churches. Horsley, in his Commentary on the Psalms, was, I believe, the first who was hardy enough to claim that palm for Sternhold, to which, with all its awkwardness, his rude vigour entitles him. The late Bishop When he comes to speak of Christianizing our hymns, the apprehension which he expresses of deviating from the present practice of our establishment seems to have restrained him from saying something which he would otherwise have said. The question surely is not so much, what the practice of our present establishment is, as what that of the first Christians was. There is, perhaps, no alteration in our service that could be made with better effect than this, provided it were made with as great caution as its importance demands. His death, which was at last sudden, was caused by a hurt on his shin, that happened when he was stepping out of his carriage. On the Sunday (two days after) he felt so little inconvenience from the accident as to officiate in his church at Aston. But on the next Wednesday, the 7th of April, 1797, a rapid mortification brought him to his grave. His monument, of which Bacon was the sculptor, is placed in Westminster Abbey, near that of Gray, with the following inscription : Optimo Viro Gulielmo Mason, A.M. Si quis alius Ob. 7. Apr. 1797. Et. 72. Mason is reported to have been ugly in his person. His portrait, by Reynolds, gives to features, ill-formed and gross, an expression of intelligence and benignity. In the latter part of life, his character appears to have undergone a greater change, from its primitive openness and good nature, than mere time and experience of the world should have wrought in it. Perhaps this was nothing more than a slight perversion which he had contracted in the school of Warburton. What was a coarse arrogance in the master himself, assumed the form of nicety and superciliousness in the less confident and better regulated tempers of Mason and Hurd. His harmless vanity cleaved to him longer. As a proof of this, it is related that, several years after the publication of Isis, when he was travelling through Oxford, and happened to cross over Magdalen Bridge at a late hour of the evening, he turned round to a friend who was riding with him, and remarked that it was luckily grown dusk, for they should enter the University unobserved. When his friend, with some surprise, inquired into the reason of this caution; what, (said he) do you not remember my Isis? He was very sensible to the annoyance of the periodical critics, which Gray was too philosophical or too proud to regard otherwise than as matter of amusement. He was the butt for a long line of satirists or lampooners. Churchill, Lloyd, Colman, the author of the Probationary Odes, and, if I remember right, Paul Whitehead and Wolcot, all leveled their shafts at him in turn. In the Probationary Odes, his peculiarities were well caught: when the writer of these pages repeated some of the lines in which he was imitated, to Anna Seward, whose admiration of Mason is recorded in her letters, she observed, that what was meant for a burlesque was in itself excellent. There is reason to suppose that he sometimes indulged himself in the same licence under which he suffered from others. If he was indeed the author of the Heroic Epistle to Sir William Cham bers, and of some other anonymous satires which have been imputed to him, he must have felt Hayley's intended compliment as a severe reproach: Sublimer Mason! not to thee belong The reptile beauties of invenom'd song. Of the Epistle, when it was remarked, in the hearing of Thomas Warton, that it had more energy than could have been expected from Walpole, to whom others ascribed it, Warton remarked that it might have been written by Walpole, and buckramed by Mason. Indeed, it is not unlikely that one supplied the venom, and the other spotted the snake. In a letter of expostulation to Warton, Mason did not go the length of disclaiming the satire, though he was angry enough that it should be laid at his door. I have heard that he received with much apathy the praises offered him by Hayley, in the Essay on Epic Poetry. He has remarked, "that if rhyme does not condense the sense, which passes through its vehicle, it ceases to be good, either as verse or rhyme." This rule is laid down too broadly. His own practice was not always consonant with it, as Hayley's never was. With Darwin's poetry, it is said that he was much pleased. His way of composing, as we learn from Gray's remarks upon his poems, was to cast down his first thoughts carelessly, and at large, and then clip them here and there at leisure. "This method," as his friend observed, "will leave behind it a laxity, a diffuseness. The force of a thought (otherwise well-invented, well-turned, and well-placed) is often weakened by it." He might have added, that it is apt to give to poetry the air of declamation. Mason wished to join what he considered the correctness of Pope with the high imaginative power of Milton, and the lavish colouring of Spenser. In the attempt to unite qualities so heterogeneous, the effect of each is in a great measure lost, and little better than a caput mortuum remains. With all his praises of simplicity, he is generally much * Essays on English Church Music, Mason's Works, vol. iii. p. 370, afraid of saying any thing in a plain and natural manner. He often expresses the commonest thoughts in a studied periphrasis. He is like a man, who being admitted into better company than his birth and education have fitted him for, is under continual apprehension, lest his attitude and motions should betray his origin. Even his negligence is studied. His muse resembles the Prioresse in Chaucer, That pained her to counterfete chere, Of court and be stateliche of manere, And to been holden digne of reverence. Yet there were happier moments in which he delivered himself up to the ruling inspiration. So it was when he composed the choruses in the Caractacus, beginning, Mona on Snowdon calls Hail, thou harp of Phrygian frameand Hark! heard ye not yon footstep dread Of which it is scarcely too much to say that in some parts they remind us of the ancient tragedians. In each of his two Tragedies, the incidents are conducted with so much skill, and there is so much power of moving the affections, that one is tempted to wish he had pursued this line, though he perhaps would never have done any thing much better in it. One great fault is that the dramatis personæ are too much employed in pointing out the Claudes and Salvator Rosas with which they are surrounded. They seem to want nothing but long poles in their hands to make them very good conductors over a gallery of pictures. When Earl Orgar, on seeing the habitation of his daughter, begins How nobly does this venerable wood, breath; And, as I tread, the flower-besprinkled lawn Sends up a cloud of fragranceand Aulus Didius opens the other play with a description somewhat more appropriate : This is the secret centre of the isle : Chills the pale plain beneath him: mark yon altar, The dark stream brawling round its rugged base, These cliffs, these yawning caverns, this Skirted with unhewn stone; they awe my wide circus, As if the very genius of the place soul, Himself appear'd, and with terrific tread Stalk'd through his drear domain we could fancy that both these personages had come fresh from the study of the English garden. The distresses of Elfrida, and the heroism of Caractacus, are in danger of becoming objects of secondary consideration, while we are admiring the shades of Harewood, and the rocks of Mona. He has attempted to shelter himself under the authority of Sophocles; but though there are some exquisite touches of landscapepainting in that drama, the poet has introduced them with a much more sparing hand. It is said that Hurd pruned away a great deal more luxuriance of this kind, with which the first draught of the Elfrida was overrun; and we learn from Gray, in his admirable letter of criticism on the Caractacus, that the opening of that tragedy was, as it at first stood, even much more objectionable than at present. Such descriptions are better suited to the Masque, a species of drama founded on some wild and romantic adventure, and of which the interest does not depend on the manners or the passions. It is therefore more in its place in Argentile and Curan, which he calls a legendary drama, written on the old English model. He composed it after the other two, and during the short time that his wife lived; but, like several of his poems, it was not published till the year of his decease. The beginning promises well; and the language of our old writers is at first tolerably well imitated. There is afterwards too much trick and too many prettinesses; such is that of the nosegay which the princess finds, and concludes from its tasteful arrangement to be the work of princely Here, Romans, pause, and let the eye of fingers. The subordinate parts, of wonder Gaze on the solemn scene; beheld yon oak, How stern he frowns, and with his broad brown arms the Falconer, and Ralph, his deputy, are not sustained according to the author's first conception of them. The story is well put together. He has, perhaps, nothing else that is equal in expression to the following passage. Thou know'st, when we did quit our anchor'd barks, We cross'd a pleasant valley; rather say A nest of sister vales, o'erhung with hills Of varied form and foliage; every vale Had its own proper brook, the which it hugg'd In its green breast, as if it fear'd to lose The treasur'd crystal. You might mark the course Of these cool rills more by the ear than eye, a cell This is grief, seeking to relieve and forget itself in fiction and fancy; the other, though the occasion required an expression of deeper sorrow, is a mere pomp of feeling. His blank verse in the English Garden has not the majesty of Akenside, the sweetness of Dyer, or the terseness of Armstrong. Its characteristic is delicacy; but it is a delicacy approaching nearer to weakness than to grace. It has more resemblance to the rill that trickles over its fretted channel, than to the stream that winds with a full tide, and warbles as it flows." The practice of cutting it into dialogue had perhaps crippled him. As he has made the characters in his plays too attentive to the decorations of the scene-painter, so in the last book of the English Garden he has turned his landscape into a theatre, for the representation of a play. The story of Nerina is too long and too complicated for an episode in a didactic poem. He will seldom bear to be confronted with those writers whom he is found either by accident or design to resemble. His picture of the callow young in a bird's-nest is, I |