the living of Aston. He again courted the attention of the public in 1756, with four Odes, the themes of which were 'Independence,' ' Memory,' 'Melancholy,' and 'The Fall of Tyranny.' Smollett and Shenstone, in their strains to 'Independence' and 'Memory,' have certainly outshone our poet, as well as anticipated him in those subjects. The glittering and alliterative style of those four Odes of Mason was severely parodied by Lloyd and Colman; and the public, it is said, were more entertained with the parodies than with the originals. On the death of Cibber he was proposed to succeed to the laurel; but he received an apology for its not being offered to him because he was a clergyman. The apology was certainly both an absurd and false one; for Warton, the succeeding laureate, was in orders.* There seems, however, to be no room for doubting the sincerity of Mason's declaration, that he was indifferent about the office.

His reputation was considerably raised by the appearance of 'Caractacus' in 1759. Many years after its publication it was performed at Covent-garden with applause; though the impression it produced was not sufficient to make it permanent on the stage. This chef-d'œuvre of Mason may not exhibit strong or minute delineation of human character; but it has enough of dramatic interest to support our admiration of virtue and our suspense and emotion in behalf of its cause; and it leads the imagination into scenes delightfully cast amidst the awfulness of superstition, the venerable antiquity of history, and the untamed grandeur of external nature. In this last respect it may be preferred to the tragedy of Beaumont and Fletcher on the same subject that it brings forward the persons and abodes of the Druids with more magnificent effect. There is so much of the poet's eye displayed in the choice of his ground and in the outline of his structure, that Mason seems to challenge something like a generous prepossession of the mind in judging of his drama.

* [This is far from correct. Whitehead succeeded Cibber, who was succeeded by Warton. Whitehead was not in orders; but Eusden, a parson, and a drunken one, had worn the laurel. Mason, being in orders, was thought by the then Lord Chamberlain less eligible than a layman.

Dryden was the last laureate appointed by the King; the successors of Charles II., with a noble regard for poetry, left the election to the Lord Chamberlain. To Gray and Sir Walter Scott the situation was offered as a sinecure, but refused, and by Mr. Southey was accepted conditionally-not to sing annually, but upon occasion, that is, when the subject was fit for song and the Muse consenting.]

It is the work of a man of genius, that calls for regret on its imperfections. Even in the lyrical passages, which are most of all loaded with superfluous ornament and alliteration, we meet with an enthusiasm that breaks out from amidst encumbering faults. The invocation of the Druids to Snowdon, for which the mind is so well prepared by the preceding scene, begins with peculiar harmony :

"Mona on Snowdon calls:

Hear, thou king of mountains, hear!"

and the ode on which Gray bestowed so much approbation
opens with a noble personification and an impetuous spirit :-
"Hark! heard ye not yon footstep dread,

That shook the earth with thundering tread?
'Twas Death. In haste the warrior pass'd,
High tower'd his helmed head."

In 1764 he published a collection of his works in one volume, containing four Elegies, which had been written since the appearance of 'Caractacus.' The language of those elegies is certainly less stiffly embroidered than that of his odes; and they contain some agreeable passages, such as Dryden's character in the first, the description of a friend's happiness in country retirement in the second, and of Lady Coventry's beauty in the fourth; but they are not altogether free from the "buckram," and are studies of the head more than the heart.

In 1762 he was appointed by his friend Mr. Montagu to the canonry and prebend of Driffield, in the cathedral of York, and by Lord Holdernesse to the precentorship of the church; but his principal residence continued still to be at Aston, where he indulged his taste in adorning the grounds near his parsonage, and was still more honourably distinguished by an exemplary fulfilment of his clerical duties. In 1765 he married a Miss Sherman, the daughter of William Sherman, Esq., of Kingstonupon-Hull. From the time of his marriage with this amiable woman he had unhappily little intermission from anxiety in watching the progress of a consumption which carried her off at the end of two years at the early age of twenty-eight. He has commemorated her virtues in a well-known and elegant sepulchral inscription.

By the death of his beloved friend Gray, he was left a legacy of 500l., together with the books and MSS. of the poet. His

'Memoirs and Letters of Gray' were published in 1775, upon a new plan of biography, which has since been followed in several instances.* The first book of his English Garden' made its appearance in 1772; the three subsequent parts came out in 1777, 1779, and 1782. The first book contains a few lines beautifully descriptive of woodland scenery :

"Many a glade is found,

The haunt of wood-gods only; where if Art
E'er dared to tread, 'twas with unsandall'd foot,
Printless, as if the place were holy ground."

There may
be other fine passages in this poem; but if there be
I confess that the somniferous effect of the whole has occasioned
to me the fault or misfortune of overlooking them. What value
it may possess as an "Art of Ornamental Gardening," I do not
presume to judge; but if this be the perfection of didactic
poetry, as Warton pronounced it, it would seem to be as difficult
to teach art by poetry, as to teach poetry by art. He begins the
poem by invoking Simplicity; but she never comes. Had her
power condescended to visit him, I think she would have thrown
a less "dilettante" air upon his principal episode, in which the
tragic event of a woman expiring suddenly of a broken heart is
introduced by a conversation between her rival lovers about
"Palladian bridges, Panini's pencil, and Piranesi's hand."
all events, Simplicity would not have allowed the hero of the
story to construct his barns in imitation of a Norman fortress,
and to give his dairy the resemblance of an ancient abbey; nor
the poet himself to address a flock of sheep with as much
solemnity as if he had been haranguing a senate.

At

During the whole progress of the American war, Mason continued unchanged in his Whig principles, and took an active share in the association for parliamentary reform, which began to be formed in the year 1779. Finding that his principles gave offence at court, he resigned his office of chaplainship to the King. His Muse was indebted to those politics for a new and lively change in her character. In the pieces which he wrote

* [Instead of melting down my materials into one mass, and constantly speaking in my own person, by which I might have appeared to have more merit in the execution of the work, I have resolved to adopt and enlarge upon the excellent plan of Mr. Mason in his Memoirs of Gray.-BOSWELL. Mason's plan has been further honoured by Hayley's imitation of it in his Life of Cowper, by Mr. Moore in his Life of Lord Byron, and by Mr. Lockhart in his Life of Sir Walter Scott.]

under the name of Malcolm MacGregor there is a pleasantry that we should little expect from the solemn hand which had touched the harp of the Druids. Thomas Warton was the first to discover, or at least to announce, him as the author of the 'Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers;' and Mason's explanation left the suspicion uncontradicted.*

Among his accomplishments his critical knowledge of painting must have been considerable, for his translation of Du Fresnoy's poem on that art, which appeared in 1783, was finished at the particular suggestion of Sir Joshua Reynolds, who furnished it with illustrative notes. One of his last publications was 'An Ode on the Commemoration of the British Revolution.' It was his very last song in praise of liberty. Had Soame Jenyns, whom our poet rallies so facetiously for his Toryism, lived to read his palinode after the French Revolution, he might have retorted on him the lines which Mason put in the mouth of Dean Tucker in his 'Dialogue of the Dean and the Squire :'— Squire Jenyns, since with like intent We both have writ on government."

66

But he showed that his philanthropy had suffered no abatement from the change of his politics, by delivering and publishing an eloquent sermon against the slave-trade. In the same year that gave occasion to his 'Secular Ode' he condescended to be the biographer of his friend Whitehead, and the editor of his works.

Mason's learning in the arts was of no ordinary kind. He composed several devotional pieces of music for the choir of York cathedral; and Dr. Burney speaks of an 'Historical and Critical Essay on English Church Music,' which he published in 1795, in very respectful terms. It is singular, however, that the fault ascribed by the same authority to his musical theory should be that of Calvinistical plainness. In verse he was my Lord Peter-in his taste for sacred music Dr. Burney compares him to Jack-in the Tale of a Tub.'

His death was occasioned, in his seventy-second year, by an accidental hurt on his leg, which he received in stepping out of a carriage, and which produced an incurable mortification.

* [Mason's right to the poem is now put beyond all question by the collected edition of Walpole's Letters.]

JOSEPH WARTON.

[Born, 1722. Died, 1800.]

DOCTOR JOSEPH WARTON, Son to the vicar of Basingstoke, and elder brother to the historian of English poetry, was born in the house of his maternal grandfather, the Rev. Joseph Richardson, rector of Dunsfold, in Surrey. He was chiefly educated at home by his father, Dr. Warton, till his fourteenth year, when he was admitted on the foundation of Winchester College. He was there the schoolfellow and intimate of Collins, the poet; and, in conjunction with him and another youth, whose name was Tomkyns, he sent to 'The Gentleman's Magazine' three pieces of poetry, which were highly commended in that miscellany. In 1740, being superannuated, he left Winchester School, and having missed a presentation to New College, Oxford, was entered a commoner at that of Oriel. At the university he composed his two poems, 'The Enthusiast' and 'The Dying Indian,' and a satirical prose sketch, in imitation of Le Sage, entitled 'Ranelagh,' which his editor, Mr. Wooll, has inserted in the volume that contains his life, letters, and poems. Having taken the degree of bachelor of arts at Oxford in 1744, he was ordained on his father's curacy at Basingstoke. At the end of two years he removed from thence to do duty at Chelsea, where he caught the small-pox. Having left that place for change of air, he did not return to it, on account of some disagreement with the parishioners, but officiated for a few months at Chawton and Droxford, and then resumed his residence at Basingstoke. In the same year, 1746, he published a volume of his odes, in the preface to which he expressed a hope that they would be regarded as a fair attempt to bring poetry back from the moralizing and didactic taste of the age, to the truer channels of fancy and description. Collins, our author's immortal contemporary, also published his odes in the same month of the same year. He realised, with the hand of genius, that idea of highly personified and picturesque composition which Warton contemplated with the eye of taste. But Collins's works were ushered in with no manifesto of a design to regenerate the taste of the age, with no pretensions of erecting a new or recovered standard of excellence.