greater number, whose friendship he had cultivated in his early years, and he was not ambitious of new connections. This brought on him the imputation of that pride, or distance of manner which is ascribed to men of unsocial habits. But Mason's heart was not inaccessible, and his friendships were inviolable. The simplicity, however, attributed to him in his young days by Gray, and the patience with which lord Orford informs us, he heard his faults, did not accompany him through life. On the publication of Gray's life, he was ready to allow, that "twenty-five years had made a very considerable abatement in his general philanthropy," and by philanthropy he seems here to mean a diffidence of opinion on matters of literature, and an unwillingness to censure acknowledged merit. It can have no reference to philanthropy in the more general acceptation of the word, for he was to the last liberal, humane, and charitable. What it really means, indeed, we find in the work just alluded to. The contemptuous notice of Waterland, Akenside, and Shenstone, which he did not suppress in Gray, he employed himself with more harshness whenever he could find an opportunity to attack the writings of Dr. Johnson. The opinion this, great critic pronounced on Gray may be probably quoted as the provocation, and great allowance is to be made for the warmth and zeal with which he guards the memory of his departed friend. But surely one of his notes on Gray's Letters may be here fairly quoted against him. "Had Mr. Pope disregarded the sarcasms of the many writers that endeavoured to eclipse his poetical fame, as much as Mr. Gray appears to have done, the world would not have been possessed of a Dunciad; but it would have been impressed with a more amiable idea of its author's temper." Nor was his prosecution of Murray for taking about fifty lines from his works of Gray into an edition which that bookseller published, much to the credit of his liberality, especially as he refused to drop the prosecution, when requested to name his own terms of compensation. Such littlenesses are to be regretted in a man who was the friend of genius and literature, whose circumstances placed him far above want, and whose regular discharge of the duties of piety and humanity bespoke an ambition for higher enjoyments than fame and wealth can yield. Of his regard for sacred truth and the respect due to it, he exhibited a proof in a letter to lord Orford, on his lordship's childish epitaph on two piping bullfinches, to which he received an answer that was probably not very satisfactory.

As a poet, his name has been so frequently coupled with that of Gray, and their merits have been supposed to approach so nearly, that what has been said of the one will in some degree apply to the other. It is evident that they studied in the same school, and mutually cultivated those opinions which aim at restoring a purer species of poetry than was taught in the school of their predecessor Pope. Whether we consider Mason as a lyric, dramatic, or didactic writer, we find the same grandeur of outline, the same daring and inventive ambition which carries out of the common track of versification and sentiment into the higher regions of imagination. His attachment to the sister art, and his frequent contemplation of the more striking and sublime objects of nature, inclined him to the descriptive; and his landscapes have a warmth and colouring, often rich and harmonious, but perhaps too frequently marked with a glare of manner peculiar to the artist. His compositions, however, even on the same subject, have all the variety of a fertile invention. Although we have even

ing, morning, &c. often depicted, they are to be distinguished, and the preference we are inclined to give is regulated by the feeling which the varieties of natural appear ances excite in different minds, and in the same mind at different times.

Mason's correctness is almost proverbial, and his ambition undoubtedly was to be equally correct and elegant; yet his style must often lead the reader to question his judgment, and to wonder that he could not see what every one else saw. That a man with so many endowments as a scholar, a critic, and an admirer of the simplicity of the ancients, should have fallen so frequently into a style ornamented with a finical profuseness, would be sufficiently remarkable, if his decorations had readily presented themselves; but when we see him so frequently pausing for an epithet that encumbers what it cannot illustrate, when we see him more attentive to novelty than strength of imagery, and, above all, taxing his memory to produce repeated alliterations, we are forced to conclude, that judgment is not always consistent, or that in some men it occasionally exists independent of true taste. With these exceptions, however, few indeed of the modern poets in this collection deserve a higher rank than Mason, as a lyric and descriptive poet, nor has he given any finished piece to the world from which examples of excellence may not be quoted.

It is now necessary to advert to a series of poems which are added to Mr. Mason's works in the present edition. The author of the Heroic Epistle was long concealed from the world, and for reasons which are obvious: but it had merit enough to be ascribed to the best living satirists, to Mason, Walpole, Hayley, Cowper, Anstey and others. It appears, however, to be now universally given to Mason. Mr. Thomas Warton was of opinion that "it might have been written by Walpole and buckramed by Mason." Mr. Malone, in a note on this opinion, which occurs in Boswell's Life of Johnson, says "it is now known that the Heroic Epistle was written by Mason." Mr. Mant, in his Life of Warton, informs us, that when it was first published, Warton as cribed it to Mason, and endeavoured to confirm his opinion by internal evidence. Mason heard of this, and sent to him a letter in 1777, published by Mr. Mant, in which he professes to expostulate with him for raising a report merely from critical conjecture." I have been told that you have pronounced me very frequently in company to be the author of the Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers, and I am told too that the premier himself suspects that I am so, upon your authority. Surely, sir, mere interual evidence (and you can possibly have no other) can never be sufficient to ground such a determination upon, when you consider how many persons in this rhyming age of our's are possessed of that knack of Pope's versification, which constitutes one part of the merit of that poem, and as to the wit, humour, or satire which it contains, no part of my writings could ever lead you, by their analogy, to form so peremptory a judgment. I aequit you, however, in this procedure of every, even the slightest degree of ill-nature and believe that what you have said was only to show your critical acumen. I only mention it that you may be more cautious of speaking of other persons in like manner, who may throw such anonymous bantings of their brain into the wide world. To some of these it might prove an essential injury: for though they might deserve the frown of power (as the author in question certainly does) yet I am persuaded that your good nature would be hurt if that frown was either increased or fixed by your ipse dixit.