Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 36.djvu/445

Mason , Yorkshire, on 12 June 1768. His income (, Lit. Anecd. ii. 241) is said to have been 1 ,500l. a year.

Though performing his ecclesiastical duties regularly, Mason never gave up his literary pursuits. In 1756 he published four odes. In 1757 some apology was made for not offering him the laureateship, vacant by the death of Gibber, which was declined by Gray and given to W. Whitehead. In 1759 he published his `Caractacus,' a rather better performance in the `Elfrida' style, which Gray had carefully criticised in manuscript and read `not with pleasure only but with emotion' (to Mason, 28 Sept. 1757). Mason's odes and the choruses in his dramas show a desire to imitate Gray, and the two were parodied by George Colman the elder [q. v.] and Robert Lloyd [q. v.] in their `Odes to Obscurity and Oblivion' (published in Lloyd's 'Poems'). Gray declined (to Mason, 20 Aug. 1760) to `combustle' about it, and Mason was equally wise. Mason published some `elegies' in 1762, and in 1764 a collection of his poems, omitting `Isis' and the `Installation Ode,' with a prefatory sonnet to Lord Holderness.

On 25 Sept. he married, at St. Mary's, Lowgate, Mary, daughter of William Sherman of Kingston-upon-Hull (register entry given in Notes and Queries, 6th ser. iv. 347). She soon fell into a consumption and died at Bristol, where she had gone to drink the Clifton waters, on 27 March 1767. She was buried in the north aisle of Bristol Cathedral, where there is a touching inscription by her husband (, Lit. Anecd. ii. 240), the last three lines of which were written by Gray. (The epitaph now in the cathedral is given in, Works; , Lit. Anecd. ii. 240, gives an entirely different epitaph, and wrongly dated 24 March; information from Mr. William George of Bristol.) Mason appears to have done little for some time; Gray visited him for the last time in the summer of 1770, and on his death (30 July 1771) left the care of his papers to his friend. Mason had been to the last an affectionate disciple of Gray, who called him `Scroddles,' and condescended to a minute revision of all his poems before publication. Mason published Gray's `Life and Letters' in 1774. His plan of printing the letters as part of the life, said to have been suggested by Middleton's `Cicero,' was followed by later writers, including Boswell. Johnson himself had thought meanly of the 'Life,' describing it as `fit for the second table,' but he was doubtless not uninfluenced by Mason's whiggism in politics. Mason took great liberties with the letters, considering them less as biographical documents than as literary material to be edited and combined (see, e.g., his letter to Walpole of 28 June 1773, where he proposes to alter Gray's French and `run two letters into one'). The book, however, is in other respects well done. It brought him into a long correspondence with Horace Walpole, who supplied him with materials, and whom he consulted throughout. The correspondence continued after the publication of the life, and was published by Mitford in 1851. Walpole supplied the country parson with the freshest town gossip and `criticised' the works submitted to him, if criticism be a name applicable to unmixed flattery. They corresponded in particular about Mason's `Heroic Epistle,' a sharp satire, in the style of Pope, upon `Sir William Chambers' [q. v.], whose `Dissertation upon Oriental Gardening' appeared in 1772. This and some succeeding satires under the pseudonym of `Malcolm Macgregor' are very smartly written. Mason took great pains to conceal the authorship, and even his correspondence with Walpole is so expressed that the secret should not be revealed if the letters were opened at the post-office. The friendship, like most of Walpole's, led to a breach. Both correspondents were whigs, and even played at republicanism. When, however, Mason took a prominent part in the agitation which began with the Yorkshire petition for retrenchment and reform in the beginning of 1780 (he was a leading member of the county association for some years), Walpole thought that his friend was going into extremes. He remonstrated in several letters, and the friendship apparently cooled. Mason afterwards became an admirer of Pitt, to whom he addressed an ode, and he took the side of the court in the struggle over Fox's India Bill. Walpole thought that Mason had persuaded their common friend, Lord Harcourt, to oppose Fox's measure and become reconciled to the crown. In a couple of letters (one probably not sent) he showed that he could be as caustic on occasion as he had been effusive. In the suppressed letter he says that Mason had `floundered into a thousand absurdities' through a blind ambition of winning popularity. The letter actually sent was not milder in substance, and the friendship expired. In 1796 Mason again wrote to Walpole, however, and one or two civil letters passed between them. The French revolution had frightened both of them out of any sympathy for radical reforms.

Mason continued his literary labours after the ' Life of Gray.' His `Elfrida' was brought out at Covent Garden on 21 Nov. 1772 by Colman without his consent, and again, with