Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/331

Rh turn of mind; and a metrical translation of an epigram of Martial is extant which he wrote when he was about nine years old. In March 1743, when in his sixteenth year, he was entered at Trinity College, Oxford (on which foundation he was successively elected a scholar and fellow), passed there the remaining forty-seven years of his life, and now sleeps in the College Chapel.

While an undergraduate, he occasionally published some pieces anonymously; but in 1749, when in his 21st year, he first came forward openly as a poet, and the circumstances under which he made his debût, conspired to cover him with glory, or at least with applause. It should be remembered that the relative position of the Universities and the country was widely different then from what it is at present. Our material interests having advanced with such unparallelled rapidity, intellectual pursuits have lost that prominence they formerly possessed. They, too, have changed the theatre of their more active exercise; and the time has gone by when Oxford prescribed the canons of taste, and the decision of a London audience on the merits of a play was held liable to reversal by the Universities. The political views of the two great seats of learning were then matter of grave concern to the Government; and, Oxford being suspected of Jacobite tendencies, a foolish frolic of a party of students, gave great offence to the Court, and the Vice-Chancellor and some of the Heads of Houses were prosecuted in the Queen's Bench. Mason, a Cambridge man, and of the governmental faction, embraced so tempting an occasion to inveigh against the rival University, and published a poem, named "Isis," in which that gentle river nymph thus wrathfully addresses the wine-bibbing students of Oxford.

Hence! frontless crowds, that not content to fright The blushing Cynthia from her throne of light,