An English divine who gained some reputation by his poetry, but more by the friendship of Gray, was the son of the Vicar of St. Trinity Hall, in the East Riding of Yorkshire; educated at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and elected a Fellow of Pembroke College in 1747. In 1754, he took holy orders; became Rector of Aston, Yorkshire, and chaplain to the king, and at the time of his death had been thirty-two years Precentor and Canon Residentiary of York. His principal works are “Elfrida, a Dramatic Poem, written on the Model of the Antient Greek Tragedy,” 1752; “Odes on Memory, Independence, Melancholy, and the Fate of Tyranny,” 1756; “Caractacus, a Dramatic Poem, written on the Model of the Antient Greek Tragedy,” 1759; “The English Garden, a Poem in Four Books,” 1772–82; “Collection of Anthems for Church Music,” 1782; “Secular Ode in Commemoration of the Glorious Revolution, 1688,” 1788; “Essays, Historical and Critical, on English Church Music,” 1795, “Memoirs of Thomas Gray,” 1775.

Personal

  Mr. Mason is my acquaintance: I liked the ode very much, but have found no one else that did. He has much fancy, little judgment, and a good deal of modesty. I take him for a good and well-meaning creature; but then he is really in simplicity a child, and loves everybody he meets with: he reads little or nothing, writes abundance, and that with a design to make his fortune by it.

	Whence is that groan? no more Britannia sleeps,
	But o’er her lost Musæus bends and weeps.
	Lo, every Grecian, every British, Muse
	Scatters the rarest flowers, and gracious dews,
	Where Mason lies.

  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…. Among his accomplishments, his critical knowledge of painting must have been considerable, for his translation of DuFresnoy’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…. 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.”

  Mason’s private character is said to have been distinguished by the most fervid affection for his friends, and by the most universal philanthropy, though there was something in his manners which appeared more than the mere dignity of conscious talent. Warton, whose character was marked by an unaffected simplicity and easy carelessness, used to say “Mason is not in my way, he is a buckram man;” and this has been repeated by those who were not partial to him for political or other reasons. He had the misfortune to survive most of his early friends, and he does not appear to have been desirous of forming new connexions; this did not proceed from misanthropic cynicism, but from natural reserve; yet it caused the superficial observer to deem him proud and unsocial. That he possessed the Christian virtues in an eminent degree, and fulfilled the duties of his sacred character in an exemplary manner cannot be doubted.

Elfrida, 1752

  One of the best poets of the present age, the ingenious Mr. Mason of Cambridge, has not long ago published a Tragedy upon the model of the ancients, called “Elfrida;” the merit of this piece, as a poem has been confessed by the general reading it has obtained; it is full of beauties; the language is perfectly poetical, the sentiments chaste, and the moral excellent; there is nothing in our tongue can much exceed it in the flowry enchantments of poetry, or the delicate flow of numbers, but while we admire the poet, we pay no regard to the character; no passion is excited, the heart is never moved, nor is the reader’s curiosity ever raised to know the event.

  My friend Mason is much chagrined at his daughter Elfrida’s having eloped without his consent. I knew when I heard it was brought on the stage that he was not consulted, and they say it is sadly performed. It vexes one to think that a poem of such delicacy and dignity should be prostituted, and the charms of virgins represented by the abandoned nymphs of Drury Lane. Such a poem would have been represented in days of yore by the youthful part of the Royal family, or those of the first rank.

  Mr. Mason, in his “Elfrida,” has wantonly misrepresented historical fact,—for which no man could be forgiven, and for which no beauties in his poetry can compensate.

  The conduct of this regular drama is the most irregular thing in the world.

  “Elfrida” is very, very far from a contemptible piece of workmanship: it is manifestly the production of a scholar and a gentleman, of an ardent lover of poetry, and platonic inamorato of abstract virtue: but impossible as it is to approve our conjecture by experiment, we do shrewdly suspect that it is nothing like what Sophocles or Euripides would have written had they risen from the dead in the plenitude, or, if you will, with only a tithe of their powers, and an inspired mastery of the English language, to exhibit to the eighteenth century the marvel of a modern ancient drama…. As an accommodation of the ancient drama to modern habits and sympathies, “Elfrida” must be pronounced a decided failure…. With the great poets in any department of poetry, Mason cannot be numbered, yet for many years of his life he was England’s greatest living Poet.

  There are two sorts of simplicity in the natural history of poets—the right sort, the manly simplicity that makes him write like Burns and Crabbe, from the forcible dictates of nature; and the wrong sort, perhaps, better entitled to the name of credulity, that gulls them to believe in the false resources of their art. The worthy and single-hearted Mason was of the latter description: he was one of those, to use Burns’s words,

	“Who think to climb Parnassus’ hill
	By dint o’ Greek.”

He was not only persuaded himself that he could incorporate the Attic chorus with the modern drama—an attempt like that of ingrafting a dead branch on a living tree, but he made his experiment with a play that is without action and without interest. We might forgive him for perverting history, and showing off “Elfrida,” who was a barbarous traitress, as a tender wife, but it defies all patience to find her employed in nothing but making speeches, and calling on her waiting-maids to strike up odes to the rising sun. In order to save her husband, and divert the king’s affection, she makes a promise to stain and deform her beauty, but she never performs it; and, when her lord is killed, she hurries off her poor maids into a nunnery, without consulting their inclinations. All this time he dreamed himself, and wrote to his friends, that he was imitating Sophocles!

General

  I intended writing to you on “Gray’s Life,” if you had not prevented me. I am charmed with it, and prefer it to all the biography I ever saw. The style is excellent, simple, unaffected; the method admirable, artful, and judicious. He has framed the fragments (as a person said), so well, that they are fine drawings, if not finished pictures. For my part, I am so interested in it, that I shall certainly read it over and over.

  With many other virtues he possessed a fine genius for poetry, and was indeed the best poet of his time, as appears from his Works of that sort published by himself at different times in three volumes.

  Mr. Chalmers’s character of this poet is expressed as usual with laboured and inaccurate pomposity; its import however is just, he censures the finical profuseness of his ornaments, the epithets which encumber what they do not illustrate, and the stiff and strained alliteration which he so perpetually affected: and he does justice to the bold and original conceptions of a writer who aimed at nobler and better things than any of his contemporaries.

  I cannot bring myself to think much of Mason’s poetry. I may be wrong; but all those passages in the Caractacus which we learn to admire at school, now seem to me one continued falsetto.

	Prim, in spruce parti-colours, Mason shone,
	His Muse lookt well in gall-dyed crape alone.

  Mason’s poetry cannot be said to be popular, even with poetical readers. His greatest want is simplicity, yet at times his rich diction has a fine effect. In his “English Garden,” though verbose and languid as a whole, there are some exquisite images.

  Grateful as we must be to Mason for his affection and good-heartedness, we cannot refrain from wishing that his poems had been fastened to a mill-stone and cast into the river Cam. They are not only barren and pompous to the very last degree, but to the lovers of Gray they have this disadvantage, that they constantly resolve that poet’s true sublime into the ridiculous, and leave on the ear an uncomfortable echo, as of a too successful burlesque or parody. Of this Gray himself was not unconscious, though he put the thought behind him, as one inconsistent with friendship.

  The most pretentious poetical prig that the eighteenth century produced. This was Mason, who still lingers in literary history, after a vicarious fashion, as the friend of Gray. He was himself, however, not actually devoid of poetical ability. At least at one period of his life spitefulness gave a vigor to his pen which inspiration was never able to impart, and he produced, as a result, some abusive and therefore still readable satires…. No student of Chaucer needs to be told that language [of “Musæus”] is hardly contemptuous enough to set forth satisfactorily the contemptible character of this imitation. It is an outrage both upon the memory of the poet and of the speech in which he wrote. Yet there is no question that it was generally thought at the time to be a successful reproduction of the diction of Chaucer. Mason was hailed by some as the coming poet upon the strength of this one production. Even as late as 1806 Bowles in his edition of Pope styled it “the exquisite Musæus.” That this cuckoo song could so long have been mistaken for the note of a nightingale is one of those perversities of criticism which leave the reader in doubt whether there is in reality anything that can be deemed even remotely a standard of taste. The affirmative view can only be maintained in this case upon the ground that knowledge is essential to any proper literary judgment, and that then knowledge of our early speech did not exist.

  It is rather difficult to classify the poet William Mason, except to say that he was first, last, and all the time an imitator…. His connection with Gray, and the fact that he edited Gray’s literary remains have kept Mason alive; his poetry is not altogether without merit, but it “smells of mortality.” Lowell said that Gray and Mason together could not make the latter a poet.

  Mason was a man of considerable abilities and cultivated taste, who naturally mistook himself for a poet. He accepted the critical canons of the day, taking Gray and Hurd for his authorities, and his serious attempts at poetry are rather vapid performances, to which his attempt to assimilate Gray’s style gives an air of affectation. The “Heroic Epistle” gives him a place among the other followers of Pope’s school in satire.

  Was a very small poet and a somewhat absurd person. He aped, first Milton and afterward Gray, so closely that his work often seems like parody.