perhaps,
by his having rendered into hexameters the stanzas of four lines, to
which the elegiac measure of the Romans would have been better suited.
The Epistola Poetica Familiaris, addressed to his friend Mr. Bamfylde,
has more freedom. His scholarship did him better service when it
suggested to him passages in the poets of antiquity, which he has
parodied with singular happiness. Such is that imitated in one of
Simkin's Letters:

Do the gods such a noble ambition inspire?
Or a god do we make of each ardent desire?

from Virgil's

Dine hunc ardorem mentibus addunt,
Euryale? an sua cuique deus fit dira cupido?

a parody that is not the less diverting, from its having been before
gravely made by Tasso:

O dio l'inspira,
O l'uom del suo voler suo dio si face.

On the whole, he has the rare merit of having discovered a mode of
entertaining his readers, which belongs exclusively to himself.

* * * * *

WILLIAM MASON.

It is to be regretted that no one of Mason's friends has thought fit to
pay the same tribute of respect to his memory, which he had himself paid
to that of his two poetical friends, Gray and Whitehead. In this dearth
of authentic biography, we must be contented with such information
concerning him, as either his own writings, or the incidental mention
made of him by others, will furnish.

William Mason was born on the 23rd of February, 1725, at Hull, where his
father, who was vicar of St. Trinity, resided. Whether he had any other
preceptor in boyhood, except his parent, is not known.

That this parent was a man of no common attainments, appears from a poem
which his son addressed to him when he had attained his twenty-first
year, and in which he acknowledged with gratitude the instructions he
had received from him in the arts of painting, poetry, and music. In
1742, he was admitted of St. John's College, Cambridge; and there, in
1744, the year in which Pope died, he wrote Musaeus, a monody on that
poet; and Il Bellicoso and Il Pacifico, a very juvenile imitation, as he
properly calls it, of the Allegro and Penseroso. In 1745, he took his
degree of Bachelor of Arts; and in the ensuing year, with a heavy heart,
and with some fear lest he should grow old 'in northern clime,' bade
farewell to Granta in an Ode, which commemorates the virtues of his
tutor, Dr. Powell. He soon, however, returned; by his father's
permission visited London; and rem