lished an
Ode on the Installation of the Duke of Newcastle, which his friend, who
was a laughing spectator of the ceremony, considers "the only
entertainment that had any tolerable elegance," and thinks it, "with
some little abatements, uncommonly well on such an occasion:" it was,
however, very inferior to that which he himself composed when the Duke
of Grafton was installed.

His next production (in 1751) was Elfrida, written on the model of the
ancient Greek Tragedy; a delicate exotic, not made to thrive in our
"cold septentrion blasts," and which, when it was long after transferred
to the theatre by Colman, was unable to endure the rough aspect of a
British audience. The poet complained of some trimming and altering that
had been thought requisite by the manager on the occasion; and Colman,
it is said, in return, threatened him with a chorus of Grecian
washerwomen. Matters were no better when Mason himself undertook to
prepare it for the stage.

In 1752, we find him recommended to Lord Rockingham, by Mr. Charles
Yorke, who thought him, said Warburton, likely to attach that Lord's
liking to him, as he was a young nobleman of elegance, and loved
painting and music. In the following year he lost his father, in the
disposition of whose affairs he was less considered than he thought
himself entitled to expect. What the reason for this partiality was, it
would be vain to conjecture; nor have we any means of knowing whether
the disappointment determined him to the choice of a profession which he
made soon after (in 1754), when he entered into the church. From the
following passage, in a letter of Warburton's, it appears that the step
was not taken without some hesitation. "Mr. Mason has called on me. I
found him yet unresolved whether he would take the living. I said, was
the question about a mere secular employment, I should blame him without
reserve if he refused the offer. But as I regarded going into orders in
another light, I frankly owned to him he ought not to go unless he had a
call; by which I meant, I told him, nothing fanatical or superstitious,
but an inclination, and on that a resolution, to dedicate all his
studies to the science of religion, and totally to abandon his poetry:
he entirely agreed with me in thinking that decency, reputation, and
religion, all required this sacrifice of him, and that if he went into
orders he intended to give it." This was surely an absurd squeamishness
in one of the same pro