ern of Calypso,
covers it with a vine, and scatters the alder, the poplar, and the
cypress, without any symmetry about it; but near the palace of Alcinous
he lays out the garden by the rule and compass. Our first parents in
Paradise, are placed by Milton amidst

A happy rural seat of various view;

but let the same poet represent himself in his pensive or his cheerful
moods, and he is at one time walking "by hedge-row elms on hillocks
green;" and at another, "in trim gardens." When we are willing to escape
from the tedium of uniformity, nature and accident supply numberless
varieties, which we shall for the most part vainly strive to heighten
and improve. It is too much to say, that we will use the face of the
country as the painter does his canvas;

Take thy plastic spade,
It is thy pencil; take thy seeds, thy plants,
They are thy colours.

The analogy can scarcely hold farther than in a parterre; and even
there very imperfectly. Mason could not hear to see his own system
pushed to that excess into which it naturally led; and bitterly resented
the attempts made by the advocates of the picturesque, to introduce into
his landscapes more factitious wildness than he intended.

In 1783 he published a Translation from the Latin of Du Fresnoy's Art of
Painting, in which the precepts are more capable of being reduced to
practice. He had undertaken the task when young, partly as an exercise
in versification, and partly to fix on his mind the principles of an art
in which he had himself some skill. Sir Joshua Reynolds, having desired
to see it, added some notes, and induced him to revise and publish it.
The artist found in it the theory of ideal beauty, which had been taught
him by Zachary Mudge, from the writings of Plato, and which enabled him
to rise above the mere mechanism of his predecessors. That Mason's
version surpasses the original, is not saying much in its praise. In
some prefatory lines addressed to Reynolds, he has described the
character of Dryden with much happiness.

The last poem which he published separately, was a Secular Ode on the
Revolution in 1688. It was formal and vapid; but sufficed to shew that
time, though it had checked "the lyric rapture," had left him his ardour
in the cause of freedom. Like the two leaders of the opposite parties,
Pitt and Fox, he hailed with glad voice the dawn of French liberty. It
was only for the gifted eye of Burke to foresee the storm that was
im