rd, and happened to pass over
Magdalen Bridge at a late hour of the evening, he turned round to a
friend who was riding with him, and remarked that it was luckily grown
dusk, for they should enter the University unobserved. When his friend,
with some surprise inquired into the reason of this caution: What, (said
he) do you not remember my Isis?

He was very sensible to the annoyance of the periodical critics, which
Gray was too philosophical or too proud to regard otherwise than as
matter of amusement. He was the butt for a long line of satirists or
lampooners. Churchill, Lloyd, Colman, the author of the Probationary
Odes, and, if I remember right, Paul Whitehead and Wolcot, all levelled
their shafts at him in turn. In the Probationary Odes, his peculiarities
were well caught: when the writer of these pages repeated some of the
lines in which he was imitated to Anna Seward, whose admiration of Mason
is recorded in her letters, she observed, that what was meant for a
burlesque was in itself excellent. There is reason to suppose that he
sometimes indulged himself in the same license under which he suffered
from others. If he was indeed the author of the Heroic Epistle to Sir
William Chambers, and of some other anonymous satires which have been
imputed to him, he must have felt Hayley's intended compliment as a
severe reproach:

Sublimer Mason! not to thee belong
The reptile beauties of invenom'd song.

Of the Epistle, when it was remarked, in the hearing of Thomas Warton,
that it had more energy than could have been expected from Walpole, to
whom others ascribed it, Warton remarked that it might have been written
by Walpole, and buckramed by Mason. Indeed, it is not unlikely that one
supplied the venom, and the other spotted the snake. In a letter of
expostulation to Warton, Mason did not go the length of disclaiming the
satire, though he was angry enough that it should be laid at his door. I
have heard that he received with much apathy the praises offered him by
Hayley, in the Essay on Epic Poetry. He has remarked, "that if rhyme
does not condense the sense, which passes through its vehicle, it ceases
to be good, either as verse or rhyme."[2] This rule is laid down too
broadly. His own practice was not always consonant with it, as Hayley's
never was. With Darwin's poetry, it is said that he was much pleased.

His way of composing, as we learn from Gray's remarks upon his poems,
was to cast down his first thoughts