carelessly, and at large, and then
clip them here and there at leisure. "This method," as his friend
observed, "will leave behind it a laxity, a diffuseness. The force of a
thought (otherwise well-invented, well-turned, and well-placed) is often
weakened by it." He might have added, that it is apt to give to poetry
the air of declamation.

Mason wished to join what he considered the correctness of Pope with the
high imaginative power of Milton, and the lavish colouring of Spenser.
In the attempt to unite qualities so heterogeneous, the effect of each
is in a great measure lost, and little better than a caput mortuum
remains. With all his praises of simplicity, he is generally much afraid
of saying any thing in a plain and natural manner. He often expresses
the commonest thoughts in a studied periphrasis. He is like a man, who
being admitted into better company than his birth and education have
fitted him for, is under continual apprehension, lest his attitude and
motions should betray his origin. Even his negligence is studied. His
muse resembles the Prioresse in Chaucer,

That pained her to counterfete chere,
Of court and be stateliche of manere,
And to been holden digne of reverence.

Yet there were happier moments in which he delivered himself up to the
ruling inspiration. So it was when he composed the choruses in the
Caractacus, beginning,

Mona on Snowdon calls--
Hail, thou harp of Phrygian frame--

and

Hark! heard ye not yon footstep dread--

of which it is scarcely too much to say that in some parts they remind
us of the ancient tragedians.

In each of his two Tragedies, the incidents are conducted with so much
skill, and there is so much power of moving the affections, that one is
tempted to wish he had pursued this line, though he perhaps would never
have done any thing much better in it. One great fault is, that the
dramatis personae are too much employed in pointing out the Claudes and
Salvator Rosas, with which they are surrounded. They seem to want
nothing but long poles in their hands to make them very good conductors
over a gallery of pictures. When Earl Orgar, on seeing the habitation of
his daughter, begins--

How nobly does this venerable wood,
Gilt with the glories of the orient sun,
Embosom yon fair mansion! The soft air
Salutes me with most cool and temperate breath
And, as I tread, the flower-besprinkled lawn
Sends up a cloud of fragance--

and Aulus Didi