I may hear the rolling planet's song
And tuneful turning spheres."

Mason's Miltonic imitations, "Musaeus," "Il Bellicoso" and "Il Pacifico"
were written in 1744--according to the statement of their author, whose
statements, however, are not always to be relied upon. The first was
published in 1747; the second "surreptitiously printed in a magazine and
afterward inserted in Pearch's miscellany," finally revised and published
by the author in 1797; the third first printed in 1748 in the Cambridge
verses on the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. These pieces follow copy in
every particular. "Il Bellicoso," _e.g._, opens with the invocation.

"Hence, dull lethargic Peace,
Born in some hoary beadsman's cell obscure!"

The genealogies of Peace and War are recited, and contrasted pictures of
peaceful and warlike pleasures presented in an order which corresponds as
precisely as possible to Milton's in "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso."

"Then, to unbend my mind, I'll roam
Amid the cloister's silent gloom;
Or, where ranged oaks their shades diffuse,
Hold dalliance with my darling Muse,
Recalling oft some heaven-born strain
That warbled in Augustan reign;
Or turn, well pleased, the Grecian page,
If sweet Theocritus engage,
Or blithe Anacreon, mirthful wight,
Carol his easy love-lay light. . .
And joys like these, if Peace inspire
Peace, with thee I string the lyre."[9]

"Musaeus" was a monody on the death of Pope, employing the pastoral
machinery and the varied irregular measure of "Lycidas." Chaucer,
Spenser, and Milton, under the names of Tityrus, Colin Clout, and
Thyrsis, are introduced as mourners, like Camus and St. Peter in the
original. Tityrus is made to lament the dead shepherd in very incorrect
Middle English. Colin Clout speaks two stanzas of the form used in the
first eclogue of "The Shepherd's Calendar," and three stanzas of the form
used in "The Faerie Queene." Thyrsis speaks in blank verse and is
answered by the shade of Musaeus (Pope) in heroic couplets. Verbal
travesties of "Lycidas" abound--"laureate hearse," "forego each vain
excuse," "without the loan of some poetic woe," etc.; and the closing
passage is reworded thus:

"Thus the fond swain his Doric oat essayed,
Manhood's prime honors rising on his cheek:
Trembling he strove to court the tuneful Maid,
With stripling arts and dalliance all too weak,
Unseen, unheard beneat