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 impending.
At the same time he recommended the cause of the enslaved Negroes from the pulpit. The abolition of the slave trade was one of the few political subjects, the introduction of which seemed to be allowable in that place. In 1788, appeared also his Memoirs of William Whitehead, attached to the posthumous works of that writer; a piece of biography, as little to be compared in interest to the former, as Whitehead himself can be compared to Gray.
His old age glided on in solitude and peace amid his favourite pursuits, at his rectory of Aston, where he had taught his two acres of garden to command the inequalities of "hill and dale," and to combine "use with beauty." The sonnet in which he dedicated his poems to his patron, the Earl of Holdernesse, describes in his best manner the happiness he enjoyed in this retreat. He was not long permitted to add to his other pleasures the comforts of a connubial life. In 1765 he had married Mary, daughter of William Shermon, Esq., of Kingston-upon-Hull, who in two years left him a widower. Her epitaph is one of those little poems to which we can always return with a melancholy pleasure. I have heard that this lady had so little regard for the art in which her husband excelled, that on his presenting her with a copy of verses, after the wedding was over, she crumpled them up and put them into her pocket unread. When he had entered his seventieth year, Hurd, who had been his first friend, and the faithful monitor of his studies from youth, confined him "to a sonnet once a year, or so;" warning him, that "age, like infancy, should forbear to play with pointed tools." He had more latitude allowed in prose; for in 1795 he published Essays, Historical and Critical, on English Church Music. In the former part of his subject, he is said, by those who have the best means of knowing, to be well informed and accurate; but in the latter to err on the side of a dry simplicity, which, in the present refined state of the art, it would not answer any good purpose to introduce into the music of our churches. In speaking of a wind instrument, which William of Malmsbury seems to describe as being acted on by the vapour arising from hot water, he has unfortunately gone out of his way to ridicule the projected invention of the steam-boat by Lord Stanhope. The atrocities committed during the fury of the French Revolution had so entirely cured him of his predilection for the popular part of our Government, that he could not resist the opportunity, however ill-timed, of casting a slur on this nobleman, who was accused of being over-partial to it. In the third Essay, on Parochial Psalmody, he gives the preference to Merrick's weak and affected version over the two other translations that are used in our churches. The late Bishop Horsley, in his Commentary on the Psalms, was, I believe, the first who was hardy enough to claim that palm for Sternhold, to which, with all its awkwardness, his rude vigour entitles him.
When he comes to speak of Christianizing our hymns, the apprehension which he expresses of deviating from the present practice of our establishment, seems to have restrained him from saying something which he would otherwise have said. The question surely is not so much, what the practice of our present establishment is, as what that of the first Christians was. There is, perhaps, no alteration in our service that could be made with better effect than this, provided it were made with as great caution as its importance demands.
His death, which was at last sudden, was caused by a hurt on his shin, that happened when he was stepping out of his carriage. On the Sunday (two days after) he felt so little inconvenience from the accident, as to officiate in his church at Aston. But on the next Wednesday, the 7th of April, 1797, a rapid mortification brought him to his grave. His monument, of which Bacon was the sculptor, is placed in Westminster Abbey, near that of Gray, with the following inscription:—