“His manners, too, are equally as chaste and unaffected as his conversation. The stream that winds its easy way through woods and verdant meads, is not less artificial or more insinuating than he is in doing the honours of the table, or promoting the graces of the drawing room. That peculiar happiness which some few I have met with possess, of reconciling you implicitly to their superiority, he enjoys in an eminent degree, by the amiability of his sentiments, the benignity of his attention, and particularly by an indescribable way with him, of making you appear to advantage, even when he convinces you of the erroneousness of your opinions, or the inconclusiveness of your reasoning.
“In regard to his morals, I believe from what I have collected, that few can look back upon a period of sixty years existence, spent so uniformly pure and correct. In the course of our chit chat, he informed me, in an unostentatious unaffected manner, that he never was intoxicated but once.”
There was another point of resemblance, besides their vein of humour, between Mason and the Doctor, in their latter days; they were nearly of the same age, and time had brought with it to both the same sober, contemplative, deep feeling of the realities of religion.
The French Revolution cured Mason of his whiggery, and he had the manliness to sing his palinode. The fearful prevalence of a false and impious philosophy made him more and more sensible of the inestimable importance of his faith. On his three last birth-days he composed three sonnets, which for their sentiment and their beauty ought to be inserted in every volume of select poems for popular use. And he left for posthumous publication a poem called RELIGIO CLERICI: as a whole it is very inferior to that spirited satire of Smedley's which bears the same title, and which is the best satire of its age; but its concluding paragraph will leave the reader with a just and very favourable impression of the poet and the man.
FATHER, REDEEMER, COMFORTER DIVINE!
This humble offering to thy equal shrine
Here thy unworthy servant grateful pays,
Of undivided thanks, united praise,
For all those mercies which at birth began,
And ceaseless flow'd thro' life's long-lengthened span,
Propt my frail frame thro' all the varied scene,
With health enough for many a day serene;
Enough of science clearly to discern
How few important truths the wisest learn;
Enough of arts ingenuous to employ
The vacant hours, when graver studies cloy;
Enough of wealth to serve each honest end,
The poor to succour, or assist a friend;
Enough of faith in Scripture to descry,
That the sure hope of immortality,
Which only can the fear of death remove,
Flows from the fountain of REDEEMING LOVE.
One who visited York a few years after the death of the Poet, says, “the Verger who showed us the Minster upon my inquiring of him concerning Mason, began an encomium upon him in an humble way indeed, but more honourable than all the factitious praises of learned ostentation; his countenance brightened up when I asked him the question; his very looks told me that Mason's charities did not evaporate in effusions of sensibility; I learned that he was humble, mild, and generous; the father of his family; the delight of all that came within the sphere of his notice. Then he was so good in his parish. My soul contemplates, with fond exultation, the picture of a man, endowed with genius, wit and every talent to please the great, but suâ se virtute involventem, resigning himself with complacency to the humble duties of a country pastor,—turning select Psalms into Verse to be sung in his Church; simplifying and arranging, and directing to the purposes of devotion his church music; and performing his duties as a minister with meekness, perseverance, and brotherly love.”
Enough has now been adduced to vindicate Mason's character from Miller's aspersion. They who desire to see his merits as a poet appreciated with great ability and equal justice should peruse his life in Hartley Coleridge's Boreal Biography,—what a boisterous title for a book in which there is not one blustering sentence, and so many sweet strains of feeling and of thought!
CHAPTER CXXVII.
THE DOCTOR'S THEORY OF PROGRESSIVE EXISTENCE.