Part 12

He was buried in the parish church of Walcot, in the city of Bath, in the same vault with his fourth daughter the wife of Rear-Admiral Sotheby, and her two infant children.

A cenotaph has been erected to his memory among the poets of his country in Westminster Abbey, by his eldest son, the Rev. Christopher Anstey, with the following inscription:--

M.S. Christopheri Anstey, Arm. Alumni Etonensis, Et Collegii Regalis apud Cantabrigienses olim Socii, Poetae, Literis elegantioribus adprime ornati, Et inter principes Poetarum, Qui in eodem genere floruerunt, Sedem eximiam tenentis. Ille annum circiter MDCCLXX. Rus suum in agro Cantabrigiensi Mutavit Bathonia, Quem locum ei praeter omne dudum arrisisse Testis est, celeberrimum illud Poema, Titulo inde ducto insignitum: Ibi deinceps sex et triginta annos commoratus, Obiit A.D. MDCCCV. Et aetatis suae Octogesimo primo.

To this there is an encomium added, which its prolixity hinders me from inserting.

A painter and a poet were, perhaps, never more similar to each other in their talents than the contemporaries Bunbury and Anstey. There is in both an admirable power of seizing the ludicrous and the grotesque in their descriptions of persons and incidents in familiar life; and this accompanied by an elegance which might have seemed scarcely compatible with that power. There is in both an absence of any extraordinary elevation or vigour; which we do not regret, because we can hardly conceive but that they would be less pleasing if they were in any respect different from what they are. Each possesses a perfect facility and command over his own peculiar manner, which has secured him from having any successful imitator. Yet as they were both employed in representing the fortuitous and transient follies, which the face of society had put on in their own day, rather than in portraying the broader and more permanent distinctions of character and manners, it may be questioned whether they can be much relished out of their own country, and whether even there, the effect must not be weakened as fatuity and absurdity shall discover new methods of fastening ridicule upon themselves. They border more nearly on farce than comedy. They have neither of them any thing of fancy, that power which can give a new and higher interest to the laughable itself, by mingling it with the marvellous, and which has placed Aristophanes so far above all his followers.

When Anstey ventures out of his own walk, he does not succeed so well. It is strange that he should have attempted a paraphrase of St. Paul's eulogium on Charity, after the same task had been so ably executed by Prior. If there is anything, however, that will bear repetition, in a variety of forms, it is that passage of scripture; and his verses though not equal to Prior's, may still be read with pleasure.

The Farmer's Daughter is a plain and affecting tale.

His Latin verses might well have been spared. In the translation of Gray's Elegy there is a more than usual crampness; occasioned, perhaps, by his having rendered into hexameters the stanzas of four lines, to which the elegiac measure of the Romans would have been better suited. The Epistola Poetica Familiaris, addressed to his friend Mr. Bamfylde, has more freedom. His scholarship did him better service when it suggested to him passages in the poets of antiquity, which he has parodied with singular happiness. Such is that imitated in one of Simkin's Letters:

Do the gods such a noble ambition inspire? Or a god do we make of each ardent desire?

from Virgil's

Dine hunc ardorem mentibus addunt, Euryale? an sua cuique deus fit dira cupido?

a parody that is not the less diverting, from its having been before gravely made by Tasso:

O dio l'inspira, O l'uom del suo voler suo dio si face.

On the whole, he has the rare merit of having discovered a mode of entertaining his readers, which belongs exclusively to himself.

* * * * *

WILLIAM MASON.

It is to be regretted that no one of Mason's friends has thought fit to pay the same tribute of respect to his memory, which he had himself paid to that of his two poetical friends, Gray and Whitehead. In this dearth of authentic biography, we must be contented with such information concerning him, as either his own writings, or the incidental mention made of him by others, will furnish.

William Mason was born on the 23rd of February, 1725, at Hull, where his father, who was vicar of St. Trinity, resided. Whether he had any other preceptor in boyhood, except his parent, is not known.

That this parent was a man of no common attainments, appears from a poem which his son addressed to him when he had attained his twenty-first year, and in which he acknowledged with gratitude the instructions he had received from him in the arts of painting, poetry, and music. In 1742, he was admitted of St. John's College, Cambridge; and there, in 1744, the year in which Pope died, he wrote Musaeus, a monody on that poet; and Il Bellicoso and Il Pacifico, a very juvenile imitation, as he properly calls it, of the Allegro and Penseroso. In 1745, he took his degree of Bachelor of Arts; and in the ensuing year, with a heavy heart, and with some fear lest he should grow old 'in northern clime,' bade farewell to Granta in an Ode, which commemorates the virtues of his tutor, Dr. Powell. He soon, however, returned; by his father's permission visited London; and removing from St. John's College to Pembroke Hall, was unexpectedly nominated Fellow of that society in 1747, when by the advice of Dr. Powell, he published Musaeus. His fourth Ode expresses his delight at the prospect of being restored to the banks of the Cam. In a letter to a friend written this year, he boasts that his poem had already passed through three impressions. At the same time, he wrote his Ode to a Water Nymph, not without some fancy and elegance, in which his passion for the new style of gardening first shewed itself; as his political bias did the year after in Isis, a poem levelled against the supposed Toryism of Oxford, and chiefly valuable for having called forth the Triumph of Isis, by Thomas Warton. To this he prefixed an advertisement, declaring that it would never have appeared in print, had not an interpolated copy, published in a country newspaper, scandalously misrepresented the principles of the author. Now commenced his intimacy with Gray, who was rather more than eight years his senior, a disparity which, at that period of life, is apt to prevent men at college from uniting very closely. His friend described him to Dr. Wharton as having much fancy, little judgment, and a good deal of modesty. "I take him," continued Gray, "for a good and well-meaning creature; but then he is really in simplicity a child, and loves every body he meets with: he reads little or nothing, writes abundance, and that with a design to make his fortune by it." On reviewing this character of himself twenty-five years after, he confessed, what cannot be matter of surprise, that this interval had made a considerable abatement in his general philanthropy; but denied having looked for more emolument from his publications than a few guineas to take him to a play or an opera. Gray's next report of him, after a year's farther acquaintance, is, that he grows apace into his good graces, as he knows him more; that "he is very ingenious, with great good nature and simplicity; a little vain, but in so harmless and so comical a way, that it does not offend one at all; a little ambitious, but withal so ignorant in the world and its ways, that this does not hurt him in one's opinion; so sincere and so undisguised, that no mind with a spark of generosity would ever think of hurting him, he lies so open to injury; but so indolent, that if he cannot overcome this habit, all his good qualities will signify nothing at all." At this time, he published an Ode on the Installation of the Duke of Newcastle, which his friend, who was a laughing spectator of the ceremony, considers "the only entertainment that had any tolerable elegance," and thinks it, "with some little abatements, uncommonly well on such an occasion:" it was, however, very inferior to that which he himself composed when the Duke of Grafton was installed.

His next production (in 1751) was Elfrida, written on the model of the ancient Greek Tragedy; a delicate exotic, not made to thrive in our "cold septentrion blasts," and which, when it was long after transferred to the theatre by Colman, was unable to endure the rough aspect of a British audience. The poet complained of some trimming and altering that had been thought requisite by the manager on the occasion; and Colman, it is said, in return, threatened him with a chorus of Grecian washerwomen. Matters were no better when Mason himself undertook to prepare it for the stage.

In 1752, we find him recommended to Lord Rockingham, by Mr. Charles Yorke, who thought him, said Warburton, likely to attach that Lord's liking to him, as he was a young nobleman of elegance, and loved painting and music. In the following year he lost his father, in the disposition of whose affairs he was less considered than he thought himself entitled to expect. What the reason for this partiality was, it would be vain to conjecture; nor have we any means of knowing whether the disappointment determined him to the choice of a profession which he made soon after (in 1754), when he entered into the church. From the following passage, in a letter of Warburton's, it appears that the step was not taken without some hesitation. "Mr. Mason has called on me. I found him yet unresolved whether he would take the living. I said, was the question about a mere secular employment, I should blame him without reserve if he refused the offer. But as I regarded going into orders in another light, I frankly owned to him he ought not to go unless he had a call; by which I meant, I told him, nothing fanatical or superstitious, but an inclination, and on that a resolution, to dedicate all his studies to the science of religion, and totally to abandon his poetry: he entirely agreed with me in thinking that decency, reputation, and religion, all required this sacrifice of him, and that if he went into orders he intended to give it." This was surely an absurd squeamishness in one of the same profession, as Warburton was, who had begun his career by translations in prose and verse from Latin writers, had then mingled in the literary cabals of the day, and afterwards did not think his time misemployed in editing and commenting on Shakspeare and Pope. Yet he was unreasonable enough to continue his expectations that Mason should do what he had, without any apparent compunction, omitted to do himself; for after speaking of Brown, the unfortunate author of Barbarossa, who was also an ecclesiastic, he adds: "How much shall I honour one, who has a stronger propensity to poetry, and has got a greater name in it, if he performs his promise to me of putting away these idle baggages after his sacred espousal." After all, this proved to be one of the vows at which Jove laughs. The sacred espousal did not lessen his devotion to the idle baggages; and it is very doubtful whether he discharged his duties as King's Chaplain or Rector of Aston (for both which appointments he was indebted to the kindness of Lord Holdernesse) at all the worse for this attachment, which he was indeed barefaced enough to avow two years after by the publication of some of his odes. At his Rectory of Aston, in Yorkshire, he continued to live for great part of his remaining life, with occasional absences in the metropolis, at Cambridge, or at York, where he was made Precentor and Canon of the Cathedral, and where his residence was therefore sometimes required. I have not learnt whether he had any other preferment. Hurd, in a letter written in 1768, mentions that the death of a Dr. Atwell threw a good living into his hands. Be this as it might, he was rich enough, and had an annual income of about fifteen hundred pounds at his death. Lord Orford says of him somewhere in his letters, that he intended to have refused a bishopric if it had been offered him. He might have spared himself the pains of coming to this resolution; for mitres, "though they fell on many a critic's head," and on that of his friend Hurd among the rest, did not seem adapted to the brows of a poet. When the death of Cibber had made the laurel vacant, he was informed that "being in orders he was thought merely on that account less eligible for the office than a layman." "A reason," said he, "so politely put, I was glad to hear assigned; and if I had thought it a weak one, they who know me will readily believe that I am the last man in the world who would have attempted to controvert it." Of the laurel, he probably was not more ambitious than of the mitre; though he was still so obstinate as to believe that he might unite the characters of a clerk and a poet, to which he would fain have superadded that of a statist also. Caractacus, another tragedy on the ancient plan, but which made a better figure on the stage, appeared in 1759; and in 1762, three elegies. In 1769, Harris heard him preach at St. James's early prayers, and give a fling at the French for the invasion of Corsica. Thus politics, added his hearer, have entered the sanctuary. The sermon is the sixth in his printed collection. A fling at the French was at all times a favourite topic with him. In the discourse delivered before George III on the Sunday preceding his Coronation, he has stretched the text a little that he may take occasion to descant on the blessings of civil liberty, and has quoted Montesquieu's opinion of the British Government. In praising our religious toleration, he is careful to justify our exception of the church of Rome from the general indulgence. Nor was it in the pulpit only that he acted the politician. He was one of those, as we are told in the Biographical Dictionary, who thought the decision of Parliament on the Middlesex election a violation of the rights of the people; and when the counties began, in 1779, to associate for parliamentary reform, he took an active part in assisting their deliberations, and wrote several patriotic manifestos. In the same year appeared his Ode to the Naval Officers of Great Britain, on the trial of Admiral Keppel, in which the poetry is strangled by the politics. His harp was in better tune, when, in 1782, an Ode to Mr. Pitt declared the hopes he had conceived of the son of Chatham; for, like many others, who espoused the cause of freedom, he had ranged himself among the partisans of the youthful statesman, who was then doing all he could to persuade others, as he had no doubt persuaded himself, that he was one of the number.

In the mean time Gray, who, if he had lived longer, might, perhaps, have restrained him from mixing in this turmoil, was no more. The office which he performed of biographer, or rather of editor, for his deceased friend, has given us one of the most delightful books in its kind that our language can boast. It is just that this acknowledgment should be made to Mason, although Mr. Mathias has recently added many others of Gray's most valuable papers, which his former editor was scarcely scholar enough to estimate as they deserved; and Mr. Mitford has shewn us, that some omissions, and perhaps some alterations, were unnecessarily made by him in the letters themselves. As to the task which the latter of these gentlemen imposed on himself, few will think that every passage which he has admitted, though there be nothing in any to detract from the real worth of Gray, could have been made public consistently with those sacred feelings of regard for his memory, by which the mind of Mason was impressed, and that reluctance which he must have had to conquer, before he resolved on the publication at all. The following extract from a letter, written by the Rev. Edward Jones, brings us into the presence of Mason, and almost to an acquaintance with his thoughts at this time, and on this occasion. "Being at York in September 1771," (Gray died on the thirtieth of July preceding), "I was introduced to Mr. Mason, then in residence. On my first visit, he was sitting in an attitude of much attention to a drawing, pinned up near the fire-place; and another gentleman, whom I afterwards found to be a Mr. Varlet, a miniature painter, who has since settled at Bath, had evidently been in conversation with him about it. My friend begged leave to ask _whom_ it was intended to represent. Mr. Mason hesitated, and looked earnestly at Mr. Varlet. I could not resist (though I instantly felt a wish to have been silent) saying, surely from the strong likeness it must be the late Mr. Gray. Mr. Mason at once certainly forgave the intrusion, by asking my opinion as to his fears of having caricatured his poor friend. The features were certainly softened down, previously to the engraving."[1]--_Nichols's Literary Anecdotes_, vol. ix. p. 718.

In the next year, 1772, appeared the first book of the English Garden. The other three followed separately in 1777, 1779, and 1782. The very title of this poem was enough to induce a suspicion, that the art which it taught (if art it can be called) was not founded on general and permanent principles. It was rather a mode which the taste of the time and country had rendered prevalent, and which the love of novelty is already supplanting. In the neighbourhood of those buildings which man constructs for use or magnificence, there is no reason why he should prefer irregularity to order, or dispose his paths in curved lines, rather than in straight. Homer, when he describes the cavern of Calypso, covers it with a vine, and scatters the alder, the poplar, and the cypress, without any symmetry about it; but near the palace of Alcinous he lays out the garden by the rule and compass. Our first parents in Paradise, are placed by Milton amidst

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.