CHAPTER CXXVI.

MR. BAXTER'S OFFICES. MILLER'S CHARACTER OF MASON; WITH A FEW REMARKS IN VINDICATION OF GRAY'S FRIEND AND THE DOCTOR'S ACQUAINTANCE.

        ——Te sonare quis mihi
    Genîque vim dabit tui?
Stylo quis æquor hocce arare charteum,
    Et arva per papyrina
Satu loquace seminare literas?
                                                   JANUS DOUSA.

That dwelling house which the reader may find represented in Miller's History of Doncaster, as it was in his time, and in the Doctor's, and in mine,—that house in which the paper-hangers and painters were employed during the parenthesis, or to use a more historical term, the Interim of this part of our history,—that house which when, after an interval of many years, I saw it last, had the name R. Dennison on the door, is now, the Sheffield Mercury tells me, occupied as Mr. Baxter's Offices. I mean no disrespect to Mr. R. Dennison. I mean no disrespect to Mr. Baxter. I know nothing of these gentlemen, except that in 1830 the one had his dwelling there, and in 1836 the other his offices. But for the house itself, which can now be ascertained only by its site, totally altered as it is in structure and appearance, without and within,—when I think of it I cannot but exclaim, in what Wordsworth would call “that inward voice” with which we speak to ourselves in solitude, “If thou be'est it,” with reference to that alteration,—and with reference to its change of tenants and present appropriation I cannot but carry on the verse, and say—“but oh how fallen, how changed!”

In that house Peter Hopkins had entertained his old friend Guy; and the elder Daniel once, upon an often pressed and special invitation, had taken the longest journey he ever performed in his life, to pass a week there. For many years Mr. Allison and Mr. Bacon made it their house of call whenever they went to Doncaster. In that house Miller introduced Herschel to Dr. Dove; and Mason when he was Mr. Copley's guest never failed to call there, and enquire of the Doctor what books he had added to his stores,—for to have an opportunity of conversing with him was one of the pleasures which Mason looked for in his visits at Netherhall.

Miller disliked Mason: described him as sullen, reserved, capricious and unamiable; and this which he declared to be “the real character of this celebrated poet,” he inserted, he said, “as a lesson to mankind, to shew them what little judgement can be formed of the heart of an author, either by the sublimity of his conceptions, the beauty of his descriptions, or the purity of his sentiments.”

Often as Miller was in company with Mason, there are conclusive proofs that the knowledge which he attained of Mason's character, was as superficial as the poet's knowledge of music, for which as has heretofore been intimated, the Organist regarded him with some contempt.

He says that the reason which Mason assigned for making an offer to the lady whom he married, was, that he had been a whole evening in her company with others, and observed, that during all that time she never spoke a single word. Mason is very likely to have said this; but the person who could suppose that he said it in strict and serious sincerity, meaning that it should be believed to the letter, must have been quite incapable of appreciating the character of the speaker.

Mason whom Gray described, a little before this offer, as repining at his four and twenty weeks residence at York, and longing for the flesh-pots and coffee-houses of Cambridge, was notwithstanding in his friend and fellow-poet's phrase, a long while mariturient, “and praying to heaven to give him a good and gentle governess.” “No man,” says Gray, “wants such a thing more in all senses; but his greatest wants do not make him move a foot faster, nor has he, properly speaking, any thing one can call a passion about him, except a little malice and revenge.” Elsewhere he speaks of Mason's “insatiable repining mouth.” Yet there was no malice in these expressions. Gray loved him, taking him for all in all, and to have been the friend of Gray will always be considered as evidence of no ordinary worth; for it is not on intellect alone that the friendship of so good and wise a man as Gray could be founded.

When Gray first became acquainted with Mason he wrote concerning him thus. “He has much fancy, little judgement, and a good deal of modesty. I take him 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.” In another letter “Mason grows apace in my good graces; 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.”

This surely is the character of an amiable and very likeable man. Mason said when he printed it, “my friends, I am sure will be much amused at this; my enemies (if they please) may sneer at it, and say (which they will very truly,) that twenty-five years have made a very considerable abatement in my general philanthropy. Men of the world will not blame me for writing from so prudent a motive, as that of making my fortune by it; and yet the truth I believe, at the time was, that I was perfectly well satisfied if my publications furnished me with a few guineas to see a Play, or an Opera.”

During the short time that his wife lived after his marriage, Miller observed that he appeared more animated and agreeable in his conversation, that is to say, he was cheerful because he was happy. After her death (and who has ever perused her epitaph without emotion?) he relapsed into a discontented habit of mind, as might be expected from one who had remained unmarried too long, and who although he might be said in the worldly sense of the word to have been a fortunate man, was never, except during the short duration of his marriage, a happy one. He had no near relations, none to whom he was in any degree attached; and in Gray he lost the most intimate of his friends, probably the only one towards whom he ever felt anything approaching to a warmth of friendship. This produced a most uncomfortable effect upon him in the decline of life; for knowing that he was looked upon as one who had wealth to leave for which there were no near or natural claimants, he suspected that any marks of attention which were shewn him, whether from kindness or from respect, proceeded from selfish views. That in many cases such suspicions may be well-founded, any one who knows what the world is, will readily believe; and if they made him capricious, and rendered him liable to be accused of injustice and want of feeling, the effect is not so extraordinary as it is pitiable. It is one of the evils attendant upon the possession of riches where there is no certain heir; it is part of the punishment which those persons bring upon themselves who accumulate unnecessary wealth, without any just or definite object.

But Mason is chargeable with no such sin. When a young man he made a resolution that if he came into possession of an estate which was entailed upon him, he would accept of no additional preferment; and he adhered to that resolution, though many offers were made to him which might have induced a worldly man to depart from it. The first thing he did after the inheritance fell to him was to resign his King's Chaplainship: “a priest in that situation,” he said, “could not help looking forward to a bishoprick, a species of ambition incompatible with the simplicity and purity of the Christian character, for, the moment a man aspires to the purple that moment virtue goes out of him.” Mr. Greville who after a visit to Mason, related this in a letter to his friend Polwhele, was informed that his income was about £1500 a-year, and that of this one third was appropriated to patronage and charity.

He had made another resolution, which was not kept, because it was not reasonable. When the Earl of Holdernesse offered him the Rectory of Aston, he was not in orders, and he called upon Warburton to ask his advice. “I found him,” says Warburton, “yet unresolved whether he should 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 service of religion, and totally to abandon his poetry. This sacrifice, I said, I thought was required at any time, but more indispensably so in this, when we are fighting with infidelity pro aris et focis. This was what I said; and I will do him the justice to say, that 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.” “How much shall I honour him,” says Warburton in another letter, “if he performs his promise to me of putting away those idle baggages after his sacred espousals!” This unwise promise explains Mason's long silence as a poet, and may partly account for his uncomfortable state of mind as long as he considered himself bound by it.

There were other circumstances about him which were unfavourable to happiness; he seems never to have been of a cheerful, because never of a hopeful temper; otherwise Gray would not have spoken of his “insatiable repining mouth,”—the lively expression of one who clearly perceived his constitutional faults, and yet loved him, as he deserved to be loved, in spite of them. The degree of malice also, which Gray noticed as the strongest passion in his nature, is to be reckoned among those circumstances. By far the most popular of his compositions were those well known satires which he never owned, and which professional critics with their usual lack of acumen, pronounced not to be his because of their sarcastic humour and the strength of their language. He had a great deal of that sarcastic humour, and this it was which Gray called malice; in truth it partakes of maliciousness, and a man is the worse for indulging it, if he ever allows himself to give it a personal direction, except in cases where strong provocation may warrant and strict justice require it. That these satires were written by Mason will appear upon the most indisputable proof whenever his letters shall be published; and it is earnestly hoped those letters may not be allowed to perish, for in them and in them only will the character of the writer appear in its natural lights and shades.

Mason would not (especially after their signal success,) have refrained from acknowledging these satires, which are the most vigorous of his compositions, unless he had been conscious that the turn of mind they indicated was not that which ought to be found in a member of his profession. And it can only have been the same feeling which induced the Editor to withhold them from the only collective edition of his works. That edition was delayed till fourteen years after his death, and then appeared without any memoir of the author, or any the slightest prefatory mark of respect: it seems therefore that he had left none by whom his memory was cherished. But though this may have been in some degree his fault, it was probably in a far greater degree his misfortune.

Mason had obtained preferment for his literary deserts, and in such just measure as to satisfy himself, and those also who would wish that ecclesiastical preferment were always so properly bestowed. But he was not satisfied with his literary fame. Others passed him upon the stream of popularity with all their sails set, full speed before the wind, while he lay quietly upon his oars in a pleasant creek; and he did not sufficiently bear in mind that he was safe at his ease, when some of those who so triumphantly left him behind were upset and went to the bottom. He had done enough to secure for himself a respectable place among the poets of his country, and a distinguished one among those of his age. But more through indolence than from any deficiency or decay of power, he had fallen short of the promise of his youth, and of his own early aspirations. Discontent, especially when mingled with self-reproach, is an uneasy feeling, and like many others he appears to have sought relief by projecting it, and transferring as much of it as he could upon the world. He became an acrimonious whig, and took an active part in the factious measures by which Yorkshire was agitated about the close of the American war. Gray if he had been then living might perhaps have been able to have rendered him more temperate and more reasonable in his political views; certainly he would have prevailed upon him not to write, or having written not to publish or preserve, the last book of his English Garden, which is in every respect miserably bad; bad in taste as recommending sham castles and modern ruins; bad in morals, as endeavouring to serve a political cause and excite indignation against the measures of Government by a fictitious story, (which if it had been true could have had no bearing whatever upon the justice or injustice of the American war;) and bad in poetry because the story is in itself absurd. Not the least absurd part of this puerile tale is the sudden death of the heroine, at the unexpected sight of her betrothed husband, whom she was neither glad nor sorry to see; and the description of the facies Hippocratica is applied to this person, thus dying in health, youth and beauty! Dr. Dove used to instance this as a remarkable example of knowledge ignorantly misapplied.

Yet though the Doctor did not rank him higher as a physiologist than Miller did as a musician, or than Sir Joshua must have done as a painter, he found more pleasure than the organist could do in his conversation; partly because there was an air of patronage in Mason's intercourse with Miller at first, and afterwards an air of estrangement, (a sufficient reason;) and partly because Mason was more capable of enjoying the richness of the Doctor's mind, and such of its eccentricities as were allowed to appear in company where he was not wholly without reserve, than he was of appreciating the simplicity of Miller's. That vein of humour which he indulged in his correspondence opened when he was conversing with one, like the Doctor, upon whom nothing was lost; at such times the heavy saturnine character of Mason's countenance, which might almost be called morose, seemed to be cast off; and pleasantry and good-nature animated its intellectual strength. But according to Polwhele's friend, there was a “sedate benignity in his countenance, which taught me,” says Mr. Greville, “instantaneously to rely on him as a man the leading traits of whose disposition were feeling and reflection. This immediate impression of his character I found afterwards to be strictly just. I never yet met with a human being whose head and heart appear to act and re-act so reciprocally, so concordantly upon each other as his.—In his style of conversation, you can trace nothing of the vis vivida of the poet. Here his inventive powers apparently lie dormant. Those flashes of genius, those intellectual emanations which we are taught to believe great men cannot help darting forward in order to lighten up the gloom of colloquial communication, he seems to consider as affected; he therefore rejects them whenever they occur, and appears to pride himself on the preference which he gives to simplicity and perspicuity. Conversation (if you will excuse a pedantic allusion,) with him resembles the style of painting mentioned in the earlier part of the Athenian History, which consisted in representing the artist's ideas in a simple unaffected point of view, through the medium of one colour only; whereas his writings are like the pictures of Polygnotus. They glow with all the warmth of an invigorated imagination, an animated diction, and a rich luxuriant phraseology.

“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!