In literature Andrew Stewart’s promised ‘Letters to Lord Mansfield’ excited universal curiosity. In that work Stewart treated the chief justice as those Chinese executioners do their patients whose skin they politely and tenderly brush away with wire brushes till nothing is left of the victim but a skeleton. It was a luxury to Walpole to see a Scot dissect a Scot. ‘They know each other’s sore places better than we do.’ The work, however, was not published. Referring to Macpherson’s ‘Ossian,’ Walpole remarked, ‘The Scotch seem to be proving that they are really descended from the Irish.’ On the other hand, the ‘Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers’ was being relished by satirical minds, and men were attributing it to Anstey and Soame Jenyns, and to Temple, Luttrell, and Horace Walpole, and pronouncing it wittier than the ‘Dunciad,’ and did not know that it was Mason’s, and that it would not outlive Pope. Sir William Chambers found consolation in the fact that the satire, instead of damaging the volume it condemned, increased the sale of the book by full three hundred volumes. Walpole, of course, knew from the first that Mason was the author; he worked hard in promoting its circulation, and gloried in its success. ‘Whenever I was asked,’ he writes, ‘have you read “Sir John Dalrymple?” I replied, “Have _you_ read the ‘Heroic Epistle’?” The _Elephant_ and _Ass_ have become constellations, and ‘_He has stolen the Earl of Denbigh’s handkerchief_,’ is the proverb in fashion. It is something surprising to find, at a time when authors are supposed to have been ill paid, Dr. Hawkesworth receiving, for putting together the narrative of Mr. Banks’s voyage, one thousand pounds in advance from the traveller, and six thousand from the publishers, Strahan & Co. It really seems incredible, but this is stated to have been the fact.