* * * * * 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