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.