He was very sensible to the annoyance of the periodical critics, which Gray was too philosophical or too proud to regard otherwise than as matter of amusement. He was the butt for a long line of satirists or lampooners. Churchill, Lloyd, Colman, the author of the Probationary Odes, and, if I remember right, Paul Whitehead and Wolcot, all levelled their shafts at him in turn. In the Probationary Odes, his peculiarities were well caught: when the writer of these pages repeated some of the lines in which he was imitated to Anna Seward, whose admiration of Mason is recorded in her letters, she observed, that what was meant for a burlesque was in itself excellent. There is reason to suppose that he sometimes indulged himself in the same license under which he suffered from others. If he was indeed the author of the Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers, and of some other anonymous satires which have been imputed to him, he must have felt Hayley's intended compliment as a severe reproach: Sublimer Mason! not to thee belong The reptile beauties of invenom'd song. Of the Epistle, when it was remarked, in the hearing of Thomas Warton, that it had more energy than could have been expected from Walpole, to whom others ascribed it, Warton remarked that it might have been written by Walpole, and buckramed by Mason. Indeed, it is not unlikely that one supplied the venom, and the other spotted the snake. In a letter of expostulation to Warton, Mason did not go the length of disclaiming the satire, though he was angry enough that it should be laid at his door. I have heard that he received with much apathy the praises offered him by Hayley, in the Essay on Epic Poetry. He has remarked, "that if rhyme does not condense the sense, which passes through its vehicle, it ceases to be good, either as verse or rhyme."[2] This rule is laid down too broadly. His own practice was not always consonant with it, as Hayley's never was. With Darwin's poetry, it is said that he was much pleased. His way of composing, as we learn from Gray's remarks upon his poems, was to cast down his first thoughts carelessly, and at large, and then clip them here and there at leisure. "This method," as his friend observed, "will leave behind it a laxity, a diffuseness. The force of a thought (otherwise well-invented, well-turned, and well-placed) is often weakened by it." He might have added, that it is apt to give to poetry the air of declamation.