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.