One who visited York a few years after the death of the Poet, says, “the Verger who showed us the Minster upon my inquiring of him concerning Mason, began an encomium upon him in an humble way indeed, but more honourable than all the factitious praises of learned ostentation; his countenance brightened up when I asked him the question; his very looks told me that Mason's charities did not evaporate in effusions of sensibility; I learned that he was humble, mild, and generous; the father of his family; the delight of all that came within the sphere of his notice. Then he was so good in his parish. My soul contemplates, with fond exultation, the picture of a man, endowed with genius, wit and every talent to please the great, but _suâ se virtute involventem_, resigning himself with complacency to the humble duties of a country pastor,—turning select Psalms into Verse to be sung in his Church; simplifying and arranging, and directing to the purposes of devotion his church music; and performing his duties as a minister with meekness, perseverance, and brotherly love.” Enough has now been adduced to vindicate Mason's character from Miller's aspersion. They who desire to see his merits as a poet appreciated with great ability and equal justice should peruse his life in Hartley Coleridge's Boreal Biography,—what a boisterous title for a book in which there is not one blustering sentence, and so many sweet strains of feeling and of thought! CHAPTER CXXVII. THE DOCTOR'S THEORY OF PROGRESSIVE EXISTENCE. _Quam multæ pecudes humano in corpore vivunt!_ PALINGENIUS. Like Mason, Dr. Dove looked to the future in that sure and certain hope without which the present would be intolerable to a thinking mind and feeling heart. But in his speculations he looked to the past also. Watson Bishop of Llandaff amused himself with asking from whom his mind descended? where it existed before he was born? and who he should have been if he had not been Richard Watson? “The Bishop was a philosopher,” says Dr. Jarrold, “and ought not to have asked such idle questions.” My Doctor would not have agreed with Dr. Jarrold in this opinion. Who the Bishop might have been if he had not been the discontented hero of his own auto-biography, he could not indeed have pretended to divine; but what he was before he was Richard Watson, where his mind had existed before he was born, and from whom, or rather from what, it had been transmitted, were questions which according to his notions, might admit of a probable solution.