MASON, George Hemming (1818-1872), A.R.A., was born at Whitley, in 1818, the eldest son of a Staffordshire county gentleman. Intended for the medical profession, he studied for five years under Dr Watt of Birmingham; but he had no taste for science; all his thoughts were given to art. In 1844 he abandoned medicine and travelled for a time on the Continent, visiting France, Germany, and Switzerland, and finally settling in Rome. His pencil was busy with the picturesque scenery that surrounded him, and with hardly any instruction, except that received from nature and from the Italian pictures that met his eye, he gradually acquired the painter’s skill At least two important works are referable to this period,— Ploughing in the Campagna, shown in the Royal Academy of 1857, and In the Salt Marshes, Campagna, exhibited in the following year. After Mason’s return from the Continent, in 1858, when he settled at Wetley Abbey, he continued to paint Italian subjects from studies made during his foreign tour, and then his art began to touch, in a wonderfully tender and poetic way, the peasant life of his native England, and especially of his native Staffordshire, and the homely landscape in the midst of which that life was set. The first picture of this class was Wind on the Wolds, and it was followed—along with much else—by the painter’s three greatest works—the Evening Hymn, 1868, a band of Staffordshire mill-girls, seen, their figures dark against the sunset, returning from their work, singing as they walk; Girls Dancing by the Sea, 1869; and the Harvest Moon, 1872. Mason had long suffered from heart disease, which carried him off on the 22d of October 1872. In his work he laboured under the double disadvantage of feeble and uncertain health, and a want of thorough arttraining, and consequently his pictures were never produced easily, or without strenuous and long-continued effort. His art is great in virtue of the solemn pathos which pervades it, of the dignity and beauty which it reveals in rustic life, of its keen perception of noble form and graceful motion and of rich effects of colour and subdued light. In motif and treatment it has most in common with the art of Millet and Jules Breton, and of Frederick Walker among Englishmen. An interesting collection of Mason’s pictures was brought together by the Burlington Club shortly after his death.

MASON, William (1725-1797), was about the beginning of the last quarter of the 18th century one of the most eminent of living poets, but his eminence was owing to the lowness of the poetic level at the time. He is now held in remembrance, not by his poetry, but by his having been the friend, the literary executor, and the biographer of Gray. Born in 1725, the son of a Yorkshire clergyman, entered of St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1742, he took his bachelor’s degree in 1745, and seems to have at once decided steadily on a literary career, reading little or nothing, Gray says, but writing abundance. Pope died in 1744, and the aspiring young poet lamented him as “Musaeus” in a careful imitation of Milton’s Lycidas, showing an ear for the music of verse and considerable skill in weaving words together, but not a spark of original force. By his Musaeus (1747) Mason attracted the notice of Gray, and through his influence was elected a fellow of Pembroke College. Mason was Gray’s attached friend, admirer, and poetical pupil to the end of the greater poet’s life. More fancy than judgment, and indolence in reading, were the chief faults that Gray found in his young friend. With his usual penetration, Gray discerned the defects of intellect that lie at the root of the weakness of Mason’s poetry. He was painstaking enough and more than enough with his verses, his epithets, bis phrases, his figures of speech, his rhymes; but be was deficient in energy of thought, his intellectual grasp was feeble, and he accepted and polished the easy suggestions of fancy instead of exerting himself to find exact expression for his subject. For a modest youth, as Gray describes him, he formed a great ambition, nothing less than the reconciliation of the modern with the ancient drama, to be effected by the strict observance of the unities and the restoration of the chorus. His Elfrida, a tragedy published in 1752 in pursuance of this ambition, is constructed elaborately upon deeply considered principles, but the principles are drawn from pedantic books and not from the dramatic needs of men, as may be judged from the dramatist’s opinion that Shakespeare, “in compliance merely with the taste of the time, showed a disregard of all the necessary rules of the drama.” Elfrida is highly “incorrect” in two respects—one venial in a play, the other fatal; it abounds in anachronistic allusions and moral improbabilities. Mason’s second attempt, Caractacus (published in 1759), is much stronger in construction and situation, but he did not possess the rare art of making his characters speak out of their own thoughts; they only speak as Mason the poet might have done in their circumstances if his fancy had been quite cool. Both Elfrida and Caractacus were acted in 1776, when Mason had made a considerable reputation by his English Garden (a poem in blank verse, first book published in 1772), his Heroic Epistle to Sir IΓ. Chambers in 1773, and his Memoirs of Gray in 1775. The plays were not successful; Mason did not expect success; his plays were intended to be read as poems. The manager perhaps had hopes from the novelty of the choruses of Saxon maidens and Druids. The second book of the English Garden was issued in 1777, the third in 1779, the fourth in 1782. Mason took orders in 1754, and soon afterwards was presented to the vicarage of Ashton in Yorkshire, the canonry of York, the prebend of Driffield, and the precentorship of York cathedral. Ashton was his residence till his death in 1797.