-CUMBERLAND, RICHARD, 1806, Memoirs Written by Himself, vol. I, p. 23.

His taste was highly polished; his vivacity attained to brilliancy; and his picturesque fancy, easily excited, was soon extinguished; his playful wit and keen irony were perpetually exercised in his observations on life, and his memory was stored with the most amusing knowledge, but much too lively to be accurate; for his studies were but his sports. But other qualities of genius must distinguish the great author, and even him who would occupy that leading rank in the literary republic our author aspired to fill. He lived too much in that class of society which is little favourable to genius; he exerted neither profound thinking, nor profound feeling; and too volatile to attain to the pathetic, that higher quality of genius, he was so imbued with the petty elegancies of society that every impression of grandeur in the human character was deadened in the breast of the polished cynic.. . . All his literary works, like the ornamented edifice he inhabited, were constructed on the same artificial principle; an old paper lodging-house, converted by the magician of taste into a Gothic castle, full of scenic effects. DISRAELI, ISAAC, 1812-13, The Pains of Fastidious Egotism, Calamities of Authors.

It

His judgment of literature, of contemporary literature especially, was altogether perverted by his aristocratical feelings. No writer surely was ever guilty of so much false and absurd criticism. He almost invariably speaks with contempt of those books which are now universally allowed to be the best that appeared in his time; and, on the other hand, he speaks of writers of rank and fashion as if they were entitled to the same precedence in literature which would have been allowed to them in a drawing-room. is easy to describe him by negatives. had not a creative imagination. He had not a pure taste. He was not a great reasoner. There is indeed scarcely any writer, in whose works it would be possible to find so many contradictory judgments, so many sentences of extravagant nonsense. Nor was it only in his familiar correspondence that he wrote in this flighty and inconsistent manner; but in long and elaborate books, in books repeatedly transcribed and intended for the

He

public eye.—MACAULAY, THOMAS BABINGTON, 1833, Walpole's Lettters to Sir Horace Mann, Edinburgh Review, vol. 58; Critical and Miscellaneous Essays.

I must guard you against the historical publications of the celebrated Horace Walpole. Look for entertainment in them if you please, and you will not be disappointed; but give him not your confidence: indeed you will soon see, from his lively and epigrammatic style of invective, that he cannot deserve it.-SMYTH, WILLIAM, 1840, Lectures on Modern History, Lecture xxxiii.

The affectation of his style has its roots in the affectation of his nature, and it is an admirable style for him.-WHIPPLE, EDWIN P., 1849, Use and Misuse of Words, Literature and Life, p. 247.

Horace Walpole illustrates his knowledge of the world by anecdote and witticism, by the authority of his own empirical opinion, by a fancy so wanton and discursive that it cannot fail to be sometimes just; but he never fatigues himself by seeking, like Rochefoucauld, to dissect and analyse. He prides himself on being frivolous, and, if he is wise, he takes care to tell you that he is only so for his own amusement. We cannot dispute his knowledge of the world in breadth of surface, as we may do that of the French Court-philosophers; but he very rarely dives to the depth which they explore, though it be but the depth of a garden. fountain. LYTTON, EDWARD BULWER LORD, 1863-68, Caxtoniana, Miscellaneous Prose Works, vol. III, p. 427.

Horace Walpole's pungent prose. BURTON, JOHN HILL, 1880, A History of the Reign of Queen Anne, vol. II, p. 131

Without a spark of genius, he has a taste, bright and intelligent, for the arts; he understands their principles, and dabbles in them all. He revives Gothic architecture in Strawberry Hill-a toy house; he makes an experiment in romance in "The Castle of Otranto"-a toy novel; he writes sketchy Lives of the Painters, and composes an ingenious "Essay on Landscape Gardening."-COURTHOPE, WILLIAM JOHN, 1885, The Liberal Movement in English Literature, p. 120.

"Unhealthy and disorganised mind," "a bundle of whims and affectations,"

marked by an unaffected simplicity and easy carelessness, used to say "Mason is not in my way, he is a buckram man ;" and this has been repeated by those who were not partial to him for political or other reasons. He had the misfortune to survive most of his early friends, and he does not appear to have been desirous of forming new connexions; this did not proceed from misanthropic cynicism, but from natural reserve; yet it caused the superficial observer to deem him proud and unsocial. That he possessed the Christian virtues in an eminent degree, and fulfilled the duties of his sacred character in an exemplary manner cannot be doubted.SINGER, S. W., 1822, The British Poets,

Chiswick ed.

ELFRIDA

1752

One of the best poets of the present age, the ingenious Mr. Mason of Cambridge, has not long ago published a Tragedy upon the model of the ancients, called "Elfrida;" the merit of this piece, as a poem has been confessed by the general reading it has obtained; it is full of beauties; the language is perfectly poetical, the sentiments chaste, and the moral excellent; there is nothing in our tongue can much exceed it in the flowry enchantments of poetry, or the delicate flow of numbers, but while we admire the poet, we pay no regard to the character; no. passion is excited, the heart is never moved, nor is the reader's curiosity ever raised to know the event.—CIBBER, THEOPHILUS, 1753, Lives of the Poets, vol. 1, p. 316.

My friend Mason is much chagrined at his daughter Elfrida's having eloped without his consent. I knew when I heard it was brought on the stage that he was not consulted, and they say it is sadly performed. It vexes one to think that a poem of such delicacy and dignity should be prostituted, and the charms of virgins represented by the abandoned nymphs of Drury Lane. Such a poem would have been represented in days of yore by the youthful part of the Royal family, or those of the first rank. GRANVILLE, MARY (MRS. DELANY,), 1772, Letter to Mrs. Port, Dec. 30; Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, Second series, vol. I, p. 488.

misrepresented historical fact, for which no man could be forgiven, and for which no beauties in his poetry can compensate. -HEADLEY, HENRY, 1787, Select Beauties of Ancient English Poetry.

The conduct of this regular drama is the most irregular thing in the world.BOADEN, JAMES, 1825, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, vol. 1, p. 265.

"Elfrida" is very, very far from a conmanifestly the production of a scholar and temptible piece of workmanship: it is a gentleman, of an ardent lover of poetry, and platonic inamorato of abstract virtue: but impossible as it is to approve our conjecture by experiment, we do shrewdly suspect that it is nothing like what Sophocles or Euripides would have written had they risen from the dead in the plenitude, or, if you will, with only a tithe of their powers, and an inspired mastery of the English language, to exhibit to the eighteenth century the marvel of a modern ancient drama. . . . As an accommodation of the ancient drama to modern habits and sympathies, "Elfrida" must be pronounced a decided failure. With

the great poets in any department of poetry, Mason cannot be numbered, yet for many years of his life he was England's greatest living Poet.-COLERIDGE, HARTLEY, 1833, Biographia Borealis, pp. 406, 427, 462.

There are two sorts of simplicity in the natural history of poets-the right sort, the manly simplicity that makes him write like Burns and Crabbe, from the forcible dictates of nature; and the wrong sort, perhaps, better entitled to the name of credulity, that gulls them to believe in. the false resources of their art. The worthy and single hearted Mason was of the latter description: he was one of those, to use Burns's words,

"Who think to climb Parnassus' hill

By dint o' Greek."