ABSTRACT
Mason (1724-97), a clergyman-poet, was sometime Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and a close friend of Gray, whose biographer he became. He served as chaplain to the king in 1757, and then as a Canon of York. Mason greatly admired Pope, and it was probably Pope's satires which led him to Donne; but his interest in Donne's poetry seems to have been limited, and brief. (See D. A. Low, 'An Eighteenth-Century Imitation of Donne's First Satire', RES, n.s., xvi, 1965, pp. 291-8.)
(i) In his Musaeus: A Monody To the Memory of Mr Pope, in Imitation of Milton's Lycidas, 1747, p. 18, Mason mentions Donne as one of the fathers of satiric poetry. The lines are spoken by Musaeus (Pope himself), who here replies to the praises lavished on him by Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton:
Come then that honest fame; whose sober ray Or gilds the satire, or the moral lay; Which dawns, tho' thou, rough DONNE! hew out the line, But beams, sage HORACE! from each strain of thine.
