SATIRICAL POEMS. By William Mason. Edited by Paget Toynbee. (Clarendon
Press. 42s. net.)
IT is exciting to have a mystery cleared up ; and, except for the specialist, that is the main interest of this volume. William Mason was a man of cultivation, and a typical, good, solid
eighteenth-century poet. It calls for a great appetite to read his works, even though Gray and Walpole admired him so much. But here he is more lively. He published half a dozen satires on his contemporaries, and at the time they were sufficiently daring and caustic for him to conceal his author- ship. Apparently Horace- Walpole himself-was flurried and anxious. He thought the satires both true and brilliant ; but he was afraid of being connected with them in anyway. Mason and Walpole between them managed to throw most people off the scent ; and even tq-day, Mr. Toynbee tells us Mason's authorship is not universally admitted. Now Mr. Toynbee has put the matter quite beyond doubt by printing letters froth Walpole and Mason, and Walpole's manuscript notes to the poems.
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