Author: Mason, William
Biography:
MASON, William (1725-97: ODNB), pseudonym Malcolm MacGreggor
Mason was a Yorkshireman, born on 12 Feb. 1725 at his father’s vicarage in Hull. His mother Mary Wild died before he was a year old and his father, Rev. William Mason, remarried twice before his own death in 1753. Mason was educated at Hull grammar school and at Cambridge (Pensioner, Trinity College, 1742; BA 1746, MA 1749, and Fellow 1749-65 at Pembroke), where close friends included Richard Hurd and Thomas Gray (qq.v.). Ordained in 1754 and presented to the living of Aston, Yorkshire, which he held for the rest of his life, he acquired by preferment several other livings and appointments, including royal chaplain (1757-72) and Precentor of York Minster (1762-97). An inheritance in 1768 made him financially independent and freed him to pursue interests—notably music and garden design--beyond his clerical and literary engagements. On 25 Sept. 1765 he married Mary Sherman at St. Mary’s, Lowgate, Hull, but she died of consumption at Clifton, Somerset, on 27 Mar. 1767 and was buried at Bristol Cathedral; they had no children and he did not remarry. Mason established a respectable literary reputation well before 1770 with works such as Elfrida (1752) and Caractacus (1759), but his best work came later. His edition of the works of Gray with “memoirs of his life and writings” (1775) created the life-and-letters model that became widely adopted, as was explicitly acknowledged by Boswell; his English Garden (1772-81) reworked the Virgilian georgic tradition on a subject of patriotic pride; and anonymously or under a pseudonym he exercised his powers of satire. He died suddenly at his rectory at Aston on 5 Apr. 1797 after a wound from a fall became infected; he was buried at All Saints, Aston, on 11 Apr. (ODNB 9 Apr. 2023; ACAD; CCEd 9 Apr. 2023; findmypast.com 9 Apr. 2023) HJ
Other Names:
- W. Mason