Meek twilight slowly sails, and waves her banners gray."

It was alleged, indeed, by those who loved to say ill-natured things,
(Horace Walpole among them,) that in the later years of his life he
forgot his first love of Liberalism and became politically conservative.
But it must be remembered that the good poet lived into the time when
the glut and gore of the French Revolution made people hold their
breath, and when every man who lifted a humane plaint against the
incessant creak and crash of the guillotine was reckoned by all mad
reformers a conservative. I think, if I had lived in that day, I should
have been a conservative, too,--however much the pretty and bloody
Desmoulins might have made faces at me in the newspapers.

I can find nothing in Mason's didactic poem to quote. There are tasteful
suggestions scattered through it,--better every way than his poetry. The
grounds of his vicarage at Aston must have offered charming
loitering-places. I will leave him idling there,--perhaps conning over
some letter of his friend the poet Gray; perhaps lounging in the very
alcove where he had inscribed this verse of the "Elegy,"--

"Here scattered oft, the loveliest of the year,
By hands unseen, are showers of violets found;
The redbreast loves to build and warble here,
And little footsteps lightly print the ground."

If, indeed, he had known how to strew such gems through his "English
Garden," we should have had a poem that would have out-shone "The
Seasons."

And this mention reminds me, that, although I have slipped past his