him in November 1774 and mentions that he had been appointed one of the judges for India, but that as somebody younger than himself was named before him, he refused the post,' though a most lucrative employ,' whereupon the lord chancellor obtained for him the place of cursitor baron of the exchequer, worth between 300/. and 400l. a year (Diary, i. 273). He filled this position from August 1773 until his death in 1824, a length of tenure without parallel in the records of the law, and he is said to have refused his consent to an augmentation of his salary. The recorder of London appointed him as his deputy on 16 Feb. 1779, but he resigned the post in 1783, and in 1780 the court of common council elected him senior judge of the sheriffs' court in the city of London, an office which he held until 1822. Maseres was a zealous protestant and whig and a warm advocate for reforms in the church of England, but he was not in favour of a wide scheme of electoral reform. He wore his wig and gown on a visit to Cobbett in Newgate, to show his abhorrence of the sentence which had been inflicted on the prisoner; and through sympathy with the sacrifice of position and profit by Theophilus Lindsey, he adopted in later life the principles of unitarianism, and suggested an important variation which was inserted in the Reformed Liturgy in 1793. Bentham designates him 'the public-spirited constitutionalist, and one of the most honest lawyers England ever saw;' and in another passage called him ' an honest fellow who resisted Lord Mansfield's projects for establishing despotism in Canada. There was a sort of simplicity about him which I once quizzed and then repented.' He inherited great wealth, partly from his father and partly from his bachelor brother, and he was very liberal with his money, especially in assisting the publications of others. It was his delight to entertain his friends in his rooms in London or in his country house at Reigate, and his conversation abounded in anecdote and information, particularly in the incidents of English history from 1040 to his own date. He kept up his taste for the classics. Homer he knew by heart, and Horace was at his fingers' ends. Lucan was his favourite next to Homer in ancient literature; among English writers he felt great admiration for Milton, and was thoroughly conversant with the works of Hobbes. He spoke French fluently, but it was the language in idiom and expression which his ancestors had brought over to England. A good chess-player, of such admirable sang-froid as never to exhibit any sign of victory or defeat, he combated Philidor, who was blindfolded, at the chess club in St. James's Street, and it was two hours before he was beaten. After a long and happy life he died at his house, Church Street, Reigate, on 19 May 1824, and his character was recorded in a Latin inscription on a monument placed in the church by the Rev. Robert Fellowes [q. v.] He left 30,000l. to his relatives the Whitakers, and the balance of his fortune to Fellowes. His library came by his will to the Inner Temple, and three of the manuscripts contained in it are described in the Hist. MSS. Comm. 11th Rep. App. pt. vii. v. 304; his unsold works in sheets passed to William Frend [q. v.] He endowed a Sunday-afternoon service at Reigate with funds producing 27l. 6s. per annum. He left nothing to his college, and there is a tradition that his original will included a legacy for it, but that, as he was never asked by its heads to sit for his portrait, he cancelled the bequest. An excellent portrait of him at the age of eighty-three was drawn by Charles Hayter in 1815 and engraved by Philip Audinet. He was elected F.R.S. on 2 May 1771.
Priestley wrote of Maseres that his works in mathematics are 'original and excellent' (Rutt, Life and Corresp. of Priestley, ii. 490). Frend and he set themselves against the rest of the world. They rejected negative quantities and 'made war of extermination on all that distinguishes algebra from arithmetic' (Wordsworth, Schola Acad. pp. 72, 141). Their leading idea seems to have been to calculate more decimal places than any one would want and to reprint the works of all who had done the same thing' (Astronom. Soc. Monthly Notices, v. 148). His mathematical treatises were:
- 'Dissertation on the use of the Negative Sign in Algebra,' 1768.
- 'Elements of Plane Trigonometry,' 1760.
- 'Scriptores Logarithmici,' a collection of tracts on logarithms, vol. i. 1791, ii. 1791, iii. 1796, iv. 1801, v. 1804, vi. 1807.
- 'Doctrine of Permutations and Combinations,' 1795.
- 'Appendix to Frend's Principles of Algebra,' 1798.
- 'Tracts on the Resolution of affected Algebraick Equations by Halley's, Raphson's, and Sir Isaac Newton's Methods of Approximation,' 1800.
- 'Tracts on the Resolution of Cubick and Biquadratick Equations,' n.d. [1803].
- 'Scriptores Optici,' 1823, a reprint, with the assistance of Babbage, of the writings of James Gregory and others.
Maseres, as intimately connected with North America, wrote:
- 'Considerations on the expediency of admitting Representatives from the American Colonies to the House of Commons,' 1770.
- 'Collection of Commissions and other Public Instruments relating to Quebec since 1760,' London, 1772.
