'Dacorum Hundred' p. 311). A portion of his library was sold by Messrs. Leigh & Sotheby in four distinct parts in 1798 and 1799, Lord Spencer buying some of the rarest items (Dibdin, Bibliomania, pp. 559-564). The sale catalogue (4 pts. 8vo, London, 1798-9) was formerly prized by collectors.
Mason, who was a director of the Sun Fire Office, died unmarried at Aldenham Lodge on 4 Nov. 1806 (Gent. Mag. 1806, pt. ii. p. 1169). He left his landed property to his brother's son, and provided handsomely for a natural daughter.
His works are: 1. 'An Essay on Design in Gardening' [anon.], 8vo, London, 1768; 2nd edit., greatly augmented, 1795. An 'Appendix,' in answer to Uvedale Price's publications, appeared in 1798. 2. 'A Supplement to Johnson's "English Dictionary," of which the palpable errors are attempted to be rectified, and its material omissions supplied,' 4to, London, 1801. 3. 'The Life of Richard, Earl Howe' 8vo, London, 1803. 4. 'A Review of the Proposals of the Albion Fire Insurance: also a Continuation of the ... Globe's History from where Mr. Stonestreet's ends. ... A Narrative of gross misbehaviour towards the Public, in the British Critic ... on the subject of the Appendix to the Supplement to Johnson's Dictionary' 8vo, London, 1806. He is also accredited with the authorship of a pamphlet called ' A British Freeholder's Answer to Thomas Paine.'
From a manuscript in his possession Mason published a selection of 'Poems by Thomas Hoccleve, with a Preface, Notes, and Glossary' 4to, London, 1796, a very creditable performance.
Mason's correspondence with William Herbert, whom he assisted in the preparation of a new edition of Joseph Ames's 'Typographical Antiquities' and with Samuel Pegge on the subject of a glossary to 'Hoccleve' may be found in Nichols's 'Illustrations of Literature' (iv. 550-70). He also had frequent correspondence with Owen Manning [q. v.], the historian of Surrey, who thought him a ' very sensible and ingenious person' (ib. viii. 287).
[Nichols's Lit. Anecd. ii. 659.]
MASON, GEORGE HEMING (1818–1872), painter, born at Fenton Park in the parish of Stoke-upon-Trent, Staffordshire, on 11 March 1818, was the eldest son of George Miles Mason, afterwards of Wetley Abbey, by his wife, Eliza Heming, daughter of Major Heming of Mappleton, Derbyshire. His grandfather was a potter, and the pottery was afterwards carried on by his father and uncle, who invented the celebrated ware called ‘Mason's iron-stone china.’ His father, who graduated from Brasenose College, Oxford, was a cultivated man, who relinquished business, became a country gentleman, and mainly devoted himself to literature and painting.
Mason went at an early age to Anderton's school at Brompton, Newcastle-under-Lyme; was afterwards educated at home, and in 1834 was articled to William Royden Watts, surgeon, of Birmingham, but after a few years the articles were cancelled. As a youth he was passionately fond of literature and of athletic exercise, and he inherited his father's taste for painting. An early oil sketch of his, entitled ‘Dummy's Turn to Play,’ still exists, in which he tried to embody a ghastly incident of the time of the plague. He was also art-critic to a local newspaper.
In the autumn of 1843 he left England with his brother Miles on a trip through France, Switzerland, and Italy. The journey was mainly performed on foot. They reached Rome in the autumn of 1845, and George took a studio there. Temporary family troubles soon compelled him and his brother to shift for themselves, and he picked up a livelihood by painting portraits of the English in Rome, and more particularly of their horses and dogs, for which he had a natural talent. Despite a serious illness and severe poverty, Mason's spirits never sank, and when the Italian war broke out, he helped to tend the wounded. His brother Miles entered Garibaldi's army as a volunteer, and eventually became a captain. During the siege of Rome, Mason and two fellow-artists, G. Thomas and Murray, were arrested as suspected spies, and narrowly escaped death. Soon afterwards Watts Russell met him at Rome, and commissioned him to paint a picture for fifty scudi. In 1851 he made a tour in the Sabine and Ciociara countries with William Cornwallis Cartwright, afterwards M.P. for Oxfordshire, and subsequently spent much time painting cattle as the guest of a gentleman grazier of the Campagna.
Mason delighted in the Campagna, and his three fine pictures, ‘Ploughing in the Campagna,’ ‘In the Salt Marshes,’ 1856, and ‘A Fountain with Figures,’ amply prove his intimate knowledge of it. When thinking out a composition, which often originated in some literary subject, he usually strolled the neighbouring country in search of particular forms and colours for the accessories. Sometimes a new subject would be thus suggested, as in the case of his ‘Ploughing in the Campagna,’
