fore," writes Mason, "that when my friend had accepted the laurel, without such permission, the best blossom that could have been annexed to its foliage, that I advised him to employ a deputy to write his annual odes, and reserve his own pen for certain great occasions that might occur, such as a peace or a marriage, and then to address his Royal Master with some studied ode or epistle, as Boileau and Racine had done in France for their pensions. And I also pointed out to him two or three needy poets of the day, who, for the reward of five or ten guineas, would write immediately under the eye of the musical composer (a humiliation which all that write for music in the present state of that art ought to submit to,) and who would cut their lines shorter or spin them out longer, in order to fit them to any given air; as the poetical subalterns whom Handel employed did with great obsequiousness, whenever the oratorio exigencies of their musical general required them to new-array the rank and file of their metres. This advice, given partly in jest, partly in earnest, was not attended to by my friend. He set himself to his periodical task, with the zeal of a person who wished to retrieve the honours of that laurel which came to him from the hand of Cibber in a very shrivelled or rather blasted state. But though his first ode was calculated, from the heroic genealogy which it contained, to be peculiarly acceptable to the monarch for whose birthday it was written, and though its poetical merit had the very just approbation of Mr. Gray and other good judges, it was little relished in general."
The Odes have provoked a censure from Dr. Johnson, who, speaking of Cibber's and those of his successor, observed "Cibber's familiar style was better than Whitehead's assumed one; grand nonsense is insupportable." Gibbon has, for an historical inaccuracy, severely criticised the first of them which he speaks of "as one of the annual
