James Boswell admitted in his Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) that he was indebted to William Mason's memoirs of Thomas Gray (1775) for the form his masterpiece took. Mason also published a second biography--of William Whitehead (1788)--generally disregarded, or at least seen as overshadowed by his work on Gray, a landmark in biographical writing because of the half-epistolary form which so impressed Boswell and others at the time of its publication. Mason's declared aim had been to keep himself in the background, to allow his subject to speak for himself whenever possible through his correspondence. Future biographers, after Boswell and Arthur Murphy, would reject this plan, but the principle of representing lives rather than blowing life into them to inflate them still holds. Through this one work, therefore, Mason earned his place in the development of the genre. But his choice of subject--almost an inevitable outcome of a long, close...