Mason’s Miltonic imitations, “Musaeus,” “Il Bellicoso” and “Il Pacifico” were written in 1744—­according to the statement of their author, whose statements, however, are not always to be relied upon.  The first was published in 1747; the second “surreptitiously printed in a magazine and afterward inserted in Pearch’s miscellany,” finally revised and published by the author in 1797; the third first printed in 1748 in the Cambridge verses on the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle.  These pieces follow copy in every particular.  “Il Bellicoso,” e.g., opens with the invocation.

    “Hence, dull lethargic Peace,
    Born in some hoary beadsman’s cell obscure!”

The genealogies of Peace and War are recited, and contrasted pictures of peaceful and warlike pleasures presented in an order which corresponds as precisely as possible to Milton’s in “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.”

    “Then, to unbend my mind, I’ll roam
    Amid the cloister’s silent gloom;
    Or, where ranged oaks their shades diffuse,
    Hold dalliance with my darling Muse,
    Recalling oft some heaven-born strain
    That warbled in Augustan reign;
    Or turn, well pleased, the Grecian page,
    If sweet Theocritus engage,
    Or blithe Anacreon, mirthful wight,
    Carol his easy love-lay light. . . 
    And joys like these, if Peace inspire
    Peace, with thee I string the lyre."[9]

“Musaeus” was a monody on the death of Pope, employing the pastoral machinery and the varied irregular measure of “Lycidas.”  Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton, under the names of Tityrus, Colin Clout, and Thyrsis, are introduced as mourners, like Camus and St. Peter in the original.  Tityrus is made to lament the dead shepherd in very incorrect Middle English.  Colin Clout speaks two stanzas of the form used in the first eclogue of “The Shepherd’s Calendar,” and three stanzas of the form used in “The Faerie Queene.”  Thyrsis speaks in blank verse and is answered by the shade of Musaeus (Pope) in heroic couplets.  Verbal travesties of “Lycidas” abound—­“laureate hearse,” “forego each vain excuse,” “without the loan of some poetic woe,” etc.; and the closing passage is reworded thus: 

    “Thus the fond swain his Doric oat essayed,
    Manhood’s prime honors rising on his cheek: 
    Trembling he strove to court the tuneful Maid,
    With stripling arts and dalliance all too weak,
    Unseen, unheard beneath an hawthorn shade. 
    But now dun clouds the welkin ’gan to streak;
    And now down dropt the larks and ceased their strain: 
    They ceased, and with them ceased the shepherd swain.”