1828.] 



.-. Domestlc^and Foreign* 



and death. Who will confound for a moment, 

 under any aspect whatever, such things as these 

 with the pastimes of the field? They are sports 

 peculiarly the share of the rabhle of towns, and 

 not those of what I will make bold to call the 

 chivalry of the fields. 



The author, we believe, is Mr. Kendall, 

 the writer of several works of no in- 

 considerable power particularly his Let- 

 ters on the State of Ireland, On Trial by 

 Battle, and the Crested Wren, &c. &c. 

 Jn the volume before us, he announces the 

 " true history of the unicorn, along with 

 that of the mermaid, sea-serpent, craken, 

 ogre, werewolf, vampyre, leviathan, behe- 

 moth, &c., under the title of Errors, Fables, 

 and Obscurities, concerning the natural his.- 

 tory of the heavens, the earth, mankind, 

 and the animal and vegetable kingdoms; 

 to which is added contributions to the natu- 

 ral and civil history of various animals, as 

 the whale, the dolphin, the camel, the 

 sheep, the dog, the cat," &c. &c. 



Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and 

 Character, Literary, Professional, and 

 Religious, of the late John Mason Good, 

 M.D., fyc. Qc., by Olinthus Gregory ; 

 1828. Who, beyond the narrow circle of 

 Dr. Mason Good's friends and acquaintance, 

 are likely to read Dr. Olinthus Gregory's 

 bulky biography of him, we have no con- 

 ception. Active, and even useful and suc- 

 cessful, as he may have been in his pro- 

 fessional capacity, and indefatigable as a 

 scribbler as he unquestionably was, we 

 know of no performance of his possessed of 

 such permanent value, or any merits or 

 services which can so have impressed the 

 public mind, as to make the detail of his 

 life, or the survey of his sentiments, of any 

 the slightest importance to any human be- 

 ing that narrow circle excepted, to which 

 we allude, and which almost every man's 

 memory commands. Dr. Olinthus Gre-^ 

 gory, however, thinks otherwise; and asf 

 unluckily, his book has fallen into our 

 hands, we must give some account of 

 the man, and of the matter of the book. 

 The author, to be sure, has an object 

 which we have not Dr. Mason Good, in 

 his later days, became a convert to Evan- 

 gelism, after associating twenty years with 

 Socinians, and it is of consequence with a 

 party to swell the bead-roll of its saints and 

 adherents. 



Dr. Mason Good's publications have oc- 

 casionally fallen in our way, for the last 

 twenty years, and we have seen enough to 

 settle in our minds that he was pre-emi- 

 nently in possession of the qualities that 

 lead to book -making a man of ready ap- 

 prehension capable of great labour with 

 a facility of acquiring, and a fluent pen, 

 which prompted him to communicate as 

 soon as he had acquired of a sanguine 

 temperament prone, therefore, rather to 

 find resemblances than to detect distinctions 

 , consequently, of .generalizing and of 



weaving systems, and impatient of dwelling 

 on points and facts, and indisposed to ar- 

 rive at truth by that surest path the exa- 

 mination of details. Nothing daunted 

 nothing puzzled him he could grasp with 

 equal ease the circle of the sciences, and the 

 .world of language, and, in fact, left scarcely 

 any thing untouched, and wanted nothing of 

 being himself a perfect encyclopaedia, totu's 

 teres atque rotundus, but a little mathematics, 

 of which Dr. Olinthus Gregory, who must 

 know, seems to think he did not know much. 

 This commanding person was born, it 

 appears, in 17G4 he was the son of a dis- 

 senting teacher, and his mother the niece 

 of Mason, the author of the " well-known" 

 treatise on Self-knowledge. He was edu- 

 cated by his father, and at the usual age of 

 fourteen, was apprenticed to a surgeon at 

 Oosport, and, in due course, commenced 

 operations as a finished performer at Sud- 

 bury. In 1793 he removed to London ? 

 and was so far successful, as to make an 

 income of 1,400 by his professional prac- 

 tice ; and, in 1820, with a Scotch diploma, 

 he started as a physician, and met again 

 with a degree of success, that made him 

 regret he had not made an earlier attempt. 

 His death occurred in January 1827, acce- 

 lerated by the multiplicity of his pursuits ? 

 and exertions beyond his strength exer- 

 tions, which neither his circumstances, nor 

 his reputation, nor any anticipations of ex- 

 traordinary usefulness, seem in any respect 

 to have exacted Now to his literature 



From his earliest years he was given up 

 to acquirement; and, very early also, the pos- 

 session of knowledge, thus acquired, to an 

 unusual degree, was too much for him to 

 keep, and he accordingly proceeded to pour 

 it forth, in amplified forms, for the benefit of 

 his generation. We cannot enumerate one 

 half of his numerous publications, but when 

 he once began there was no stopping him . 

 he had no rest in his soul. Poems, plays, 

 translations, essays, critiques, fell in showers 

 from his prolific pen ; but among his more 

 important and acknowledged works must be 

 reckoned his Dissertation on the Diseases 

 of Prisons and Poor Houses collected, we 

 presume, in his way, from books he could 

 at the time have had little personal expe- 

 rience of these places a prize essay, and 

 published at the request of the Medical So- 

 ciety (in Bolt-court, Fleet-street). This 

 publication first introduced his name to his 

 brethren. In the following year (1794) a 

 stir was made among the doctors to sepa- 

 rate the apothecary and the druggist, and a 

 society was instituted under the title of 

 The General Pharmaceutic Association, of 

 which Mr. Mason Good was an active mem,, 

 her, and, after his manner, shewed his ac- 

 tivity by writing a book, entitled the His- 

 tory of Medicine, so far as it relates to the 

 profession of the apothecary, from the ear- 

 liest accounts to the present period, which, 

 according to .the .biographer, aided greatly 



