MEMOIR.

THE Rev. Charles Mason was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, July 25th, 1812. He was the youngest son of the late Hon. Jeremiah Mason, and a descendant, in the fifth generation, of John Mason, the hero and historian of the Pequot war, who was born in England in 1599, became one of the first settlers of Dorchester, Conn., was for many years Major-General of the forces of Connecticut, and for ten years DeputyGovernor, and died at Norwich in 1672. Jeremiah Mason, the grandson of John, was also distinguished in the military service of his country, having held an important command on Dorchester Heights in the early part of the war of the Revolution. His son Jeremiah, the father of the subject of this sketch, born in Lebanon, Conn., in 1768, and a graduate of Yale College," removed from Connecticut to New Hampshire immediately after his graduation at Yale College, where, after retiring from public life, in the early senate of the country, he devoted himself to his profession, in

which he became a highly distinguished jurist and advocate, and was well known as long the leader of the New Hampshire bar. In 1832 he removed to Boston, where he continued to maintain the eminence which he had already gained, till, at the advanced age of eighty years, he closed his honorable and useful life." His wife was Mary, daughter of Col. Robert Means, a native of Ireland, an intelligent, high-minded, and successful merchant, and for many years a resident of Amherst, N. H. Mrs. Mason was a woman of rare gentleness and sweetness of manner, spirit, and character, endowed with the domestic virtues to a degree seldom equalled, and with a simple, unostentatious piety, which gave grace to her speech and beauty to her life, as a wife, mother, and friend, loved, honored, regretted, as only those can be in whom the best gifts of nature and cultivation are consecrated by Christian faith and purpose.

The early education of the subject of this sketch was conducted under the choicest home influences, both intellectual and moral. He inherited from his father a judicial cast of mind, habits of careful and accurate thought, and the tendency to form opinions on the deliberate weighing of argument and evidence; while his mother's simplicity, modesty, and tenderness were happily blended in his boyhood with the attributes that gave presage of a genuine and self-sustaining manliness.

About the time when he would have entered college, he was seized with a dangerous illness, — the same disease that terminated his life, after an interval of thirty-five years of almost uninterrupted health; and for several months he was so feeble that the care and comfort of his home were deemed essential to his entire restoration. His father's library became his study and his recitation-room; and here his conscientious diligence and fidelity, his maturity of judgment, his frankness, probity, and purity of character, gave full promise of all that he became in subsequent years. Seldom can there have been, at so early an age, so symmetrical a development. The recent death of an elder brother, of distinguished ability and excellence, had impressed him deeply, and combined with the religious instructions of his childhood to form that profound, yet cheerful seriousness which was hardly less the characteristic of his boyhood than of his riper years.

At the commencement of the summer term of 1829, he entered the freshman class at Harvard. Here he assumed and maintained a high rank as a scholar, though with but little ambition for college honors. His aim was to satisfy his own conscience by the faithful discharge of every duty, rather than to acquire a brilliant reputation. He brought to his classical studies a discriminating taste; and in these, as also in metaphysical and moral science,

he manifested a peculiar aptitude and proficiency. His choice of the Hebrew language as an elective study indicated his future profession; and in this department he, with several of the brightest and best among his classmates, came under the tuition of the writer. In this little class were destined ministers of several different denominations,-Unitarian, Methodist, Baptist, Episcopal,— their teacher at the same time a theological student; and the recitation-hour was often prolonged in friendly discussion of the great themes on which their views were so widely diverse, though with entire community and harmony of aim and spirit.

In these conferences, Mason bore his part with the firmness of settled conviction, but with a meekness, gentleness, and modesty which commanded the respect of the whole circle for himself and for the church of which he was the sole representative among them. The college course, though covering ostensibly nearly the same ground as at present, (including, indeed, a larger minimum in the mathematical and classical departments,) made a much less heavy draft upon the time and labor of a good scholar than it does now; and Mason availed himself of his leisure hours for the perusal of the best authors, particularly of those early English classics which were his favorite reading through life, and which exercised a marked influence in the formation of his style.

He was graduated with honor in 1832, and spent the following year at his father's residence in Boston, in the study of the Greek and Latin classics and in theological reading. In the autumn of 1833 he entered the Andover Theological Seminary, "in order to make himself better acquainted with the views of those who differed from the Church, and to be ably versed in the Hebrew language and biblical learning, then so well understood at Andover.” The two following years were spent at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in New York; and, at the close of this term, he was ordained deacon by the venerable Bishop Griswold. In September, 1836, he was invited to become the Rector of Christ Church, Cambridge, but declined the invitation, in order to secure an added period for professional study.

On the 1st of May, 1837, he was instituted Rector of St. Peter's Church, Salem; and retained that charge for ten years, interrupted only by a European tour of a few months, at a time when health, somewhat enfeebled, rendered an interval of relaxation necessary. His ministry in Salem was eminently successful, both as regarded the external growth and the spiritual prosperity of his church. "Few men, in the course of a ministry of ten years, have ever made so deep an impression upon the respect and affection of any people, as that which

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