credited in a later letter with a large share in the 'Vindication' (lii. 152). Portions of both letters are printed by Wood.
By his wife (born Elizabeth Price) Mason had three children. The baptisms of Elizabeth on 9 Sept. 1604 and of Samuel on 4 May 1606 are recorded in the parish registers of Orford.
John Mason (fl. 1603), a brother of Francis, matriculated from Merton College, Oxford, on 15 Oct. 1591, proceeded B.A. of Corpus Christi College on 23 July 1599, and M.A. on 9 July 1603, and became fellow of Corpus. His exercise for the degree of B.D. excited suspicion of his orthodoxy, but he recanted, and his submission was made in convocation on 12 June (Wood, Hist. and Antiq., Gutch, vol. ii. pt. ii. p. 305). He received the degree on 25 June. He was possibly the John Mason who was vicar of Yazor in Herefordshire in 1620.
[Wood's Athenae (Bliss), ii. cols. 305-8, 311, 647; Reg. Univ. Oxon. (Oxford Hist. Soc.), vol. ii. pt. i. pp. 38, 39, 41, pt. ii. p. 127, pt. iii. pp. 139, 216; Foster's Alumni Oxon. 1500-1714; Cal. State Papers, Dom. Ser. Eliz. 1598-1601, p. 346; Wood's Hist. and Antiq. (Gutch), vol. ii. pt. i. p. 247; Lindsay's Preface to Mason's Vindication, passim; Dodd's Church Hist. ii. 269-77, iii. 82; Nichols's Lit. Anecd. i. 376; Davy's Athenæ Suffolciences (Addit. MS. 19165, if. 301-3); Bramhall's Works, 1845, iii. 22, 97, 111, 119, v. 219, 221,238, 242; assistance from the Rev. E. Maude Scott of Orford and the Rev. F. R. Hawkes Mason of Barton Mills, Suffolk.]
MASON, FRANCIS (1837–1886), surgeon, youngest son of Nicholas Mason, a lace merchant, of Wood Street, Cheapside, London, was born at Islington'on 21 July 1837. He received his early education at the Islington proprietary school, of which John Jackson [q. v.], afterwards bishop of London, was then the headmaster. He afterwards went to the King's School, Canterbury, and, matriculating at the London University, he pursued his medical studies at King's College, London, of which he was made an honorary fellow. In the medical school attached to King's College he became a friend of Sir William Fergusson [q. v.], who esteemed his surgical skill so highly as to make him his private assistant. He was admitted a member of the Royal College of Surgeons of England on 25 July 1858. He served as house-surgeon at King's College Hospital 1859-60, and was granted the diploma of fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England 11 Dec. 1862.
In 1863 he was appointed an assistant-surgeon to King's College Hospital, and surgeon to the St. Pancras and Northern Dispensary. In 1867 he became assistant-surgeon to, and lecturer on anatomy at, the Westminster Hospital, becoming full surgeon there in 1871. Mason was invited to join the medical staff of St. Thomas's Hospital as assistant-surgeon and lecturer on anatomy when the new buildings of that institution were opened in 1871. He accepted the invitation, and became full surgeon in 1876, when he resigned the lectureship of anatomy for that of practical surgery.
He filled many important offices at the Medical Society of London, being orator in 1870, Lettsomian lecturer in 1878, president in 1882, and subsequently treasurer.
Mason was a man of genial character, generous, hospitable, and possessed of great musical talents. He died of acute erysipelatous inflammation of the throat on Saturday, 5 June 1886, leaving a widow without children. He is buried at Highgate. There is a portrait of Mason in the medical committee-room at St. Thomas's Hospital.
He published:
- 'On Harelip and Cleft Palate,' 8vo, London, 1877.
- 'On the Surgery of the Face,' 8vo, London, 1878.
He was editor of the 'St. Thomas's Hospital Reports,' vols. ix-xiv. (1879-86).
[Obituary notices in St. Thomas's Hospital Reports, new ser. 1886, xv. 249; Lancet, 1886, i. 1144; Transactions of the Royal Medico-Chirurgical Society, lxx. 17; information supplied by Mrs. Mason.]
MASON, GEORGE (1735–1806), miscellaneous writer, born in 1735, was eldest son of John Mason (d. 1750), distiller, of Deptford Bridge, whose widow remarried Dr. George Jubb [q. v.], regius professor of Hebrew at Oxford. He matriculated at Oxford from Corpus Christi College on 7 Feb. 1753, but did not graduate, and was called to the bar from the Inner Temple in 1761 (Foster, Alumni Oxon. 1714-1886, iii. 924). Having inherited ample means, including the estate of Porters, in the parish of Shenley, Hertfordshire, and another property at Havering, Essex, he was enabled to fully gratify his taste for letters and landscape-gardening. He bought also with rare discrimination some of the scarcest books in Greek, Latin, and English literature, including a perfect copy of Dame Juliana Bernes's 'Boke of Haukyng and Huntyng' (1486), which fetched 73l. 10s. at his sale, and a few choice manuscripts. In 1772 he sold Porters to Richard, earl Howe, whose biographer he afterwards became, and thenceforward resided at Aldenham Lodge, Hertfordshire (Cussans, Hertfordshire, vol. iii.,
