will, I much want that instance of your friendship I men. tioned in my last; a friendship I am very sensible I can receive from no one but yourself. I should not urge this thing so much but for very particular reasons; nor can you be at a loss to conceive how "a trifle of this na ture" may be of serious moment to me; and while I am in hopes of the great advantage of your advice about it, I shall not be so absurd as to make any further step without it. I know you are much engaged, and only hope to hear of you at your entire leisure. 'I am, Sir, your most faithful 'and obedient servant, 'E. YOUNG.' Nay, even after Pope's death, he says, in "Night Seven,' Pope, who could'st make immortals, art thou dead? Either the Essay,' then, was dedicated to a patron who disapproved its doctrine, which I have been told by the author was not the case; or Young appears, in his old age, to have bartered for a dedication, an opinion entertained of his friend through all that part of life when he must have been best able to form opinions. From this account of Young, two or three short passages, which stand almost together in Night Four,' should not be excluded. They afford a picture by his own hand, from the study of which my readers may choose to form their own opinion of the features of his mind, and the complexion of his life. Ah me! the dire effect My very Master knows me not. I've been so long remember'd I'm forgot. When in his courtiers' ears I pour my plaint, They drink it as the Nectar of the Great; And squeeze my hand, and beg me come to-morrow. If this song lives, Posterity sball know One though in Britain born, with courtiers bred, Deduct from the writer's age, 'twice told the period spent on stubborn Troy,' and you will still leave him more than forty when he sat down to the miserable siege of court fayour. He has before told us After all, the siege seems to have been raised only in consequence of what the general thought his death-bed." By these extraordinary poems, written after he was sixty, of which I have been able to say so much, I hope, by the wish of doing justice to the living and the dead, it was the desire of Young to be principally known. He entitled the four volumes which he published himself, "The Works of the Author of the Night Thoughts.' While it is remembered that from these he excluded many of his writings, let it not be forgotten that the rejected pieces contained nothing prejudicial to the cause of virtue, or of religion. Were every thing that Young ever wrote to be published, he would only appear, perhaps, in a less respectable light as a poet, and more despicable as a dedicator; he would not pass for a worse Christian, or for a worse man. This enviable praise is due to Young. Can it be claimed by every writer? His dedications, after all, he had perhaps no right to suppress. They all, I believe, speak, not a little to the credit of his gratitude, of favours received; and I know not whether the author, who has solemnly printed an acknow. ledgment of a favour, should not always print it. Is it to the credit or to the discredit of Young, as a poet, that of his Night Thoughts' the French are particularly fond? Of the 'Epitaph on Lord Aubrey Beauclerk,' dated 1740, all I know is, that I find it in the late body of English Poetry, and that I am sorry to find it there. Notwithstanding the farewell which he seemed to have taken in the Night Thoughts' of every thing which bore the least resemblance to ambition, he dipped again in politics. In 1745 he wrote Reflections on the public Situation of the Kingdom, addressed to the Duke of New castle, indignant as it appears, to behold -a pope-bred Princeling crawl ashore, And whistle cut-throats, with those swords that scrap'd To cut his passage to the British throne. This political poem might be called a Night Thought.' Indeed it was originally printed as the conclusion of the "Night Thoughts,' though he did not gather it with his other works. Prefixed to the second edition of Howe's' Devout Meditations' is a letter from Young, dated Jan. 19, 1752, addressed to Archibald Macauly, Esq. thanking him for the book, which he says he shall never lay far out of his reach; for a greater demonstration of a sound head and a sincere heart he never saw.' In 1753, when The Brothers' had lain by him about thirty years, it appeared upon the stage. If any part of his fortune had been acquired by servility of adulation, he now determined to deduct from it no inconsiderable sum, as a gift to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. To this sum he hoped the profits of the 'Brothers' would amount. In his calculation he was deceived; but by the bad success of his play the Society was not a loser. The Author made up the sum he originally intended, which was a thousand pounds, from his own pocket. The next performance which he printed was a prose publication, entitled, The Centaur not fabulous, in Six Letters to a Friend, on the Life in Vogue.' The conclusion is dated November 29, 1754. In the third Letter is described the death-bed of the 'gay, young, noble, ingenious, accomplished, and most wretched Altamont.' His last words were My principles have poisoned my friend, my extravagance has beggared my boy, my unkindness has murdered my wife.' Either Altamont and Lorenzo were the twin production of fancy, or Young was unlucky enough to know two characters who bore no little resemblance to each other in perfection of wickedness. Report has been accustomed to call Altamont Lord Euston. 'The Old Man's Relapse,' occasioned by an Epistle to Walpole, if written by Young, which I much doubt, must have been written very late in life. It has been seen, I am told, in a Miscellany published thirty years before his death. In 1758, he exhibited The Old Man's Relapse' in more than words, by again becoming a dedicator, and publishing a sermon addressed to the King. The lively Letter in prose, 'On Original Composition,' addressed to Richardson, the author of 'Clarissa,” appeared in 1759. Though he despair of breaking through the frozen obstructions of age and care's incumbent cloud, into that flow of thought and brightness of expression which subjects so polite, require;' yet is it more like the production of untamed, unbridled youth, than of jaded fourscore. Some sevenfold volumes put him in mind of Ovid's sevenfold channels of the Nile at the conflagration: ostia septem Pulverulenta vocant, septem sine flumine valles. Such leaden labours are like Lycurgus's iron money, which are so much less in value than in bulk, that it required barns for strong boxes, and a yoke of oxen to draw five hundred pounds. If there is a famine of invention in the land, we must travel, he says, like Joseph's brethren, far for food; we must visit the remote and rich ancients. But an inventive genius may safely stay at home; that, like the widow's cruse, is divinely replenished from within, and affords us a miraculous delight. He asks why it should seem altogether impossible, that Heaven's latest editions of the human mind may be the most correct and fair? and Jonson, he tells us, was very learned, as Samson was very strong, to his own hurt. Blind to the nature of tragedy, he pulled down all antiquity on his head, and buried himself under it. Is this 'care's incumbent cloud,' or 'the frozen obstructions of age?' In this Letter Pope is severely censured for his 'fall from Homer's numbers, free as air, lofty and barmonious as the spheres, into childish shackles and tinkling sounds; for putting Achilles into petticoats a second time:' but we are told that the dying swan talked over an epic plan with Young a few weeks before his decease. Young's chief inducement to write this Letter was, as he confesses, that he might erect a monumental marble to the memory of an old friend. He, who employed his pious pen for almost the last time in thus doing justice to the exemplary death bed of Addison, might probably at the close of his own life, afford no unuseful lesson for the deaths of others. In the postcript, he writes to Richardson, that he will see in his next how far Addison is an original. But no other letter appears. The few lines which stand in the last edition, as sent by Lord Melcombe to Dr. Young, not long before his Lordship's death,' were indeed so sent, but were only an introduction to what was there meant by The Muse's latest Spark.' The poem is necessary, whatever may be its merit, since the Preface to it is already printed. Lord Melcombe called his Tusculum La Trappe.' Love thy country, wish it well, Life's wide ocean trust no more; Strive thy little bark to steer With the tide, but near the shore. Waft thee to the port of peace. Keep thy conscience from offence, Easy shall thy passage be, Cheerful thy allotted stay, Short th' account 'twixt God and thee; Hope shall meet thee on the way: Truth shall lead thee to the gate, The poem was accompanied by a letter. DEAR SIR, 'La Trappe, the 27th of Oct. 1761. "You seemed to like the ode I sent you for your amusement: I now send it you as a present. If you please to ac cept of it, and are willing that our friendship should be known when we are gone, you will be pleased to leave this among those of your own papers that may possibly see the light by a pósthumous publication. God send us health while we stay, and an easy journey! 'My dear Dr. Young, 'Your's, most cordially, |