Of his adventures in the Exeter family I am unable to give any account. The attempt to get into parliament was at Cirencester, where Young stood a contested election. His grace discovered in him talents for oratory as well as for poetry. Nor was this judgment wrong. Young, after he took orders became a very popular preacher, and was much followed for the grace and animation of his delivery. By his oratorical talents he was once in his life, according to the Biographia, deserted. As he was preaching in his turn at at St James's, he plainly perceived it was out of his power to command the attention of his audience. This so affected the feelings of the preacher, that he sat back in the pulpit, and burst into tears. But we must pursue his poetical life.

In 1719 he lamented the death of Addison, in a Letter addressed to their common friend Tickell. For the secret history of the following lines, if they contain any, it is now vain to seek:

In joy once join'd, in sorrow, now, for years-
Partner in grief, and brother of my tears,
Tickell, accept this verse, thy mournful due.

From your account of Tickell it appears that he and Young used to "communicate, to each other whatever verses they wrote, even to the least "things."

In 1719 appeared a "Paraphrase on part of the Book of Job." Patker, to whom it is dedicated, had not long, by means of the seals, been qualified for a patron. Of this work the author's opinion may be known from his Letter to Curll: "You seem, in the Collection you propose, to have "omitted what I think may claim the first place in it; I mean A Trans"lation from Part of Job,' printed by Mr. Tonson." The dedication, which was only suffered to appear in Mr. Tonson's edition. while it speaks with satisfaction of his present retirement, seems to make an unusual struggle to escape from retirement. But every one who sings in the dark does not sing from joy. It is addressed, in no common strain of flattery, to a chancellor, of whom he clearly appears to have had no kind of knowledge.

Of his Satires it would not have been impossible to fix the dates without the assistance of first editions, which, as you had occasion to observe in your account of Dryden, are with difficulty found. We must then have referred to the poems, to discover when they were written. For these internal notes of time we should not have referred in vain. The first Satire laments that "Guilt's chief foe in Addison is fled." The second, addressing himself, asks,

VOL. I.

Is thy ambition sweating for a rhyme,

Thou unambitious fool, at this late time?

A fool at forty is a fool indeed.

4'M

The

The Satires were originally published seperately in folio, under the title of "The Universal Passion." These passages fix the appearance of the first to about 1725, the time at which it came out. As Young seldom suffered his pen to dry, after he had once dipped it in poetry, we may conclude that he began his Satires soon after he had written the "Paraphrase on Job." The last Satire was certainly finished in the beginning of the year 1726. In December 1725 the king, in his passage from Helvoetsluys, escaped with great difficulty from a storm by landing at Rye; and the conclusion of the Satire turns the escape into a miracle, in such an encomiastick strain of compliment as poetry too often seeks to pay to royalty. From the sixth of these poems we learn,

Midst empire's charms, how Carolina's heart

Glow'd with the love of virtue and of art.

since the grateful poet tells us, in the next couplet,

Her favour is diffus'd to that degree,

Excess of goodness! it has dawn'd on me.

Her Majesty had stood godmother and given her name to a daughter of the Lady whom Young married in 1731; and had perhaps shewn some attention to Lady Elizabeth's future husband.

The fifth Satire, "On Women." was not published till 1727; and the sixth not till 1728.

To these poems, when in 1728, he gathered them into one publication, he prefixed a preface, in which he observes, that "no man can converse "much in the world but, at what he meets with, he must either be insensible "or grieve, or be angry or smile. Now to smile at it, and turn it into ridi"cule," he adds, "I think most eligible, as it hurts ourselves least, and

gives vice and folly the greatest offence. Laughing at the misconduct of "the world, will in a great measure, ease us of any more disagreeable passion about it. One passion is more effectually driven out by another than by reason, whatever some teach." So wrote, and so of course thought, the lively and witty satirist at the grave age of almost fifty, who, many years earlier in life wrote the "Last Day." After all, Swift pronounced of these satires, that they should either have been more angry, or more merry.

Is it not somewhat singular that Young preserved, without any palliation this preface, so bluntly decisive in favour of laughing at the world, in the same collection of his works which contains the mournful, angry, gloomy Night Thoughts ?"

At the conclusion of the preface he applies Plato's beautiful fable of the Birth of Love" to modern poetry, with the addition, "that poetry, like " Love,

"Love, is a little subject to blindness, which makes her mistake her way to "preferments and honours; and that she retains a dutiful admiration of her "father's family; but divides her favours, and generally lives with her "mother's relations." Poetry, it is true, did not lead Young to preferments or to honours, but was there not something like blindness in the flattery which he sometimes forced her, and her sister Prose, to utter? She was always, indeed, taught by him to entertain a most dutiful admiration of riches; but surely Young, though nearly related to Poetry, had no connexion with her whom Plato makes the mother of Love. That he could not well complain of being related to Poverty appears clearly from the frequent bounties which his gratitude records, and from the wealth which he left behind him. By "The Universal Passion" he acquired no vulgar fortune, more than three thousand pounds. A considerable sum had already been swallowed up in the South-Sea: For this loss he took the vengeance of an author. His muse makes poetical use more than once of a South-Sea Dream.

It is related by Mr. Spence, in his Manuscript Anecdotes, on the authority of Mr. Rawlinson, that Young, upon the publication of his "Universal "Passion," received from the Duke of Grafton two thousand pounds; and that, when one of his friends exclaimed, "Two thousand pounds for a poem!" he said it was the best bargain he ever made in his life, for the poem was worth four thousand.

This story may be true; but it seems to have been raised from the two answers of Lord Burghleigh and Sir Philip Sidney in Spencer's Life.

After inscribing his Satires, not perhaps without the hope of preferments and honours, to such names as the Duke of Dorset, Mr. Dodington, Mr. Spencer Compton, Lady Elizabeth Germain, and Sir Robert Walpole, he returns to plain panegyrie. In 1726, he addressed a poem to Sir Robert Walpole, of which the title sufficiently explains the intention. If Young must be acknowledged a ready celebrator, he did not endeavour, or did not choose, to be a lasting one, "The Instalment" is among the pieces he did not admit into the number of his excuseable writings. Yet it contains a couplet which pretends to pant after the power of bestowing immortality:

O how I long, enkindled by the theme,

In deep eternity to launch thy name !

The bounty of the former reign seems to have been continued, possibly increased, in this. Whatever it might have been, the poet thought he deserved it; for he was not ashamed to acknowledge what, without his acacknowledgment, would now perhaps never have been known :

My breast, O Walpole, glows with grateful fire,

The streams of Royal bounty, turned by thee,
Refresh the dry domains of poesy.

If the purity of modern patriotism will term Young a pensioner, it must at least be confessed he was a grateful one.

The reign of the new monarch was ushered in by Young with "Ocean, an Ode." The hint of it was taken from the royal speech, wich recommended the encrease and encouragement of the seamen; that they might be "invited, rather than compelled by force and violence, to enter into the service of their country;" a plan which humanity must lament that policy has not even yet been able, or willing to carry into execution. Prefixed to the original publication were an "Ode to the King, Pater Patriæ," and an" Essay on Lyrick Poetry." It is but justice to confess, that he preserved neither of them; and that the ode itself, which in the first edition, and in the last, consists of seventy-three stanzas, in the author's own edition is reduced to forty-nine. Among the omitted passages is a "Wish," that concluded the poem, which few would have suspected Young of forming; and of which few, after having formed it, would confess something like their shame by suppression.

It stood originally so high in the author's opinion, that he intituled the poem, " Ocean, an Ode. Concluding with a Wish." This Wish consists of thirteen stanzas. The first runs thus:

cr

O may I steal
Along the vale

Of humble life, secure from foes!

My friend sincere,

My judgment clear,

And gentle business my repose!

The three last tanzas are not more remarkable for just rhymes; but, altogether, they will make rather a curious page in the life of Young,

Prophetic schemes,

And golden dreams,

May I, unsanguine, cast away!
Have what I have,

And live, not leave,

Enamour'd of the present day!

My hours my own!

My faults unknown!

My chief revenue in content!

Then leave one beam

Of honest fame!

And scorn the labour'd monument !

Unhurt my urn

Till that great TURN

When mighty Nature's self shall die,

Time cease to glide,

With human pride,

Sunk in the ocean of eternity!

It is whimsical that he, who was soon to bid adieu to rhyme, should fix upon a measure in which thyme abounds even to satiety. Of this he said, in his "Essay on Lyrick Poetry," prefixed to the poem--" For the more harmony likewise I chose the frequent return of rhyme, which laid me "under great difficulties. But difficulties, overcome, give grace and pleasure. Nor can I account for the pleasure of rhyme in general (of which the "moderns are too fond) but from this truth." Yet the moderns surely deserve not much censure for their fondness of what, by his own confession, affords pleasure, and abounds in harmony.

The next paragraph in his Essay did not occur to him when he talked of "that great turn" in the stanza just quoted. "But then the writer must "take care that the difficulty is overcome. That is, he must make rhyme "consistent with as perfect sense and expression, as could be expected if he "was perfectly free from that shackle."

Another part of this Essay will convict the following stanza of, what every reader will discover in it, "involuntary burlesque."

But would the English poets fill quite so many volumes, if all their productions were to be tried, like this, by an elaborate essay on each particular species of poetry of which they exhibit specimens ?

If Young be not a lyric poet, he is at least a critic in that sort of poetry; and, if his lyric poetry can be proved bad, it was first proved so by his own criticism. This surely is candid.

Milbourne was styled by Pope "the fairest of critics," only because he exhibited his own version of Virgil to be compared with Dryden's which he condemned, and with which every reader had it otherwise in his power to compare it. Young was surely not the most unfair of poets for prefixing to a lyric composition an essay on Lyric Poetry so just and impartial as to condemn himself.

We shall soon come to a work, before which we find indeed no critical Essay, but which disdains to shrink from the touchstone of the severest critic; and which certainly, as I remember to have heard you say, if it contain some of the worst, contains also some of the best things in the language. Soon