P. S. This account of Young was seen by you in manuscript you know, Sir; and, though I could not prevail on you to make any alterations, you insisted on striking out one passage, only because it said, that, if I did not wish you to live long for your fake, I did for the sake of myself and of the world. But this postscript you will not see before it is printed; and I will fay here, in spite of you, how I feel myself honoured and bettered by your friendshipand that, if I do credit to the church, after which I always longed, and for which I am now going to give in exchange the bar, though not at so late a period of life as Young took Orders, it will be owing, in no small measure, to my having had the happiness of calling the author of The Rambler my friend.

Oxford, Sept. 1782.

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OF Young's Poems it is difficult to give any general character; for he has no uniformity of manner: one of his pieces has no great resemblance to another. He began to write early, and continued long; and at different times had different modes of poetical excellence in view. His numbers are sometimes smooth, and sometimes rugged; his style is sometimes concatenated, and sometimes abrupt; sometimes diffusive, and fometimes concife. His plan seems to have started in his mind at the present moment, and his thoughts appear the effects of chance, sometimes adverse, and sometimes lucky, with very little operation of judgement.

He was not one of the writers whom experience improves, and who observing their own faults become gradually correct. His Poem on the Last Day, his first great performance, has an equability and propriety, which he afterwards either never endeavoured or never attained. Many paragraphs are noble, and few are mean, yet the whole is languid; the plan is too much extended, and a fucceffion of images divides and weakens the

the general conception; but the great reason why the reader is disappointed is, that the thought of the LAST DAY makes every man more than poetical, by spreading over his mind a general obscurity of facred horror, that oppresses distinction, and disdains expreffion.

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His story of Jane Grey was never popular. It is written with elegance enough, but Jane is too heroick to be pitied.

The Univerfal Paffion is indeed a very great performance. It is faid to be a series of Epigrams: but if it be, it is what the author intended: his endeavour was at the production of striking distichs and pointed sentences; and his distichs have the weight of folid sentiment, and his points the sharpness of refiftless truth. His characters are often selected with difcernment, and drawn with nicety; his illustrations are often happy, and his reflections often just. His fpecies of fatire is between those of Horace and of Juvenal; he has the gaiety of Horace without his laxity of numbers, and the morality of

Juvenal with greater variation of images. VOL. IV.

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He plays, indeed, only on the furface of life; he never penetrates the recesses of the mind, and therefore the whole power of his poetry is exhausted by a single perusal; his conceits please only when they surprise.

To tranflate he never condescended, unless his Paraphrafe on Job may be confidered as a verfion; in which he has not, I think, been unfuccessful: he indeed favoured himself, by chusing those parts which most easily admit the ornaments of English poetry.

He had least success in his lyrick attempts, in which he seems to have been under some malignant influence: he is always labouring to be great, and at last is only turgid.

In his Night Thoughts he has exhibited a very wide display of original poetry, variegated with deep reflections and striking allufions, a wilderness of thought, in which the fertility of fancy scatters flowers of every hue and of every odour. This is one of the few poems in which blank verse could not be changed for rhyme but with disadvantage. The wild diffufion of the sentiments, and the

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the digreffive fallies of imagination, would have been compressed and restrained by confinement to rhyme. The excellence of this work is not exactness, but copiousness; particular lines are not to be regarded; the power is in the whole, and in the whole there is a magnificence like that ascribed to Chinese Plantation, the magnificence of vast extent and endless diversity.

His last poem was the Resignation; in which he made, as he was accustomed, an experiment of a new mode of writing, and fucceeded better than in his Ocean or his Merchant. It was very falsely represented as a proof of decaying faculties. There is Young in every stanza, such as he often was in his highest vigour.

His Tragedies not making part of the Collection, I had forgotten, till Mr. Steevens recalled them to my thoughts by remarking, that he seemed to have one favourite catastrophe, as his three Plays all concluded with lavish suicide; a method by which, as Dryden remarked, a poet easily rids his scene of persons whom he wants not to keep alive. In

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