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 possible 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." second, addressing himself, asks

The

Is thy ambition sweating for a rhyme, Thou unambitious fool, at this late time; A fool at forty is a fool indeed. The Satires were originally published separately in folio, under the title of "The Universal Pasgion." 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 Satre 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 Rre; and the conclusion of the Satire turns the escape into a miracle, in such an encomiastic 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:

Plato's beautiful fable of "The Birth of Love" to modern poetry, with the addition "that poetry, like 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

since the grateful poet tells us, in the next couplet, Burghley and Sir Philip Sidney in Spenser's

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 the daughter of the lady whom Young
married in 1731; and had perhaps shown some
attention to Lady Elizabeth's future husband.

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

Life.

After inscribing his Satires, not perhaps without the hopes of preferment and honours, to such names as the Duke of Dorset, Mr. Dodington, Mr. Spencer Compton, Lady Elizabeth Germaine, and Sir Robert Walpole, he returns to plain panegyric. In 1726 he addressed a poem to Sir Robert Walpole, of which the title To these poems, when, in 1728, he gathered sufficiently explains the intention. If Young them into one publication, he prefixed a Preface; must be acknowledged a ready celebrator, he in which he observes, that "no man can converse did not endeavour, or did not choose, to be a much in the world, but at what he meets with he lasting one. "The Instalment" is among the must either be insensible or grieve, or be angry or pieces he did not admit into the number of his smile. Now to smile at it, and turn it into ridi-excusable writings. Yet it contains a couplet cule," he adds, "I think most eligible, as it hurts which pretends to pant after the power of beourselves least, and gives vice and folly the stowing immortality: greatest offence. Laughing at the misconduct of the world will, in a great measure, ease us of any inore 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

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 acknowledgment, would now perhaps never have been known:

My breast, O Walpole, glows with grateful fire,
The streams of royal bounty, turn'd 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, which re

The northern blast,
The shatter'd mast,

The syrt, the whirlpool, and the rock,
The breaking spout,

The stars gone out,

The boiling streight, the monster's shock.

commended the increase and the 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 volumes, if all their productions were to be tried, But would the English poets fill quite so many were an "Ode to the King, Pater Patriæ," and like this, by an elaborate essay on each particuan "Essay on Lyric Poetry." It is but justice lar species of poetry of which they exhibit specito 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 fortynine. 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 entitled the poem, "Ocean, an Ode. Concluding with a Wish." This wish consists of thirteen stanzas. The first runs thus:

O may I steal

Along the vale

Of humble life secure from foes!
My friend sincere,

My judgment clear,
And gentle business my repose!

mens?

critic in that sort of poetry; and, if his lyric If Young be not a lyric poet, he is at least a poetry can be proved bad, it was first proved so by his own criticism. This surely is candid. critics," only because he exhibited his own verMilbourn was styled by Pope "the fairest of sion of Virgil to be compared with Dryden's reader had it not otherwise in his power to comwhich he condemned, and with which every pare it. Young was surely not the most unfair Essay on Lyric Poetry, so just and impartial as of poets for prefixing to a lyric composition an

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 have heard you say, if it contain some of the worst, contains also some of the best things in

The three last stanzas are not more remark-to able 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!

the language.

Soon after the appearance of "Ocean," when he was almost fifty, Young entered into orders. In April, 1728,* not long after he had put on the gown, he was appointed chaplain to George the Second.

The tragedy of "The Brothers," which was already in rehearsal, he immediately withdrew from the stage. The managers resigned it with some reluctance to the delicacy of the new clergyman. The epilogue to "The Brothers," the only appendage to any of his three plays which he added himself, is, I believe, the only one of the kind. He calls it an historical epilogue. Finding that "Guilt's dreadful close his narrow scene denied," he, in a manner, continues the tragedy in the epilogue, and relates how Rome revenged the shade of Demetrius, and punished Perseus "for this night's deed."

It is whimsical, that he, who was soon to bid adieu to rhyme, should fix upon a measure in Of Young's taking orders, something is told which rhyme abounds even to satiety. Of this by the biographer of Pope, which places the eahe said, in his "Essay on Lyric Poetry," pre-siness and simplicity of the Poet in a singular fixed to the poem-"For the more harmony like light. When he determined on the church, he wise I chose the frequent return of rhyme, which did not address himself to Sherlock, to Atterlaid me under great difficulties. But difficulties bury, or to Hare, for the best instructions in theovercome, give grace and pleasure. Nor can I ology; but to Pope, who, in a youthful frolic, account for the pleasure of rhyme in general (of advised the diligent perusal of Thomas Aquiwhich the moderns are too fond) but from this nas. With this treasure Young retired from truth." Yet the moderns surely deserve not interruption to an obscure place in the suburbs. much censure for their fondness of what, by their His poetical guide to godliness hearing nothing own confession, affords pleasure, and abounds in of him during half a year, and apprehending he harmony. might have carried the jest too far, sought after him, and found him just in time to prevent what Ruffhead calls "an irretrievable derange

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 consist with as perfect sense and expression, as could be expect ed 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."

ment."

That attachment to his favourite study, which made him think a poet the surest guide to his new profession, left him little doubt whether poetry was the surest path to its honours and

Davies, in his Life of Garrick, says, 1720, and that it was produced thirty-three years after.-C.

overtaking Pindar, and perhaps at last resolved He now appears to have given up all hopes of to turn his ambition to some original species of Not long after this Pindaric attempt, he pub-farewell to Ode, which few of Young's readers poetry. This poem concludes with a formal lished Epistles to Pope, “concerning the Authors will regret : of the Age," 1730. Of these poems one occasion seems to have been an apprehension lest, from the liveliness of his satires, he should not be deemed sufficiently serious for promotion in the church.

"Midnight Sorrows" of bis religious poetry; | almost his earliest poem, he calls her "the meMrs. Temple died in 1736; Mr. Temple four lancholy maid," years afterwards, in 1740; and the Poet's wife seven months after Mr. Temple, in 1741. How could the insatiate Archer thrice slay his peace in these three persons, 66 ere thrice the moon had

filled her horn ?"

But in the short Preface to "The Complaint" he seriously tells us, "that the occasion of this poem was real, not fictitious; and that the facts mentioned did naturally pour these moral reflections on the thought of the writer." It is probable, therefore, that in these three contradictory lines the Poet complains more than the fatherin-law, the friend, or the widower.

Whatever names belong to these facts, or, if the names be those generally supposed, whatever heightening a poet's sorrow may have given the facts; to the sorrow Young felt from them, religion and morality are indebted for the "Night Thoughts." There is a pleasure sure in sadness which mourners only know!

-Whom dismal scenes delight, Frequent at tombs and in the realms of Night.

In the prayer which concludes the second book
of the same poem, he says-

-Oh! permit the gloom of solemn night
To sacred thought may forcibly invite.
Oh! how divine to tread the milky way,
To the bright palace of Eternal Day!

When Young was writing a tragedy, Grafton is said by Spence to have sent him a human skull, with a candle in it, as a lamp; and the Poet is reported to have used it.

What he calls "The true Estimate of Human Life," which has already been mentioned, exhibits only the wrong side of the tapestry; and, being asked why he did not show the right, he is said to have replied, that he could not. By others it has been told me that this was finished; but that, before there existed any copy, it was torn in pieces by a lady's monkey.

Of these poems the two or three first have been perused perhaps more eagerly and more Still, is it altogether fair to dress up the Poet frequently than the rest. When he got as far as for the man, and to bring the gloominess of the the fourth or fifth, his original motive for taking Night Thoughts" to prove the gloominess of up the pen was answered; his grief was natu-Young, and to show that his genius, like the rally either diminished or exhausted. We still genius of Swift, was in some measure the sullen find the same pious poet; but we hear less of inspiration of discontent ? Philander and Narcissa, and less of the mourner whom he loved to pity.

Mrs. Temple died of a consumption at Lyons, in her way to Nice, the year after her marriage; that is, when poetry relates the fact, "in her bridal hour." It is more than poetically true, that Young accompanied her to the Continent:

I flew, I snatch'd her from the rigid North,
And bore her nearer to the sun.

But in vain. Her funeral was attended with the difficulties painted in such animated colours in "Night the Third." After her death, the remainder of the party passed the ensuing winter at Nice.

From them who answer in the affirmative it should not be concealed that, though Invisibilia non decipiunt appeared upon a deception in Young's grounds; and Ambulantes in horto audierunt vocem Dei on a building in his garden, his parish was indebted to the good humour of the Author of the "Night Thoughts" for an assembly and a bowling-green.

Whether you think with me I know not; but the famous De mortuis nil nisi bonum always appeared to me to savour more of female weakness than of manly reason. He that has too much feeling to speak ill of the dead, who if they cannot defend themselves, are at least ignorant of his abuse, will not hesitate by the most wanton The Poet seems perhaps in these compositions calumny to destroy the quiet, the reputation, to dwell with more melancholy on the death of the fortune of the living. Yet censure is not Philander and Narcissa, than of his wife. But heard beneath the tomb, any more than praise. it is only for this reason. He who runs and De mortuis nil nisi verum-De vivis nil nisi boreads may remember, that in the "Night num-would approach much nearer to good Thoughts" Philander and Narcissa are often sense. After all, the few handfuls of remainmentioned and often lamented. To recollecting dust which once composed the body of the lamentations over the Author's wife, the memory must have been charged with distinct passages. This lady brought him one child, Frederick, to whom the Prince of Wales was godfather.

Author of the "Night Thoughts," feel not much concern whether Young pass now for a man of sorrow, or for a "fellow of infinite jest." To this favour must come the whole family of Yorick. His immortal part, wherever that now dwells, is still less solicitous on this head.

But to a son of worth and sensibility it is of some little consequence whether contemporaries believe, and posterity be taught to believe, that his debauched and reprobate life cast a Stygian gloom over the evening of his father's days, saved him the trouble of feigning a character completely detestable, and succeeded at last in bringing his "gray hairs with sorrow to the grave."

That domestic grief is, in the first instance, to be thanked for these ornaments to our language, it is impossible to deny. Nor would it be common hardiness to contend, that worldly discontent had no hand in these joint productions of poetry and piety. Yet am I by no means sure that, at any rate, we should not have had something of the same colour from Young's pencil, notwithstanding the liveliness of his satires. In so long a life, causes for discontent and occasions for grief must have occurred. It is not clear to me that his Muse was not sitting upon the The humanity of the world, little satisfied watch for the first which happened. "Night with inventing perhaps a melancholy disposition Thoughts" were not uncommon to her, even for the father, proceeds next to invent an arguwhen first she visited the Poet, and at a time ment in support of their invention, and chooses when he himself was remarkable neither for that Lorenzo should be Young's own son. The gravity nor gloominess. In his "Last Day,"Biographia, and every account of Young, pretty

born till June, 1733. In 1741, this Lorenzo, this finished infidel, this father to whose education Vice had for some years put the last hand, was only eight years old.

roundly assert this to be the fact; of the abso- | happened in May, 1731. Young's child was not lute possibility of which, the Biographia itself, in particular dates, contains undeniable evidence. Readers I know there are of a strange turn of mind, who will hereafter peruse the "Night Thoughts" with less satisfaction; who will wish they had still been deceived; who will quarrel with me for discovering that no such character as their Lorenzo ever yet disgraced human nature, or broke a father's heart. Yet would these admirers of the sublime and terrible be offended, should you set them down for cruel and for

savage.

Of this report, inhuman to the surviving son,, if it be true, in proportion as the character of Lorenzo is diabolical, where are we to find the proof? Perhaps it is clear from the poems.

An anecdote of this cruel sort, so open to contradiction, so impossible to be true, who could propagate? Thus easily are blasted the reputations of the living and of the dead.

Who, then, was Lorenzo? exclaim the readers I have mentioned. If we cannot be sure that he was his son, which would have been finely terrible, was he not his nephew, his cousin?

These are questions which I do not pretend to answer. For the sake of human nature, I could wish Lorenzo to have been only the creation of the Poet's fancy: like the Quintus of Anti Lucretius, quo nomine, says Polignac, quem

From the first line to the last of the "Night Thoughts" not one expression can be discover-vis Atheum intellige. That this was the case, ed which betrays any thing like the father. In the "Second Night" I find an expression which betrays something else; that Lorenzo was his friend; one, it is possible, of his former companions, one of the Duke of Wharton's set. The Poet styles him "gay friend;" an appellation not very natural from a pious incensed father to such a being as he paints Lorenzo, and that being his son.

many expressions in the " "Night Thoughts"
would seem to prove, did not a passage in
"Night Eight" appear to show that he had
something in his eye for the ground-work at
least of the painting. Lovelace or Lorenzo may
be feigned characters; but a writer does not
feign a name of which he only gives the initial
letter:

Tell not Calista. She will laugh the dead,
Or send thee to her hermitage with L.

But let us see how he has sketched this dreadful portrait, from the sight of some of whose features the artist himself must have turned away out the son of Young, in that son's lifetime, as The Biographia, not satisfied with pointing with horror. A subject more shocking, if his his father's Lorenzo, travels out of its way inte only child really sat to him, than the crucifixion the history of the son, and tells us of his having of Michael Angelo; upon the horrid story told been forbidden his college at Oxford for misbe of which, Young composed a short poem of four-haviour. How such anecdotes, were they true, teen lines, in the early part of his life, which he did not think deserved to be republished.

In the "First Night," the address to the Poet's supposed son is,

Lorenzo, fortune makes her court to thee.
In the "Fifth Night"-

And burns Lorenzo still for the sublime
Of life, to hang his airy nest on high?

tend to illustrate the life of Young, it is not easy to discover. Was the son of the Author of the for a time, at one of the universities? Tho "Night Thoughts," indeed, forbidden his college author of "Paradise Lost," is by some supposed to have been disgracefully ejected from the other. From juvenile follies who is free? But, whatever the Biographia chooses to relate, the son of Young experienced no dismission from his col

Is this a picture of the son of the Rector of lege either lasting or temporary. Welwyn?

66

Eighth Night"—

In foreign realms (for thou hast travell'd far)which even now does not apply to his son. In "Night Five”—

So wept Lorenzo fair Clarissa's fate;

Who gave that angel boy on whom he dotes;
And died to give him, orphan'd in his birth!
At the beginning of the "Fifth Night" we
find-

Lorenzo, to recriminate is just,

I grant the man is vain who writes for praise. But to cut short all inquiry; if any one of these passages, if any passage in the poems, be applicable, my friend shall pass for Lorenzo. The son of the Author of the "Night Thoughts" was not old enough, when they were written, to recriminate, or to be a father. The "Night Thoughts" were begun immediately after the mournful event of 1741. The first "Nights" appear, in the books of the Company of Stationers, as the property of Robert Dodsley, in 1742. The Preface to "Night Seven" is dated July the 7th, 1744. The marriage, in consequence of which the supposed Lorenzo was born,

Yet, were nature to indulge him with a second youth, and to leave him at the same time the experience of that which is past, he would proba bly spend it differently-who would not?-he would certainly be the occasion of less uneasiness to his father. But, from the same experience, he would as certainly, in the same case, be treated differently by his father.

Young was a poet: poets, with reverence be it spoken, do not make the best parents. Fancy and imagination seldom deign to stoop from their heights; always stoop unwillingly to the low level of common duties. Aloof from vulgar life, they pursue their rapid flight beyond the ken of mortals, and descend not to earth but when compelled by necessity. The prose of ordinary occurrences is beneath the dignity of poets.

He who is connected with the Author of the "Night Thoughts," only by veneration for the poet and the Christian, may be allowed to observe, that Young is one of those concerning whom, as you remark in your account of Addison, it is proper rather to say "nothing that is false than all that is true."

But the son of Young would almost sooner, I know, pass for a Lorenzo, than see himself vindicated, at the expense of his father's memor