Chapter V: Part 5

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 preferments. Not long indeed after he took orders he published in prose (1728) “A True Estimate of Human Life,” dedicated, notwithstanding the Latin quotations with which it abounds, to the Queen; and a sermon preached before the House of Commons, 1729, on the martyrdom of King Charles, entitled, “An Apology for Princes; or, the Reverence due to Government.” But the “Second Course,” the counterpart of his “Estimate,” without which it cannot be called “A True Estimate,” though in 1728 it was announced as “soon to be published,” never appeared, and his old friends the Muses were not forgotten. In 1730 he relapsed to poetry, and sent into the world “Imperium Pelagi: a Naval Lyric, written in imitation of Pindar’s Spirit, occasioned by his Majesty’s return from Hanover, September, 1729, and the succeeding peace.” It is inscribed to the Duke of Chandos. In the Preface we are told that the Ode is the most spirited kind of poetry, and that the Pindaric is the most spirited kind of Ode. “This I speak,” he adds, “with sufficient candour at my own very great peril. But truth has an eternal title to our confession, though we are sure to suffer by it.” Behold, again, the fairest of poets. Young’s “Imperium Pelagi” was ridiculed in Fielding’s “Tom Thumb;” but let us not forget that it was one of his pieces which the author of the “Night Thoughts” deliberately refused to own. Not long after this Pindaric attempt he published two Epistles to Pope, “Concerning the Authors 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.

In July, 1730, he was presented by his College to the Rectory of Welwyn, in Hertfordshire. In May, 1731, he married Lady Elizabeth Lee, daughter of the Earl of Lichfield, and widow of Colonel Lee. His connection with this lady arose from his father’s acquaintance, already mentioned, with Lady Anne Wharton, who was co-heiress of Sir Henry Lee of Ditchley in Oxfordshire. Poetry had lately been taught by Addison to aspire to the arms of nobility, though not with extraordinary happiness. We may naturally conclude that Young now gave himself up in some measure to the comforts of his new connection, and to the expectations of that preferment which he thought due to his poetical talents, or, at least, to the manner in which they had so frequently been exerted.

The next production of his muse was “The Sea-piece,” in two odes.

Young enjoys the credit of what is called an “Extempore Epigram on Voltaire,” who, when he was in England, ridiculed, in the company of the jealous English poet, Milton’s allegory of “Sin and Death:”

“You are so witty, profligate and thin,
At once we think thee Milton, Death, and Sin.”

From the following passage in the poetical dedication of his “Sea-piece” to Voltaire it seems that this extemporaneous reproof, if it must be extemporaneous (for what few will now affirm Voltaire to have deserved any reproof), was something longer than a distich, and something more gentle than the distich just quoted.

“No stranger, sir, though born in foreign climes.
On _Dorset_ Downs, when Milton’s page,
With Sin and Death provoked thy rage,
Thy rage provoked who soothed with _gentle_ rhymes?”

By “Dorset Downs” he probably meant Mr. Dodington’s seat. In Pitt’s Poems is “An Epistle to Dr. Edward Young, at Eastbury, in Dorsetshire, on the Review at Sarum, 1722.”

“While with your Dodington retired you sit,
Charmed with his flowing Burgundy and wit,” etc.

Thomson, in his Autumn, addressing Mr. Dodington calls his seat the seat of the Muses,

“Where, in the secret bower and winding walk,
For virtuous Young and thee they twine the bay.”

The praises Thomson bestows but a few lines before on Philips, the second

“Who nobly durst, in rhyme-unfettered verse,
With British freedom sing the British song,”

added to Thomson’s example and success, might perhaps induce Young, as we shall see presently, to write his great work without rhyme.

In 1734 he published “The Foreign Address, or the best Argument for Peace, occasioned by the British Fleet and the Posture of Affairs. Written in the Character of a Sailor.” It is not to be found in the author’s four volumes. He now appears to have given up all hopes of overtaking Pindar, and perhaps at last resolved to turn his ambition to some original species of poetry. This poem concludes with a formal farewell to Ode, which few of Young’s readers will regret:

“My shell, which Clio gave, which _Kings applaud_,
Which Europe’s bleeding genius called abroad,
Adieu!”

In a species of poetry altogether his own he next tried his skill, and succeeded.

Of his wife he was deprived in 1741. Lady Elizabeth had lost, after her marriage with Young, an amiable daughter, by her former husband, just after she was married to Mr. Temple, son of Lord Palmerston. Mr. Temple did not long remain after his wife, though he was married a second time to a daughter of Sir John Barnard’s, whose son is the present peer. Mr. and Mrs. Temple have generally been considered as Philander and Narcissa. From the great friendship which constantly subsisted between Mr. Temple and Young, as well as from other circumstances, it is probable that the poet had both him and Mrs. Temple in view for these characters; though, at the same time, some passages respecting Philander do not appear to suit either Mr. Temple or any other person with whom Young was known to be connected or acquainted, while all the circumstances relating to Narcissa have been constantly found applicable to Young’s daughter-in-law. At what short intervals the poet tells us he was wounded by the deaths of the three persons particularly lamented, none that has read the “Night Thoughts” (and who has not read them?) needs to be informed.

“Insatiate archer! could not one suffice?
Thy shaft flew thrice, and thrice my peace was slain;
And thrice, ere thrice yon moon had filled her horn.”

Yet how is it possible that Mr. and Mrs. Temple and Lady Elizabeth Young could be these three victims, over whom Young has hitherto been pitied for having to pour the “Midnight Sorrows” of his religious poetry? Mrs. Temple died in 1736; Mr. Temple four 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, “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 father-in-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! Of these poems the two or three first have been perused perhaps more eagerly and more frequently than the rest. When he got as far as the fourth or fifth his original motive for taking up the pen was answered; his grief was naturally either diminished or exhausted. We still find the same pious poet, but we hear less of Philander and Narcissa, and less of the mourner whom he loved to pity.

Mrs. Temple died of a consumption at Lyons, on 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 snatched 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. The poet seems perhaps in these compositions to dwell with more melancholy on the death of Philander and Narcissa than of his wife. But it is only for this reason. He who runs and reads may remember that in the “Night Thoughts” Philander and Narcissa are often mentioned and often lamented. To recollect lamentations over the author’s wife the memory must have been charged with distinct passages. This lady brought him one child, Frederick, now living, to whom the Prince of Wales was godfather.

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 watch for the first which happened. “Night Thoughts” were not uncommon to her, even when first she visited the poet, and at a time when he himself was remarkable neither for gravity nor gloominess. In his “Last Day,” almost his earliest poem, he calls her “The Melancholy Maid,”

“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. Still, is it altogether fair to dress up the poet for the man, and to bring the gloominess of the “Night Thoughts” to prove the gloominess of Young, and to show that his genius, like the genius of Swift, was in some measure the sullen inspiration of discontent? 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 calumny to destroy the quiet, the reputation, the fortune of the living. Yet censure is not heard beneath the tomb, any more than praise. “De mortuis nil nisi verum—De vivis nil nisi bonum” would approach much nearer to good sense. After all, the few handfuls of remaining dust which once composed the body of the 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 “grey hairs with sorrow to the grave.” The humanity of the world, little satisfied with inventing perhaps a melancholy disposition for the father, proceeds next to invent an argument in support of their invention, and chooses that Lorenzo should be Young’s own son. “The Biographia,” and every account of Young, pretty roundly assert this to be the fact; of the absolute impossibility 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.

From the first line to the last of the “Night Thoughts” no one expression can be discovered which betrays anything 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. 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 with horror. A subject more shocking, if his only child really sat to him, than the crucifixion of Michael Angelo; upon the horrid story told of which Young composed a short poem of fourteen 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?”

Is this a picture of the son of the Rector of Welwyn? “Eighth Night:”—

“In foreign realms (for thou hast travelled 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, orphaned 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 7th, 1744. The marriage, in consequence of which the supposed Lorenzo was born, happened in May, 1731. Young’s child was not 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. An anecdote of this cruel sort, so open to contradiction, so impossible to be true, who could propagate? Thus easily are blasted the reputation 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, “quemvis Atheum intellige.” That this was the case many expressions in the “Night Thoughts” would seem to prove, did not a passage in “Night Eight” appear to show that he had somebody in his eye for the groundwork 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 thee dead,
Or send thee to her hermitage with L—.”

The “Biographia,” not satisfied with pointing out the son of Young, in that son’s lifetime, as his father’s Lorenzo, travels out of its way into the history of the son, and tells of his having been forbidden his college at Oxford for misbehaviour. How such anecdotes, were they true, tend to illustrate the life of Young, it is not easy to discover. Was the son of the author of the “Night Thoughts,” indeed, forbidden his college for a time, at one of our Universities? The 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 college, either lasting or temporary. 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 probably 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 memory, from follies which, if it may be thought blameable in a boy to have committed them, it is surely praiseworthy in a man to lament and certainly not only unnecessary, but cruel in a biographer to record.

Of the “Night Thoughts,” notwithstanding their author’s professed retirement, all are inscribed to great or to growing names. He had not yet weaned himself from earls and dukes, from the Speakers of the House of Commons, Lords Commissioners of the Treasury, and Chancellors of the Exchequer. In “Night Eight” the politician plainly betrays himself:—

“Think no post needful that demands a knave:
When late our civil helm was shifting hands,
So P— thought: think better if you can.”

Yet it must be confessed that at the conclusion of “Night Nine,” weary perhaps of courting earthly patrons, he tells his soul—

“Henceforth
Thy _patron_ he, whose diadem has dropped
You gems of Heaven; Eternity thy prize;
And leave the racers of the world their own.”

The “Fourth Night” was addressed by “a much-indebted Muse” to the Honourable Mr. Yorke, now Lord Hardwicke, who meant to have laid the Muse under still greater obligation, by the living of Shenfield, in Essex, if it had become vacant. The “First Night” concludes with this passage:—

“Dark, though not blind, like thee, Meonides;
Or, Milton, thee. Ah! could I reach your strain;
Or his who made Meonides our own!
Man too he sung. Immortal man I sing.
Oh had he pressed his theme, pursued the track
Which opens out of darkness into day!
Oh, had he mounted on his wing of fire,
Soared, where I sink, and sung immortal man—
How had it blest mankind, and rescued me!”

To the author of these lines was dedicated, in 1756, the first volume of an “Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope,” which attempted, whether justly or not, to pluck from Pope his “Wing of Fire,” and to reduce him to a rank at least one degree lower than the first class of English poets. If Young accepted and approved the dedication, he countenanced this attack upon the fame of him whom he invokes as his Muse.

Part of “paper-sparing” Pope’s Third Book of the “Odyssey,” deposited in the Museum, is written upon the back of a letter signed “E. Young,” which is clearly the handwriting of our Young. The letter, dated only May 2nd, seems obscure; but there can be little doubt that the friendship he requests was a literary one, and that he had the highest literary opinion of Pope. The request was a prologue, I am told.

“May the 2nd.

“DEAR SIR,—Having been often from home, I know not if you have done
me the favour of calling on me. But, be that as it will, I much want
that instance of your friendship I mentioned 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 nature’ 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
Of loitering here, of death defrauded long;
Of old so gracious (and let that suffice),
_My very master knows me not_.
I’ve been so long remembered 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.

* * * * *

Twice told the period spent on stubborn Troy,
Court favour, yet untaken, I _besiege_.

* * * * *

If this song lives, Posterity shall know
One, though in Britain born, with courtiers bred,
Who thought, even gold might come a day too late;
Nor on his subtle deathbed planned his scheme
For future vacancies in Church or State.”

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 sate down to the miserable siege of court-favour. He has before told us—

“A fool at forty is a fool indeed.”

After all, the siege seems to have been raised only in consequence of what the general thought his “deathbed.” By these extraordinary poems, written after he was sixty, of which I have been led 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 everything 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 once solemnly printed an acknowledgment 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 everything 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 Newcastle;” indignant, as it appears, to behold

“—a pope-bred Princeling crawl ashore,
And whistle cut-throats, with those swords that scraped
Their barren rocks for wretched sustenance,
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 January 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 above 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 despairs “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 it is 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 was 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 harmonious 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 postscript 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,
Not with too intense a care;
’Tis enough, that, when it fell,
Thou its ruin didst not share.

Envy’s censure, Flattery’s praise,
With unmoved indifference view;
Learn to tread life’s dangerous maze,
With unerring Virtue’s clue.

Void of strong desire and fear,
Life’s void ocean trust no more;
Strive thy little bark to steer
With the tide, but near the shore.

Thus prepared, thy shortened sail
Shall, whene’er the winds increase,
Seizing each propitious gale,
Waft thee to the Port of Peace.

Keep thy conscience from offence,
And tempestuous passions free,
So, when thou art called from hence,
Easy shall thy passage be;

Easy shall thy passage be,
Cheerful thy allotted stay,
Short the account ’twixt God and thee;
Hope shall meet thee on the way:

Truth shall lead thee to the gate,
Mercy’s self shall let thee in,
Where its never-changing state,
Full perfection, shall begin.”

The poem was accompanied by a letter.

“La Trappe, the 27th of October, 1761

“DEAR SIR,—You seemed to like the ode I sent you for your amusement;
I now send it you as a present. If you please to accept 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 posthumous publication. God send us
health while we stay, and an easy journey!—My dear Dr. Young,

“Yours, most cordially,
“MELCOMBE.”

In 1762, a short time before his death, Young published “Resignation.” Notwithstanding the manner in which it was really forced from him by the world, criticism has treated it with no common severity. If it shall be thought not to deserve the highest praise, on the other side of fourscore, by whom, except by Newton and by Waller, has praise been merited?

To Mrs. Montagu, the famous champion of Shakespeare, I am indebted for the history of “Resignation.” Observing that Mrs. Boscawen, in the midst of her grief for the loss of the admiral, derived consolation from the perusal of the “Night Thoughts,” Mrs. Montagu proposed a visit to the author. From conversing with Young, Mrs. Boscawen derived still further consolation; and to that visit she and the world were indebted for this poem. It compliments Mrs. Montagu in the following lines:—

“Yet write I must. A lady sues:
How shameful her request!
My brain in labour with dull rhyme,
Hers teeming with the best!”

And again—

“A friend you have, and I the same,
Whose prudent, soft address
Will bring to life those healing thoughts
Which died in your distress.
That friend, the spirit of my theme
Extracting for your ease,
Will leave to me the dreg, in thoughts
Too common; such as these.”

By the same lady I was enabled to say, in her own words, that Young’s unbounded genius appeared to greater advantage in the companion than even in the author; that the Christian was in him a character still more inspired, more enraptured, more sublime, than the poet; and that, in his ordinary conversation—

“—letting down the golden chain from high,
He drew his audience upward to the sky.”

Notwithstanding Young had said, in his “Conjectures on Original Composition,” that “blank verse is verse unfallen, uncursed—verse reclaimed, re-enthroned in the true language of the gods;” notwithstanding he administered consolation to his own grief in this immortal language, Mrs. Boscawen was comforted in rhyme.

While the poet and the Christian were applying this comfort, Young had himself occasion for comfort, in consequence of the sudden death of Richardson, who was printing the former part of the poem. Of Richardson’s death he says—

“When heaven would kindly set us free,
And earth’s enchantment end;
It takes the most effectual means,
And robs us of a friend.”

To “Resignation” was prefixed an apology for its appearance, to which more credit is due than to the generality of such apologies, from Young’s unusual anxiety that no more productions of his old age should disgrace his former fame. In his will, dated February, 1760, he desires of his executors, _in a particular manner_, that all his manuscript books and writings, whatever, might be burned, except his book of accounts. In September, 1764, he added a kind of codicil, wherein he made it his dying entreaty to his housekeeper, to whom he left £1,000, “that all his manuscripts might be destroyed as soon as he was dead, which would greatly oblige her deceased _friend_.”

It may teach mankind the uncertainty of wordly friendships to know that Young, either by surviving those he loved, or by outliving their affections, could only recollect the names of two _friends_, his housekeeper and a hatter, to mention in his will; and it may serve to repress that testamentary pride, which too often seeks for sounding names and titles, to be informed that the author of the “Night Thoughts” did not blush to leave a legacy to his “friend Henry Stevens, a hatter at the Temple-gate.” Of these two remaining friends, one went before Young. But, at eighty-four, “where,” as he asks in _The Centaur_, “is that world into which we were born?” The same humility which marked a hatter and a housekeeper for the friends of the author of the “Night Thoughts,” had before bestowed the same title on his footman, in an epitaph in his “Churchyard” upon James Baker, dated 1749; which I am glad to find in the late collection of his works. Young and his housekeeper were ridiculed, with more ill-nature than wit, in a kind of novel published by Kidgell in 1755, called “The Card,” under the names of Dr. Elwes and Mrs. Fusby. In April, 1765, at an age to which few attain, a period was put to the life of Young. He had performed no duty for three or four years, but he retained his intellects to the last.

Much is told in the “Biographia,” which I know not to have been true, of the manner of his burial; of the master and children of a charity-school, which he founded in his parish, who neglected to attend their benefactor’s corpse; and a bell which was not caused to toll as often as upon those occasions bells usually toll. Had that humanity, which is here lavished upon things of little consequence either to the living or to the dead, been shown in its proper place to the living, I should have had less to say about Lorenzo. They who lament that these misfortunes happened to Young, forget the praise he bestows upon Socrates, in the Preface to “Night Seven,” for resenting his friend’s request about his funeral. During some part of his life Young was abroad, but I have not been able to learn any particulars. In his seventh Satire he says,

“When, after battle, I the field have SEEN
Spread o’er with ghastly shapes which once were men.”

It is known, also, that from this or from some other field he once wandered into the camp with a classic in his hand, which he was reading intently; and had some difficulty to prove that he was only an absent poet, and not a spy.

The curious reader of Young’s life will naturally inquire to what it was owing, that though he lived almost forty years after he took orders, which included one whole reign uncommonly long, and part of another, he was never thought worthy of the least preferment. The author of the “Night Thoughts” ended his days upon a living which came to him from his college without any favour, and to which he probably had an eye when he determined on the Church. To satisfy curiosity of this kind is, at this distance of time, far from easy. The parties themselves know not often, at the instant, why they are neglected, or why they are preferred. The neglect of Young is by some ascribed to his having attached himself to the Prince of Wales, and to his having preached an offensive sermon at St. James’s. It has been told me that he had two hundred a year in the late reign, by the patronage of Walpole; and that, whenever any one reminded the king of Young, the only answer was, “he has a pension.” All the light thrown on this inquiry, by the following letter from Secker, only serves to show at what a late period of life the author of the “Night Thoughts” solicited preferment:—

“Deanery of St. Paul’s, July 8, 1758.

“GOOD DR. YOUNG,—I have long wondered that more suitable notice of
your great merit hath not been taken by persons in power. But how to
remedy the omission I see not. No encouragement hath ever been given
me to mention things of this nature to his majesty. And therefore,
in all likelihood, the only consequence of doing it would be
weakening the little influence which else I may possibly have on some
other occasions. Your fortune and your reputation set you above the
need of advancement; and your sentiments, above that concern for it,
on your own account, which, on that of the public, is sincerely felt
by

“Your loving Brother, THO. CANT.”

At last, at the age of fourscore, he was appointed, in 1761, Clerk of the Closet to the Princess Dowager. One obstacle must have stood not a little in the way of that preferment after which his whole life seems to have panted. Though he took orders, he never entirely shook off politics. He was always the lion of his master Milton, “pawing to get free his hinder parts.” By this conduct, if he gained some friends, he made many enemies. Again: Young was a poet; and again, with reverence be it spoken, poets by profession do not always make the best clergymen. If the author of the “Night Thoughts” composed many sermons, he did not oblige the public with many. Besides, in the latter part of his life, Young was fond of holding himself out for a man retired from the world. But he seemed to have forgotten that the same verse which contains “oblitus meorum,” contains also “obliviscendus et illis.” The brittle chain of worldly friendship and patronage is broken as effectually, when one goes beyond the length of it, as when the other does. To the vessel which is sailing from the shore, it only appears that the shore also recedes; in life it is truly thus. He who retires from the world will find himself, in reality, deserted as fast, if not faster, by the world. The public is not to be treated as the coxcomb treats his mistress; to be threatened with desertion, in order to increase fondness.

Young seems to have been taken at his word. Notwithstanding his frequent complaints of being neglected, no hand was reached out to pull him from that retirement of which he declared himself enamoured. Alexander assigned no palace for the residence of Diogenes, who boasted his surly satisfaction with his tub. Of the domestic manners and petty habits of the author of the “Night Thoughts,” I hoped to have given you an account from the best authority; but who shall dare to say, To-morrow I will be wise or virtuous, or to-morrow I will do a particular thing? Upon inquiring for his housekeeper, I learned that she was buried two days before I reached the town of her abode.

In a letter from Tscharner, a noble foreigner, to Count Haller, Tscharner says, he has lately spent four days with Young at Welwyn, where the author tastes all the ease and pleasure mankind can desire. “Everything about him shows the man, each individual being placed by rule. All is neat without art. He is very pleasant in conversation, and extremely polite.” This, and more, may possibly be true; but Tscharner’s was a first visit, a visit of curiosity and admiration, and a visit which the author expected.

Of Edward Young an anecdote which wanders among readers is not true, that he was Fielding’s Parson Adams. The original of that famous painting was William Young, who was a clergyman. He supported an uncomfortable existence by translating for the booksellers from Greek, and, if he did not seem to be his own friend, was at least no man’s enemy. Yet the facility with which this report has gained belief in the world argues, were it not sufficiently known that the author of the “Night Thoughts” bore some resemblance to Adams. The attention which Young bestowed upon the perusal of books is not unworthy imitation. When any passage pleased him he appears to have folded down the leaf. On these passages he bestowed a second reading. But the labours of man are too frequently vain. Before he returned to much of what he had once approved he died. Many of his books, which I have seen, are by those notes of approbation so swelled beyond their real bulk, that they will hardly shut.

“What though we wade in wealth, or soar in fame!
Earth’s highest station ends in _Here he lies_!
And _dust to dust_ concludes her noblest song!”

The author of these lines is not without his ‘_Hic jacet_.’ By the good sense of his son it contains none of that praise which no marble can make the bad or the foolish merit; which, without the direction of stone or a turf, will find its way, sooner or later, to the deserving.

M. S.
Optimi parentis
EDWARDI YOUNG, LL.D.

Hujus Ecclesiæ rect. et Elizabethæ fæm. prænob
Conjugis ejus amantissimæ
Pio & gratissimo animo hoc marmor posuit
F. Y.
Filius superstes.

Is it not strange that the author of the “Night Thoughts” has
inscribed no monument to the memory of his lamented wife? Yet what
marble will endure as long as the poems?

Such, my good friend, is the account which I have been able to
collect of the great Young. That it may be long before anything like
what I have just transcribed be necessary for you, is the sincere
wish of,

Dear Sir, your greatly obliged Friend,

HERBERT CROFT, Jun.

Lincoln’s Inn, Sept., 1780.

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 alteration,
you insisted on striking out one passage, because it said that if I
did not wish you to live long for your sake, I did for the sake of
myself and of the world. But this postscript you will not see before
the printing of it, and I will say here, in spite of you, how I feel
myself honoured and bettered by your friendship, and 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.

H. C.

Oxford, Oct., 1782.

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 sometimes concise. His plan seems to have started in his mind at the present moment, and his thoughts appear the effect of chance, sometimes adverse and sometimes lucky, with very little operation of judgment. He was not one of those 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 succession of images divides and weakens 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 sacred horror, that oppresses distinction and disdains expression. His story of “Jane Grey” was never popular. It is written with elegance enough, but Jane is too heroic to be pitied.

“The Universal Passion” is indeed a very great performance. It is said 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 solid sentiments, and his points the sharpness of resistless truth. His characters are often selected with discernment and drawn with nicety; his illustrations are often happy, and his reflections often just. His species of satire is between those of Horace and Juvenal, and he has the gaiety of Horace without his laxity of numbers, and the morality of Juvenal with greater variation of images. He plays, indeed, only on the surface 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 translate he never condescended, unless his “Paraphrase on Job” may be considered as a version, in which he has not, I think, been unsuccessful; he indeed favoured himself by choosing those parts which most easily admit the ornaments of English poetry. He had least success in his lyric 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 allusions, 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 diffusion of the sentiments and the digressive sallies 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 succeeded 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 the highest vigour. His tragedies, not making part of the collection, I had forgotten, till Mr. Stevens 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 _Busiris_ there are the greatest ebullitions of imagination, but the pride of _Busiris_ is such as no other man can have, and the whole is too remote from known life to raise either grief, terror, or indignation. The _Revenge_ approaches much nearer to human practices and manners, and therefore keeps possession of the stage; the first design seems suggested by _Othello_, but the reflections, the incidents, and the diction, are original. The moral observations are so introduced and so expressed as to have all the novelty that can be required. Of _The Brothers_ I may be allowed to say nothing, since nothing was ever said of it by the public. It must be allowed of Young’s poetry that it abounds in thought, but without much accuracy or selection. When he lays hold of an illustration he pursues it beyond expectation, sometimes happily, as in his parallel of _Quicksilver_ with _Pleasure_, which I have heard repeated with approbation by a lady, of whose praise he would have been justly proud, and which is very ingenious, very subtle, and almost exact; but sometimes he is less lucky, as when, in his “Night Thoughts,” having it dropped into his mind that the orbs, floating in space, might be called the _cluster_ of creation, he thinks of a cluster of grapes, and says, that they all hang on the great vine, drinking the “nectareous juice of immortal life.” His conceits are sometimes yet less valuable. In the “Last Day” he hopes to illustrate the reassembly of the atoms that compose the human body at the “Trump of Doom” by the collection of bees into a swarm at the tinkling of a pan. The Prophet says of Tyre that “her merchants are princes.” Young says of Tyre in his “Merchant,”

“Her merchants princes, and each _deck a throne_.”

Let burlesque try to go beyond him.