first Satire laments, that Guilt's chief foe in Addison is fled.' The second, addressing himself, asks, Is thy ambition sweating for a rhyme, Thou unambitious fool, at this late time? The Satires were originally published separately 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 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 since the grateful poet tells us, in the next couplet, Her favour is diffused 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. "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 ridicule (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?' 6 "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, 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 Pas sion' 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 Burleigh and Sir Philip Sidney, in Spenser's Life. "After inscribing his Satires, not perhaps without the hopes of preferments and honours, to such names as the Duke of Dorset, Mr. Doddington, 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 sufficiently explains the intention. If Young must be acknowledged a ready celebrator, he did not endeavour, or did not choose, to be a lasting 'The Instalment' is among the pieces he did not admit into the number of his excusable writings. Yet it contains a couplet which pretends to pant after the power of bestowing immortality: one. Oh! how I long, enkindled by the theme, "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. 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 recommended 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 were an 'Ode to the King, Pater Patriæ,' and an Essay on Lyric 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: 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 stanzas are not more remarkable for just rhymes: but, altogether, they will make rather a curious page in the life of Young: Prophetic schemes, May I, unsanguine, cast away! And live, not leave, My hours my own! My chief revenue in content! Of honest fame! And scorn the labour'd monument ! Unhurt my urn Till that great TURN When mighty Nature's self shall die, 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 rhyme abounds even to satiety. Of this he said, in his Essay on Lyric poetry,' prefixed to the poemFor 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 their 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 6 |