stances 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 ; "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, 6 ere thrice the moon had fill'd 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! 6 "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 we 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. 6 "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, Frederic, 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 It is and occasions for grief must have occurred. 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 The Melancholy Maid,' poem, he calls her 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 "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 audiêrunt 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 bowlinggreen. "Whether you think with me, I know not; but the famousDe 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 6 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 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. "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. |