いる dence of Diogenes, who boasted his furly fatisfaction with his tub. Of the domeftick 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 fhall dare to fay, To-morrow I will be wife or virtuous, or tomorrow I will do a particular thing? Upon enquiring for his housekeeper, I learned that she was buried two days before I reached the town of her abode. In a Letter from Tfcharner, a noble foreigner, to Count Haller, Tfcharner fays, he has lately spent four days with Young at Welwyn, where the author taftes all the ease and pleasure mankind can defire. "Every thing "about him fhews the man, each individual being "placed by rule. All is neat without art. He is very pleasant in converfation, and extremely polite." This, and more, may poffibly be true; but Tfcharner's was a first visit, a visit of curiosity and admiration, and a vifit which the author expected. 66 Of Edward Young an anecdote which wanders among readers is not true, that he was Fielding's Par. fon Adams. The original of that famous painting was William Young. He too was a clergyman. He supported an uncomfortable existence by tranflating for the bookfellers from Greek; and, if he was not 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 fufficiently known, that the author of the Night Thoughts bore fome resemblance to Adams. The attention Young beftowed upon the perufal of books is not unworthy imitation. When any paffage pleafed him, he appears to have folded down the the leaf. On thefe paffages he beftowed a fecond What though we wade in wealth, or foar in fame! And duft to duft concludes her noblest song. The author of these lines is not without his bic jacet. By the good sense of his fon, it contains none of ? that praise which no marble can make the bad or the foolish merit; which, without the direction of a stone or a turf, will find its way, fooner or later, to the deferving. M. S. EDWARDI YOUNG, LL. D. Et Elizabethæ fæm. prænob. Hoc marmor posuit Is it not strange that the author of the Night Thoughts has infcribed 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 I have been able to collect of Young. That it may be long before VOL. IV. T any any thing like what I have just transcribed be neceffary for you, is the fincere with of, Dear Sir, Lincoln's Inn, Your greatly obliged Friend, HERBERT CROFT, Jun. 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 infifted on ftriking out one paffage, only because it said, that, if I did not wish you to live long for your fake, I did for the fake of myself and of the world. But this postscript you will not fee before it is printed; and I will fay 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 fo late a period of life as Young took Orders, it will be owing, in no fmall measure, to my having had the happiness of calling the author of The Rambler my friend. Oxford, Sept. 1782. H. C." 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 refemblance 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 fometimes fmooth, and fometimes rugged; his ftyle is fometimes concatenated, and fometimes abrupt; fometimes diffufive, and fometimes concife. His plan feems to have started in his mind at the prefent moment, and his thoughts appear appear the effect of chance, fometimes adverfe, and fometimes lucky, with very little operation of judge ment. He was not one of the writers whom experience improves, and who obferving their own faults become gradually correct. His Poem on the Laft 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 general conception; but the great reafon why the reader is difappointed is, that the thought of the LAST DAY makes every man more than poetical, by fpreading over his mind a general obfcurity of facred horror, that oppreffes diftinction, and difdains expreffion. His ftory of Jane Grey was never popular. It is written with elegance enough, but Jane is too heroic 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 ftriking diftichs and pointed fentences; and his diftichs have the weight of folid fentiment, and his points the fharpness of refiftless truth. His characters are often felected with difcernment, and drawn with nicety; his illuftrations are often happy, and his reflections often juft. His fpecies of fatire is between thofe 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. He plays, indeed, only on the furface of life; he never penetrates the receffes of the mind, and therefore the whole power of his poetry is exhausted by a fingle perufal; his conceits please only when they furprise. To translate he never condescended, unless his Paraphrafe on Job may be confidered as a verfion; in which he has not, I think, been unfuccefsful; he indeed favoured himself, by chufing those parts which most easily admit the ornaments of English poetry. He had leaft fuccefs in his lyrick attempts, in which he feems to have been under fome malignant influence: he is always labouring to be great, and at laft is only turgid. In his Night Thoughts he has exhibited a very wide display of original poetry, variegated with deep reflections and ftriking 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 verfe could not be changed for rhyme but with disadvantage. The wild diffufion of the fentiments, and the digreffive fallies of imagination, would have been compreffed and reftrained by confinement to rhyme. The excellence of this work is not exactness but copioufnefs; 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 vaft extent and endless diverfity. His laft poem was the Refignation; 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 falfely reprefented |