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 fometimes fmooth, and fometimes rugged; his file is fometimes concatenated, and fometimes abrupt; fometimes diffufive, and sometimes concife. His plan feemsto have started in his mind at the prefent moment, and his thoughts appear the effects of chance, fometimes adverse,

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verfe, and fometimes lucky, with very little operation of judgement.

He was not one of the writers whom experience improves, and who obferving 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 fucceffion of images, divides and weakens the general conception; but the great reafon why the reader is dif appointed is, that the thought of the LAST DAY makes every man more than poetical, by fpreading over his mind, a generaf

general obfcurity of facred horror, that oppreffes diftinction, and difdains expreffion.

His ftory of Jane Grey was never pópular. It is written with elegance enough, but fane is too heroick to be pitied.

The Univerfal Paffion is indeed a very great performance. It is faid to be a feries of Epigrams; but if it be, it is what the author intended: his endeavour was at the production of ftriking dif tichs and pointed fentences; and his dif tichs have the weight of solid sentiment, and his points the fharpness of refiftless truth. His characters are often felected with difcernment, and drawn with nicety; his illuftrations are often happy,

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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 pleafe only when they furprise.

To tranflate he never condefcended, unless his Paraphrase on Job may be confidered as a verfion; in which he has not, I think, been unsuccessful: he indeed favoured himself, by chufing those parts which moft eafily admit the orna

ments of English poetry.

He

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 exhi bited a very wide difplay of original poetry, variegated with deep reflections and ftriking allufions, a wilderness of thought, in which the fertility of fancy fcatters 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 difadvantage. The wild diffufion of the fentiments, and the digreffive fallies of imagination, would have been compreffed

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