while it fpeaks with fatisfaction of his prefent retirement, feems to make an unusual struggle to escape from retirement. But every one who fings in the dark does not fing from joy. It is addreffed, in no common ftrain of flattery, to a chancellor, of whom he clearly appears to have had no kind of knowledge.

Of his Satires it would not have been impoffible to fix the dates without the affiftance of first editions, which, as you had occafion to obferve in your account of Dryden, are with difficulty found. We must then have referred to the poems, to discover when they were written. For thefe internal notes of time we should not have referred in vain. The first Satire laments that "Guilt's chief foe in Addifon is "fled." The fecond, addreffing himself, afks,

Is thy ambition sweating for a rhyme,
Thou unambitious fool, at this late time?
A fool at forty is a fool indeed.

The Satires were originally published separately in folio, under the title of "The Univerfal "Paffion." These paffages fix the appearance of the first to about 1725, the time at which it came out. As Young feldom fuffered his pen

to dry, after he had once dipped it in poetry, we may conclude that he began his Satires foon after he had written the "Paraphrafe on Job The laft Satire was certainly finished in the beginning of the year 1726. In December 1725 the king, in his paffage from Helvoetfluys, efcaped with great difficulty from a storm by landing at Rye; and the conclufion of the Satire turns the efcape into a miracle, in fuch an encomiaftick ftrain of compliment as poetry too often feeks to pay to royalty.

From the fixth of these poems we learn,

Midst empire's charms, how Carolina's heart
Glow'd with the love of virtue and of art:

fince the grateful poet tells us, in the next cou plet,

Her favour is diffus'd to that degree,

Excess of goodness! it has dawn'd on me.

Her Majefty had stood godmother and given her name to a daughter of the Lady whom Young married in 1731; and had perhaps shown fome attention to Lady Elizabeth's future hufband.

The fifth Satire, "On Women,' was not published till 1727; and the fixth not till 1728.

Το

To these poems, when, in 1728, he ga-. thered them into one publication, he prefixed à preface; in which he obferves, that “no “man can converfe much in the world but, 66 at what he meets with, he muft either be "infenfible or grieve, or be angry or smile. "Now to fmile at it, and turn it into ridicule," he adds, "I think moft eligible, as it hurts ourfelves leaft, and gives vice and folly the "greatest offence. Laughing at the mifcon

duct of the world, will in a great meafure, "eafe us of any more difagreeable paffion about "it. One paffion is more effectually driven out "by another than by reafon, whatever fome "teach." So wrote, and fo of courfe thought, the lively and witty fatirift at the grave age of almoft fifty, who, many years earlier in life, wrote the Laft Day." After all, Swift pronounced of these fatires, that they should either have been more angry, or more merry.

Is it not fomewhat fingular that Young preferved, without any palliation, this preface, fo bluntly decifive in favour of laughing at the world, in the fame collection of his works which contains the mournful, angry, gloomy "Night Thoughts?".

At

At the conclufion of the preface he applies Plato's beautiful fable of the "Birth of Love". to modern poetry, with the addition, "that

66

Poetry, like Love, is a little fubject to blind"nefs, which makes her mistake her way to preferments and honours; and that she re"tains a dutiful admiration of her father's fa"mily; 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 fomething like blindness in the flattery which he fometimes forced her, and her fifter Profe, to utter? She was always, indeed, taught by him to entertain a moft dutiful admiration of riches; but furely 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 Univerfal Paffion" he acquired no vul gar fortune, more than three thousand pounds. A confiderable fum had already been fwallowed up in the South-Sea. For this lofs he took the

vengeance of an author. His Mufe makes poetical ufe more than once of a South-Sea Dream.

It is related by Mr. Spence, in his Manufcript Anecdotes, on the authority of Mr. Rawlinson, that Young, upon the publication of his Univerfal Paffion," received from the Duke of Grafton two thoufand pounds; and that, when one of his friends exclaimed, "Two "thousand pounds for a poem!" he faid it was the best bargain he ever made in his life, for the poem was worth four thousand.

This ftory may be true; but it seems to have been raised from the two anfwers of Lord' Burghley and Sir Philip Sidney in Spenfer's Life.

'After infcribing his Satires, not perhaps without the hope of preferments and honours, to fuch names as the Duke of Dorset, Mr. Dodington, Mr. Spencer Compton, Lady Elizabeth Germain, and Sir Robert Walpole, he returns to plain panegyric. In 1726 he addreffed a poem to Sir Robert Walpole, of which the title fufficiently explains the intention. If Young must be acknowledged a ready celebrator, he did not endeavour, or did not choose, to be a lafting one. "The Inftalment" is

among