“No powers of language, but his own, can tell,
His own, which Nature and the Graces form,
At will, to raise, or hush, the civil storm.”
It is a coincidence worth noticing, that this seventh Satire was
published in 1726, and that the warrant of George the First, granting
Young a pension of £200 a year from Lady-day, 1725, is dated May 3d,
1726. The gratitude exhibited in this Satire may have been chiefly
prospective, but the “Instalment,” a poem inspired by the thrilling event
of Walpole’s installation as Knight of the Garter, was clearly written
with the double ardor of a man who has got a pension and hopes for
something more. His emotion about Walpole is precisely at the same pitch
as his subsequent emotion about the Second Advent. In the “Instalment”
he says:
“With invocations some their hearts inflame;
_I need no muse_, _a Walpole is my theme_.”
And of God coming to judgment, he says, in the “Night Thoughts:”
“I find my inspiration is my theme;
_The grandeur of my subject is my muse_.”
Nothing can be feebler than this “Instalment,” except in the strength of
impudence with which the writer professes to scorn the prostitution of
fair fame, the “profanation of celestial fire.”
Herbert Croft tells us that Young made more than three thousand pounds by
his “Satires”—a surprising statement, taken in connection with the
reasonable doubt he throws on the story related in Spence’s “Anecdotes,”
that the Duke of Wharton gave Young £2000 for this work. Young, however,
seems to have been tolerably fortunate in the pecuniary results of his
publications; and, with his literary profits, his annuity from Wharton,
his fellowship, and his pension, not to mention other bounties which may
be inferred from the high merits he discovers in many men of wealth and
position, we may fairly suppose that he now laid the foundation of the
considerable fortune he left at his death.
It is probable that the Duke of Wharton’s final departure for the
Continent and disgrace at Court in 1726, and the consequent cessation of
Young’s reliance on his patronage, tended not only to heighten the
temperature of his poetical enthusiasm for Sir Robert Walpole, but also
to turn his thoughts toward the Church again, as the second-best means of
rising in the world. On the accession of George the Second, Young found
the same transcendent merits in him as in his predecessor, and celebrated
them in a style of poetry previously unattempted by him—the Pindaric ode,
a poetic form which helped him to surpass himself in furious bombast.
“Ocean, an Ode: concluding with a Wish,” was the title of this piece. He
afterward pruned it, and cut off, among other things, the concluding
Wish, expressing the yearning for humble retirement, which, of course,
had prompted him to the effusion; but we may judge of the rejected
stanzas by the quality of those he has allowed to remain. For example,
calling on Britain’s dead mariners to rise and meet their “country’s
full-blown glory” in the person of the new King, he says:
“What powerful charm
Can Death disarm?
Your long, your iron slumbers break?
_By Jove_, _by Fame_,
_By George’s name_,
Awake! awake! awake! awake!”
Soon after this notable production, which was written with the ripe folly
of forty-seven, Young took orders, and was presently appointed chaplain
to the King. “The Brothers,” his third and last tragedy, which was
already in rehearsal, he now withdrew from the stage, and sought
reputation in a way more accordant with the decorum of his new
profession, by turning prose writer. But after publishing “A True
Estimate of Human Life,” with a dedication to the Queen, as one of the
“most shining representatives” of God on earth, and a sermon, entitled
“An Apology for Princes; or, the Reverence due to Government,” preached
before the House of Commons, his Pindaric ambition again seized him, and
he matched his former ode by another, called “Imperium Pelagi, a Naval
Lyric; written in imitation of Pindar’s spirit, occasioned by his
Majesty’s return from Hanover, 1729, and the succeeding Peace.” Since he
afterward suppressed this second ode, we must suppose that it was rather
worse than the first. Next came his two “Epistles to Pope, concerning
the Authors of the Age,” remarkable for nothing but the audacity of
affectation with which the most servile of poets professes to despise
servility.
In 1730 Young was presented by his college with the rectory of Welwyn, in
Hertfordshire, and, in the following year, when he was just fifty, he
married Lady Elizabeth Lee, a widow with two children, who seems to have
been in favor with Queen Caroline, and who probably had an income—two
attractions which doubtless enhanced the power of her other charms.
Pastoral duties and domesticity probably cured Young of some bad habits;
but, unhappily, they did not cure him either of flattery or of fustian.
Three more odes followed, quite as bad as those of his bachelorhood,
except that in the third he announced the wise resolution of never
writing another. It must have been about this time, since Young was now
“turned of fifty,” that he wrote the letter to Mrs. Howard (afterward
Lady Suffolk), George the Second’s mistress, which proves that he used
other engines, besides Pindaric ones, in “besieging Court favor.” The
letter is too characteristic to be omitted:
“Monday Morning.
“MADAM: I know his Majesty’s goodness to his servants, and his love
of justice in general, so well, that I am confident, if his Majesty
knew my case, I should not have any cause to despair of his gracious
favor to me.
“Abilities. Want.