“Pope, who could’st make immortals, art thou dead?”
Either the “Essay,” then, was dedicated to a patron who disapproved its
doctrine, which I have been told by the author was not the case; or Young
appears, in his old age, to have bartered for a dedication an opinion
entertained of his friend through all that part of life when he must have
been best able to form opinions. From this account of Young, two or
three short passages, which stand almost together in “Night Four,” should
not be excluded. They afford a picture, by his own hand, from the study
of which my readers may choose to form their own opinion of the features
of his mind and the complexion of his life.
“Ah me! the dire effect
Of loitering here, of death defrauded long;
Of old so gracious (and let that suffice),
_My very master knows me not_.
I’ve been so long remembered I’m forgot.
* * * * *
When in his courtiers’ ears I pour my plaint,
They drink it as the Nectar of the Great;
And squeeze my hand, and beg me come to-morrow.
* * * * *
Twice told the period spent on stubborn Troy,
Court favour, yet untaken, I _besiege_.
* * * * *
If this song lives, Posterity shall know
One, though in Britain born, with courtiers bred,
Who thought, even gold might come a day too late;
Nor on his subtle deathbed planned his scheme
For future vacancies in Church or State.”
Deduct from the writer’s age “twice told the period spent on stubborn
Troy,” and you will still leave him more than forty when he sate down to
the miserable siege of court-favour. He has before told us—
“A fool at forty is a fool indeed.”
After all, the siege seems to have been raised only in consequence of
what the general thought his “deathbed.” By these extraordinary poems,
written after he was sixty, of which I have been led to say so much, I
hope, by the wish of doing justice to the living and the dead, it was the
desire of Young to be principally known. He entitled the four volumes
which he published himself, “The Works of the Author of the Night
Thoughts.” While it is remembered that from these he excluded many of
his writings, let it not be forgotten that the rejected pieces contained
nothing prejudicial to the cause of virtue or of religion. Were
everything that Young ever wrote to be published, he would only appear
perhaps in a less respectable light as a poet, and more despicable as a
dedicator; he would not pass for a worse Christian or for a worse man.
This enviable praise is due to Young. Can it be claimed by every writer?
His dedications, after all, he had perhaps no right to suppress. They
all, I believe, speak, not a little to the credit of his gratitude, of
favours received; and I know not whether the author, who has once
solemnly printed an acknowledgment of a favour, should not always print
it. Is it to the credit or to the discredit of Young, as a poet, that of
his “Night Thoughts” the French are particularly fond?
Of the “Epitaph on Lord Aubrey Beauclerk,” dated 1740, all I know is,
that I find it in the late body of English poetry, and that I am sorry to
find it there. Notwithstanding the farewell which he seemed to have
taken in the “Night Thoughts” of everything which bore the least
resemblance to ambition, he dipped again in politics. In 1745 he wrote
“Reflections on the Public Situation of the Kingdom, addressed to the
Duke of Newcastle;” indignant, as it appears, to behold
“—a pope-bred Princeling crawl ashore,
And whistle cut-throats, with those swords that scraped
Their barren rocks for wretched sustenance,
To cut his passage to the British throne.”
This political poem might be called a “Night Thought;” indeed, it was
originally printed as the conclusion of the “Night Thoughts,” though he
did not gather it with his other works.
Prefixed to the second edition of Howe’s “Devout Meditations” is a letter
from Young, dated January 19, 1752, addressed to Archibald Macauly, Esq.,
thanking him for the book, “which,” he says, “he shall never lay far out
of his reach; for a greater demonstration of a sound head and a sincere
heart he never saw.”
In 1753, when _The Brothers_ had lain by him above thirty years, it
appeared upon the stage. If any part of his fortune had been acquired by
servility of adulation, he now determined to deduct from it no
inconsiderable sum, as a gift to the Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel. To this sum he hoped the profits of _The Brothers_ would amount.
In his calculation he was deceived; but by the bad success of his play
the Society was not a loser. The author made up the sum he originally
intended, which was a thousand pounds, from his own pocket.
The next performance which he printed was a prose publication, entitled
“The Centaur Not Fabulous, in Six Letters to a Friend on the Life in
Vogue.” The conclusion is dated November 29, 1754. In the third letter
is described the death-bed of the “gay, young, noble, ingenious,
accomplished, and most wretched Altamont.” His last words were—“My
principles have poisoned my friend, my extravagance has beggared my boy,
my unkindness has murdered my wife!” Either Altamont and Lorenzo were
the twin production of fancy, or Young was unlucky enough to know two
characters who bore no little resemblance to each other in perfection of
wickedness. Report has been accustomed to call Altamont Lord Euston.
“The Old Man’s Relapse,” occasioned by an Epistle to Walpole, if written
by Young, which I much doubt, must have been written very late in life.
It has been seen, I am told, in a Miscellany published thirty years
before his death. In 1758 he exhibited “The Old Man’s Relapse,” in more
than words, by again becoming a dedicator, and publishing a sermon
addressed to the king.
The lively letter in prose, on “Original Composition,” addressed to
Richardson, the author of “Clarissa,” appeared in 1759. Though he
despairs “of breaking through the frozen obstructions of age and care’s
incumbent cloud into that flow of thought and brightness of expression
which subjects so polite require,” yet it is more like the production of
untamed, unbridled youth, than of jaded fourscore. Some sevenfold
volumes put him in mind of Ovid’s sevenfold channels of the Nile at the
conflagration:—
“—ostia septem
Pulverulenta vocant, septem sine flumine valles.”
Such leaden labours are like Lycurgus’s iron money, which was so much
less in value than in bulk, that it required barns for strong boxes, and
a yoke of oxen to draw five hundred pounds. If there is a famine of
invention in the land, we must travel, he says, like Joseph’s brethren,
far for food, we must visit the remote and rich ancients. But an
inventive genius may safely stay at home; that, like the widow’s cruse,
is divinely replenished from within, and affords us a miraculous delight.
He asks why it should seem altogether impossible that Heaven’s latest
editions of the human mind may be the most correct and fair? And Jonson,
he tells us, was very learned, as Samson was very strong, to his own
hurt. Blind to the nature of tragedy, he pulled down all antiquity on
his head, and buried himself under it. Is this “care’s incumbent cloud,”
or “the frozen obstructions of age?” In this letter Pope is severely
censured for his “fall from Homer’s numbers, free as air, lofty and
harmonious as the spheres, into childish shackles and tinkling sounds;
for putting Achilles into petticoats a second time:” but we are told that
the dying swan talked over an epic plan with Young a few weeks before his
decease. Young’s chief inducement to write this letter was, as he
confesses, that he might erect a monumental marble to the memory of an
old friend. He, who employed his pious pen for almost the last time in
thus doing justice to the exemplary death-bed of Addison, might probably,
at the close of his own life, afford no unuseful lesson for the deaths of
others. In the postscript he writes to Richardson that he will see in
his next how far Addison is an original. But no other letter appears.
The few lines which stand in the last edition, as “sent by Lord Melcombe
to Dr. Young not long before his lordship’s death,” were indeed so sent,
but were only an introduction to what was there meant by “The Muse’s
Latest Spark.” The poem is necessary, whatever may be its merit, since
the Preface to it is already printed. Lord Melcombe called his Tusculum
“La Trappe”:—
“Love thy country, wish it well,
Not with too intense a care;
’Tis enough, that, when it fell,
Thou its ruin didst not share.
Envy’s censure, Flattery’s praise,
With unmoved indifference view;
Learn to tread life’s dangerous maze,
With unerring Virtue’s clue.
Void of strong desire and fear,
Life’s void ocean trust no more;
Strive thy little bark to steer
With the tide, but near the shore.
Thus prepared, thy shortened sail
Shall, whene’er the winds increase,
Seizing each propitious gale,
Waft thee to the Port of Peace.
Keep thy conscience from offence,
And tempestuous passions free,
So, when thou art called from hence,
Easy shall thy passage be;
Easy shall thy passage be,
Cheerful thy allotted stay,
Short the account ’twixt God and thee;
Hope shall meet thee on the way:
Truth shall lead thee to the gate,
Mercy’s self shall let thee in,
Where its never-changing state,
Full perfection, shall begin.”
The poem was accompanied by a letter.
“La Trappe, the 27th of October, 1761
“DEAR SIR,—You seemed to like the ode I sent you for your amusement;
I now send it you as a present. If you please to accept of it, and
are willing that our friendship should be known when we are gone, you
will be pleased to leave this among those of your own papers that may
possibly see the light by a posthumous publication. God send us
health while we stay, and an easy journey!—My dear Dr. Young,
“Yours, most cordially,
“MELCOMBE.”
In 1762, a short time before his death, Young published “Resignation.”
Notwithstanding the manner in which it was really forced from him by the
world, criticism has treated it with no common severity. If it shall be
thought not to deserve the highest praise, on the other side of
fourscore, by whom, except by Newton and by Waller, has praise been
merited?
To Mrs. Montagu, the famous champion of Shakespeare, I am indebted for
the history of “Resignation.” Observing that Mrs. Boscawen, in the midst
of her grief for the loss of the admiral, derived consolation from the
perusal of the “Night Thoughts,” Mrs. Montagu proposed a visit to the
author. From conversing with Young, Mrs. Boscawen derived still further
consolation; and to that visit she and the world were indebted for this
poem. It compliments Mrs. Montagu in the following lines:—
“Yet write I must. A lady sues:
How shameful her request!
My brain in labour with dull rhyme,
Hers teeming with the best!”