By the good sense of his son, 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, sooner or later, to
the deserving.
M. S.
Optimi parentis
EDVARDI YOUNG, LL.D.
hujus ecclesiae rect.
Et Elizabethae
faem. praenob.
Conjugis ejus amantissimae,
pio et gratissimo animo
hoc marmor posuit
F. Y.
Filius superstes.
Is it not strange that the author of the Night Thoughts has inscribed 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 which I have been able to collect
of the great Young. That it may be long before any thing like what I
have just transcribed be necessary for you, is the sincere wish of,
Dear sir,
Your greatly obliged friend,
HERBERT CROFT, Jun.
Lincoln's Inn, Sept. 1780.
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 alteration, you
insisted on striking out one passage, because it said, that, if I did
not wish you to live long, for your sake, I did for the sake of myself
and of the world. But this postscript you will not see before the
printing of it; and I will say 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 so late a period of life as
Young took orders, it will be owing, in no small measure, to my having
had the happiness of calling the author of the Rambler my friend[191].
H.C.
Oxford, Oct. 1782.
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 sometimes smooth, and sometimes rugged; his style is
sometimes concatenated, and sometimes abrupt; sometimes diffusive, and
sometimes concise. His plan seems to have started in his mind at the
present moment; and his thoughts appear the effect of chance, sometimes
adverse, and sometimes lucky, with very little operation of judgment.
He was not one of those writers whom experience improves, and who,
observing 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 succession of images divides and
weakens the general conception; but the great reason why the reader is
disappointed is, that the thought of the Last Day makes every man more
than poetical, by spreading over his mind a general obscurity of sacred
horrour, that oppresses distinction, and disdains expression.
His story of Jane Grey was never popular. It is written with elegance
enough; but Jane is too heroick to be pitied.
The Universal Passion is, indeed, a very great performance. It is said
to be a series of epigrams; but, if it be, it is what the author
intended; his endeavour was at the production of striking distichs and
pointed sentences; and his distichs have the weight of solid sentiment,
and his points the sharpness of resistless truth.
His characters are often selected with discernment, and drawn with
nicety; his illustrations are often happy, and his reflections often
just. His species of satire is between those of Horace and Juvenal; and
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 surface of life; he never penetrates the recesses of the
mind, and, therefore, the whole power of his poetry is exhausted by a
single perusal; his conceits please only when they surprise.
To translate he never condescended, unless his Paraphrase on Job may be
considered as a version; in which he has not, I think, been
unsuccessful; he, indeed, favoured himself, by choosing those parts
which most easily admit the ornaments of English poetry.
He had least success in his lyrick attempts, in which he seems to have
been under some malignant influence: he is always labouring to be great,
and at last is only turgid.
In his Night Thoughts he has exhibited a very wide display of original
poetry, variegated with deep reflections and striking allusions, 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 verse could not be changed for rhyme but with disadvantage. The
wild diffusion of the sentiments, and the digressive sallies of
imagination, would have been compressed and restrained by confinement to
rhyme. The excellence of this work is not exactness, but copiousness;
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
plantations, the magnificence of vast extent and endless diversity.
His last poem was Resignation; in which he made, as he was accustomed,
an experiment of a new mode of writing, and succeeded better than in his
Ocean or his Merchant. It was very falsely represented as a proof of
decaying faculties. There is Young in every stanza, such as he often was
in his highest vigour.
His tragedies, not making part of the collection, I had forgotten, till
Mr. Steevens recalled them to my thoughts by remarking, that he seemed
to have one favourite catastrophe, as his three plays all concluded with
lavish suicide; a method by which, as Dryden remarked, a poet easily
rids his scene of persons whom he wants not to keep alive. In Busiris
there are the greatest ebullitions of imagination: but the pride of
Busiris is such as no other man can have, and the whole is too remote
from known life to raise either grief, terrour, or indignation. The
Revenge approaches much nearer to human practices and manners, and,
therefore, keeps possession of the stage: the first design seems
suggested by Othello; but the reflections, the incidents, and the
diction, are original. The moral observations are go introduced, and so
expressed, as to have all the novelty that can be required. Of the
Brothers I may be allowed to say nothing, since nothing was ever said of
it by the publick.
It must be allowed of Young's poetry, that it abounds in thought, but
without much accuracy or selection. When he lays hold of an
illustration, he pursues it beyond expectation, sometimes happily, as in
his parallel of Quicksilver with Pleasure[192] which I have heard
repeated at the approbation by a lady, of whose praise he would have
been justly proud, and which is very ingenious, very subtile, and almost
exact: but sometimes he is less lucky, as when, in his Night Thoughts,
having it dropped into his mind, that the orbs floating in space might
be called the _cluster_ of creation, he thinks of a cluster of grapes,
and says, that they all hang on the great vine, drinking the "nectareous
juice of immortal life."
His conceits are sometimes yet less valuable. In the Last Day he hopes
to illustrate the reassembly of the atoms that compose the human body at
the "trump of doom" by the collection of bees into a swarm at the
tinkling of a pan.
The prophet says of Tyre, that "her merchants are princes." Young says
of Tyre, in his Merchant,
Her merchants princes, and each _deck a throne_.
Let burlesque try to go beyond him.
He has the trick of joining the turgid and familiar: to buy the alliance
of Britain, "Climes were paid down." Antithesis is his favourite: "They
for kindness hate;" and, "because she's right, she's ever in the wrong."
His versification is his own: neither his blank nor his rhyming lines
have any resemblance to those of former writers; he picks up no
hemistichs, he copies no favourite expressions; he seems to have laid
up no stores of thought or diction, but to owe all to the fortuitous
suggestions of the present moment. Yet I have reason to believe that,
when once he had formed a new design, he then laboured it with very
patient industry; and that he composed with great labour and frequent
revisions.
His verses are formed by no certain model; he is no more like himself in
his different productions than he is like others. He seems never to have
studied prosody, nor to have had any direction but from his own ear.
But, with all his defects, he was a man of genius and a poet.
-----
[Footnote 185: See Gent. Mag. vol. lxx. p. 225. N.]
[Footnote 186: As my great friend is now become the subject of
biography, it should be told, that every time I called upon Johnson
during the time I was employed in collecting materials for this life and
putting it together, he never suffered me to depart without some such
farewell as this: "Don't forget that rascal Tindal, sir. Be sure to hang
up the atheist." Alluding to this anecdote, which Johnson had mentioned
to me.]
[Footnote 187: Dr. Johnson, in many cases, thought and directed
differently, particularly in Young's works. J.N.]
[Footnote 188: Not in the Tatler, but in the Guardian, May 9, 1713.]
[Footnote 189: See a letter from the duke of Wharton to Swift, dated
1717, in Swift's works, in which he mentions Young being then in
Ireland. J.B.N.]
[Footnote 190: Davies, in his life of Garrick, says 1720, and that it
was produced thirty-three years after.]
[Footnote 191: Mr. Boswell discovered in this heavy piece of biography a
successful imitation of Johnson's style. An eminent literary character
exclaimed, "No, no, it is not a good imitation of Johnson; it has all
his pomp without his force; it has all the nodosities of the oak without
its strength." Endeavouring to express himself still more in Johnsonian
phrase, he added, "It has all the contortions of the Sybil, without the
inspiration." See Boswell, iv. According to Malone, this eminent person
was Burke, and the observation is assigned to him, without hesitation,
in Prin's Life. It has sometimes been attributed to G. Stevens. ED.]
[Footnote 192: See Mrs. Piozzi's Anecdotes, 162.]