Title: Johnson's Lives of the Poets — Volume 2
Author: Johnson, Samuel
Language: English
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                       CASSELL’S NATIONAL LIBRARY.

                                * * * * *



                                  LIVES
                                  OF THE
                              ENGLISH POETS


                     Gay  Thomson  Young  Gray  etc.

                                    BY
                          SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D.

                      [Picture: Decorative graphic]

                       CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED:
                _LONDON_, _PARIS_, _NEW YORK & MELBOURNE_.
                                  1889.



INTRODUCTION.


THIS volume contains a record of twenty lives, of which only one—that of
Edward Young—is treated at length.  It completes our edition of Johnson’s
Lives of the Poets, from which a few only of the briefest and least
important have been omitted.

The eldest of the Poets here discussed were Samuel Garth, Charles
Montague (Lord Halifax), and William King, who were born within the years
1660–63.  Next in age were Addison’s friend Ambrose Philips, and Nicholas
Rowe the dramatist, who was also the first editor of Shakespeare’s plays
after the four folios had appeared.  Ambrose Philips and Rowe were born
in 1671 and 1673, and Isaac Watts in 1674.  Thomas Parnell, born in 1679,
would follow next, nearly of like age with Young, whose birth-year was
1681.  Pope’s friend John Gay was of Pope’s age, born in 1688, two years
later than Addison’s friend Thomas Tickell, who was born in 1686.  Next
in the course of years came, in 1692, William Somerville, the author of
“The Chace.”  John Dyer, who wrote “Grongar Hill,” and James Thomson, who
wrote the “Seasons,” were both born in the year 1700.  They were two of
three poets—Allan Ramsay, the third—who, almost at the same time, wrote
verse instinct with a fresh sense of outward Nature which was hardly to
be found in other writers of that day.  David Mallet, Thomson’s
college-friend and friend of after-years—who shares with Thomson the
curiosity of critics who would decide which of them wrote “Rule
Britannia”—was of Thomson’s age.

The other writers of whose lives Johnson here gives his note were men
born in the beginning of the eighteenth century: Gilbert West, the
translator of Pindar, in 1706; George Lyttelton, in 1709.  William
Shenstone, whose sense of Nature, although true, was mixed with the
conventions of his time, and who once asked a noble friend to open a
waterfall in the garden upon which the poet spent his little patrimony,
was born in 1714; Thomas Gray, in 1716; William Collins, in 1720; and
Mark Akenside, in 1721.  In Collins, while he lived with loss of reason,
Johnson, who had fears for himself, took pathetic interest.  Akenside
could not interest him much.  Akenside made his mark when young with “The
Pleasures of Imagination,” a good poem, according to the fashion of the
time, when read with due consideration as a young man’s first venture for
fame.  He spent much of the rest of his life in overloading it with
valueless additions.  The writer who begins well should let well alone,
and, instead of tinkering at bygone work, follow the course of his own
ripening thought.  He should seek new ways of doing worthy service in the
years of labour left to him.

                                                                     H. M.



KING.


WILLIAM KING was born in London in 1663; the son of Ezekiel King, a
gentleman.  He was allied to the family of Clarendon.

From Westminster School, where he was a scholar on the foundation under
the care of Dr. Busby, he was at eighteen elected to Christ Church in
1681; where he is said to have prosecuted his studies with so much
intenseness and activity, that before he was eight years’ standing he had
read over, and made remarks upon, twenty-two thousand odd hundred books
and manuscripts.  The books were certainly not very long, the manuscripts
not very difficult, nor the remarks very large; for the calculator will
find that he despatched seven a day for every day of his eight years;
with a remnant that more than satisfies most other students.  He took his
degree in the most expensive manner, as a _grand compounder_; whence it
is inferred that he inherited a considerable fortune.

In 1688, the same year in which he was made Master of Arts, he published
a confutation of Varillas’s account of Wickliffe; and, engaging in the
study of the civil law, became Doctor in 1692, and was admitted advocate
at Doctors’ Commons.

He had already made some translations from the French, and written some
humorous and satirical pieces; when, in 1694, Molesworth published his
“Account of Denmark,” in which he treats the Danes and their monarch with
great contempt; and takes the opportunity of insinuating those wild
principles by which he supposes liberty to be established, and by which
his adversaries suspect that all subordination and government is
endangered.

This book offended Prince George; and the Danish Minister presented a
memorial against it.  The principles of its author did not please Dr.
King; and therefore he undertook to confute part, and laugh at the rest.
The controversy is now forgotten: and books of this kind seldom live long
when interest and resentment have ceased.

In 1697 he mingled in the controversy between Boyle and Bentley; and was
one of those who tried what wit could perform in opposition to learning,
on a question which learning only could decide.

In 1699 was published by him “A Journey to London,” after the method of
Dr. Martin Lister, who had published “A Journey to Paris.”  And in 1700
he satirised the Royal Society—at least, Sir Hans Sloane, their
president—in two dialogues, intituled “The Transactioner.”

Though he was a regular advocate in the courts of civil and canon law, he
did not love his profession, nor, indeed, any kind of business which
interrupted his voluptuary dreams or forced him to rouse from that
indulgence in which only he could find delight.  His reputation as a
civilian was yet maintained by his judgments in the Courts of Delegates,
and raised very high by the address and knowledge which he discovered in
1700, when he defended the Earl of Anglesea against his lady, afterwards
Duchess of Buckinghamshire, who sued for a divorce and obtained it.

The expense of his pleasures, and neglect of business, had now lessened
his revenues; and he was willing to accept of a settlement in Ireland,
where, about 1702, he was made Judge of the Admiralty, Commissioner of
the Prizes, Keeper of the Records in Birmingham’s Tower, and
Vicar-General to Dr. Marsh, the primate.

But it is vain to put wealth within the reach of him who will not stretch
out his hand to take it.  King soon found a friend, as idle and
thoughtless as himself, in Upton, one of the judges, who had a pleasant
house called Mountown, near Dublin, to which King frequently retired;
delighting to neglect his interest, forget his cares, and desert his
duty.

Here he wrote “Mully of Mountown,” a poem; by which, though fanciful
readers in the pride of sagacity have given it a poetical interpretation,
was meant originally no more than it expressed, as it was dictated only
by the author’s delight in the quiet of Mountown.

In 1708, when Lord Wharton was sent to govern Ireland, King returned to
London, with his poverty, his idleness, and his wit; and published some
essays, called “Useful Transactions.”  His “Voyage to the Island of
Cajamai” is particularly commended.  He then wrote the “Art of Love,” a
poem remarkable, notwithstanding its title, for purity of sentiment; and
in 1709 imitated Horace in an “Art of Cookery,” which he published with
some letters to Dr. Lister.

In 1710 he appeared as a lover of the Church, on the side of Sacheverell;
and was supposed to have concurred at least in the projection of the
_Examiner_.  His eyes were open to all the operations of Whiggism; and he
bestowed some strictures upon Dr. Kennet’s adulatory sermon at the
funeral of the Duke of Devonshire.

“The History of the Heathen Gods,” a book composed for schools, was
written by him in 1711.  The work is useful, but might have been produced
without the powers of King.  The same year he published “Rufinus,” an
historical essay; and a poem intended to dispose the nation to think as
he thought of the Duke of Marlborough and his adherents.

In 1711, competence, if not plenty, was again put into his power.  He
was, without the trouble of attendance or the mortification of a request,
made Gazetteer.  Swift, Freind, Prior, and other men of the same party,
brought him the key of the Gazetteer’s office.  He was now again placed
in a profitable employment, and again threw the benefit away.  An Act of
Insolvency made his business at that time particularly troublesome; and
he would not wait till hurry should be at an end, but impatiently
resigned it, and returned to his wonted indigence and amusements.

One of his amusements at Lambeth, where he resided, was to mortify Dr.
Tenison, the archbishop, by a public festivity on the surrender of
Dunkirk to Hill; an event with which Tenison’s political bigotry did not
suffer him to be delighted.  King was resolved to counteract his
sullenness, and at the expense of a few barrels of ale filled the
neighbourhood with honest merriment.

In the autumn of 1712 his health declined; he grew weaker by degrees, and
died on Christmas Day.  Though his life had not been without
irregularity, his principles were pure and orthodox, and his death was
pious.

After this relation it will be naturally supposed that his poems were
rather the amusements of idleness than efforts of study; that he
endeavoured rather to divert than astonish; that his thoughts seldom
aspired to sublimity; and that, if his verse was easy and his images
familiar, he attained what he desired.  His purpose is to be merry; but
perhaps, to enjoy his mirth, it may be sometimes necessary to think well
of his opinions.



HALIFAX.


THE life of the Earl of Halifax was properly that of an artful and active
statesman, employed in balancing parties, contriving expedients, and
combating opposition, and exposed to the vicissitudes of advancement and
degradation; but in this collection poetical merit is the claim to
attention; and the account which is here to be expected may properly be
proportioned, not to his influence in the State, but to his rank among
the writers of verse.

Charles Montague was born April 16, 1661, at Horton, in Northamptonshire,
the son of Mr. George Montague, a younger son of the Earl of Manchester.
He was educated first in the country, and then removed to Westminster,
where, in 1677, he was chosen a King’s Scholar, and recommended himself
to Busby by his felicity in extemporary epigrams.  He contracted a very
intimate friendship with Mr. Stepney; and in 1682, when Stepney was
elected at Cambridge, the election of Montague being not to proceed till
the year following, he was afraid lest by being placed at Oxford he might
be separated from his companion, and therefore solicited to be removed to
Cambridge, without waiting for the advantages of another year.

It seemed indeed time to wish for a removal, for he was already a
schoolboy of one-and-twenty.

His relation, Dr. Montague, was then Master of the college in which he
was placed a Fellow-Commoner, and took him under his particular care.
Here he commenced an acquaintance with the great Newton, which continued
through his life, and was at last attested by a legacy.

In 1685 his verses on the death of King Charles made such an impression
on the Earl of Dorset that he was invited to town, and introduced by that
universal patron to the other wits.  In 1687 he joined with Prior in “The
City Mouse and the Country Mouse,” a burlesque of Dryden’s “Hind and
Panther.”  He signed the invitation to the Prince of Orange, and sat in
the Convention.  He about the same time married the Countess Dowager of
Manchester, and intended to have taken Orders; but, afterwards altering
his purpose, he purchased for £1,500 the place of one of the clerks of
the Council.

After he had written his epistle on the victory of the Boyne, his patron
Dorset introduced him to King William with this expression, “Sir, I have
brought a _mouse_ to wait on your Majesty.”  To which the King is said to
have replied, “You do well to put me in the way of making a _man_ of
him;” and ordered him a pension of £500.  This story, however current,
seems to have been made after the event.  The King’s answer implies a
greater acquaintance with our proverbial and familiar diction than King
William could possibly have attained.

In 1691, being member of the House of Commons, he argued warmly in favour
of a law to grant the assistance of counsel in trials for high treason;
and in the midst of his speech falling into some confusion, was for a
while silent; but, recovering himself, observed, “how reasonable it was
to allow counsel to men called as criminals before a court of justice,
when it appeared how much the presence of that assembly could disconcert
one of their own body.”

After this he rose fast into honours and employments, being made one of
the Commissioners of the Treasury, and called to the Privy Council.  In
1694 he became Chancellor of the Exchequer; and the next year engaged in
the great attempt of the recoinage, which was in two years happily
completed.  In 1696 he projected the _general fund_ and raised the credit
of the Exchequer; and after inquiry concerning a grant of Irish Crown
lands, it was determined by a vote of the Commons that Charles Montague,
Esq., _had deserved his Majesty’s favour_.  In 1698, being advanced to
the first Commission of the Treasury, he was appointed one of the regency
in the King’s absence: the next year he was made Auditor of the
Exchequer, and the year after created Baron Halifax.  He was, however,
impeached by the Commons; but the Articles were dismissed by the Lords.

At the accession of Queen Anne he was dismissed from the Council; and in
the first Parliament of her reign was again attacked by the Commons, and
again escaped by the protection of the Lords.  In 1704 he wrote an answer
to Bromley’s speech against occasional conformity.  He headed the inquiry
into the danger of the Church.  In 1706 he proposed and negotiated the
Union with Scotland; and when the Elector of Hanover received the Garter,
after the Act had passed for securing the Protestant Succession, he was
appointed to carry the ensigns of the Order to the Electoral Court.  He
sat as one of the judges of Sacheverell, but voted for a mild sentence.
Being now no longer in favour, he contrived to obtain a writ for
summoning the Electoral Prince to Parliament as Duke of Cambridge.

At the Queen’s death he was appointed one of the regents; and at the
accession of George I. was made Earl of Halifax, Knight of the Garter,
and First Commissioner of the Treasury, with a grant to his nephew of the
reversion of the Auditorship of the Exchequer.  More was not to be had,
and this he kept but a little while; for on the 19th of May, 1715, he
died of an inflammation of his lungs.

Of him, who from a poet became a patron of poets, it will be readily
believed that the works would not miss of celebration.  Addison began to
praise him early, and was followed or accompanied by other poets; perhaps
by almost all, except Swift and Pope, who forbore to flatter him in his
life, and after his death spoke of him—Swift with slight censure, and
Pope, in the character of Bufo, with acrimonious contempt.

He was, as Pope says, “fed with dedications;” for Tickell affirms that no
dedication was unrewarded.  To charge all unmerited praise with the guilt
of flattery, and to suppose that the encomiast always knows and feels the
falsehoods of his assertions, is surely to discover great ignorance of
human nature and human life.  In determinations depending not on rules,
but on experience and comparison, judgment is always in some degree
subject to affection.  Very near to admiration is the wish to admire.

Every man willingly gives value to the praise which he receives, and
considers the sentence passed in his favour as the sentence of
discernment.  We admire in a friend that understanding that selected us
for confidence; we admire more, in a patron, that judgment which, instead
of scattering bounty indiscriminately, directed it to us; and, if the
patron be an author, those performances which gratitude forbids us to
blame, affection will easily dispose us to exalt.

To these prejudices, hardly culpable, interest adds a power always
operating, though not always, because not willingly, perceived.  The
modesty of praise wears gradually away; and perhaps the pride of
patronage may be in time so increased that modest praise will no longer
please.

Many a blandishment was practised upon Halifax which he would never have
known had he no other attractions than those of his poetry, of which a
short time has withered the beauties.  It would now be esteemed no
honour, by a contributor to the monthly bundles of verses, to be told
that, in strains either familiar or solemn, he sings like Montague.



PARNELL.


THE life of Dr. Parnell is a task which I should very willingly decline,
since it has been lately written by Goldsmith, a man of such variety of
powers, and such felicity of performance, that he always seemed to do
best that which he was doing; a man who had the art of being minute
without tediousness, and general without confusion; whose language was
copious without exuberance, exact without constraint, and easy without
weakness.

What such an author has told, who would tell again?  I have made an
abstract from his larger narrative; and have this gratification from my
attempt, that it gives me an opportunity of paying due tribute to the
memory of Goldsmith.

Thomas Parnell was the son of a Commonwealthsman of the same name, who,
at the Restoration, left Congleton, in Cheshire, where the family had
been established for several centuries, and, settling in Ireland,
purchased an estate, which, with his lands in Cheshire, descended to the
poet, who was born at Dublin in 1679; and, after the usual education at a
grammar school, was, at the age of thirteen, admitted into the College
where, in 1700, he became Master of Arts; and was the same year ordained
a deacon, though under the canonical age, by a dispensation from the
Bishop of Derry.

About three years afterwards he was made a priest and in 1705 Dr. Ashe,
the Bishop of Clogher, conferred upon him the archdeaconry of Clogher.
About the same time he married Mrs. Anne Minchin, an amiable lady, by
whom he had two sons, who died young, and a daughter, who long survived
him.

At the ejection of the Whigs, in the end of Queen Anne’s reign, Parnell
was persuaded to change his party, not without much censure from those
whom he forsook, and was received by the new Ministry as a valuable
reinforcement.  When the Earl of Oxford was told that Dr. Parnell waited
among the crowd in the outer room, he went, by the persuasion of Swift,
with his Treasurer’s staff in his hand, to inquire for him, and to bid
him welcome; and, as may be inferred from Pope’s dedication, admitted him
as a favourite companion to his convivial hours, but, as it seems often
to have happened in those times to the favourites of the great, without
attention to his fortune, which, however, was in no great need of
improvement.

Parnell, who did not want ambition or vanity, was desirous to make
himself conspicuous, and to show how worthy he was of high preferment.
As he thought himself qualified to become a popular preacher, he
displayed his elocution with great success in the pulpits of London; but
the Queen’s death putting an end to his expectations, abated his
diligence; and Pope represents him as falling from that time into
intemperance of wine.  That in his latter life he was too much a lover of
the bottle, is not denied; but I have heard it imputed to a cause more
likely to obtain forgiveness from mankind, the untimely death of a
darling son; or, as others tell, the loss of his wife, who died (1712) in
the midst of his expectations.

He was now to derive every future addition to his preferments from his
personal interest with his private friends, and he was not long
unregarded.  He was warmly recommended by Swift to Archbishop King, who
gave him a prebend in 1713; and in May, 1716, presented him to the
vicarage of Finglass, in the diocese of Dublin, worth £400 a year.  Such
notice from such a man inclines me to believe that the vice of which he
has been accused was not gross or not notorious.

But his prosperity did not last long.  His end, whatever was its cause,
was now approaching.  He enjoyed his preferment little more than a year;
for in July, 1717, in his thirty-eighth year, he died at Chester on his
way to Ireland.

He seems to have been one of those poets who take delight in writing.  He
contributed to the papers of that time, and probably published more than
he owned.  He left many compositions behind him, of which Pope selected
those which he thought best, and dedicated them to the Earl of Oxford.
Of these Goldsmith has given an opinion, and his criticism it is seldom
safe to contradict.  He bestows just praise upon “The Rise of Woman,”
“The Fairy Tale,” and “The Pervigilium Veneris;” but has very properly
remarked that in “The Battle of Mice and Frogs” the Greek names have not
in English their original effect.  He tells us that “The Bookworm” is
borrowed from Beza; but he should have added with modern applications:
and when he discovers that “Gay Bacchus” is translated from Augurellus,
he ought to have remarked that the latter part is purely Parnell’s.
Another poem, “When Spring Comes On,” is, he says, taken from the French.
I would add that the description of “Barrenness,” in his verses to Pope,
was borrowed from Secundus; but lately searching for the passage which I
had formerly read, I could not find it.  “The Night Piece on Death” is
indirectly preferred by Goldsmith to Gray’s “Churchyard;” but, in my
opinion, Gray has the advantage in dignity, variety, and originality of
sentiment.  He observes that the story of “The Hermit” is in More’s
“Dialogues” and Howell’s “Letters,” and supposes it to have been
originally Arabian.

Goldsmith has not taken any notice of “The Elegy to the Old Beauty,”
which is perhaps the meanest; nor of “The Allegory on Man,” the happiest
of Parnell’s performances.  The hint of “The Hymn to Contentment” I
suspect to have been borrowed from Cleveland.

The general character of Parnell is not great extent of comprehension or
fertility of mind.  Of the little that appears, still less is his own.
His praise must be derived from the easy sweetness of his diction: in his
verses there is more happiness than pains; he is sprightly without
effort, and always delights, though he never ravishes; everything is
proper, yet everything seems casual.  If there is some appearance of
elaboration in “The Hermit,” the narrative, as it is less airy, is less
pleasing.  Of his other compositions it is impossible to say whether they
are the productions of nature, so excellent as not to want the help of
art, or of art so refined as to resemble nature.

This criticism relates only to the pieces published by Pope.  Of the
large appendages which I find in the last edition, I can only say that I
know not whence they came, nor have ever inquired whither they are going.
They stand upon the faith of the compilers.



GARTH.


SAMUEL GARTH was of a good family in Yorkshire, and from some school in
his own county became a student at Peter House, in Cambridge, where he
resided till he became Doctor of Physic on July the 7th, 1691.  He was
examined before the College at London on March the 12th, 1691–2, and
admitted Fellow June 26th, 1693.  He was soon so much distinguished by
his conversation and accomplishments as to obtain very extensive
practice; and, if a pamphlet of those times may be credited, had the
favour and confidence of one party, as Radcliffe had of the other.  He is
always mentioned as a man of benevolence; and it is just to suppose that
his desire of helping the helpless disposed him to so much zeal for “The
Dispensary;” an undertaking of which some account, however short, is
proper to be given.

Whether what Temple says be true, that physicians have had more learning
than the other faculties, I will not stay to inquire; but I believe every
man has found in physicians great liberality and dignity of sentiment,
very prompt effusion of beneficence, and willingness to exert a lucrative
art where there is no hope of lucre.  Agreeably to this character, the
College of Physicians, in July, 1687, published an edict, requiring all
the Fellows, Candidates, and Licentiates to give gratuitous advice to the
neighbouring poor.  This edict was sent to the Court of Aldermen; and, a
question being made to whom the appellation of the _poor_ should be
extended, the College answered that it should be sufficient to bring a
testimonial from the clergyman officiating in the parish where the
patient resided.

After a year’s experience the physicians found their charity frustrated
by some malignant opposition, and made to a great degree vain by the high
price of physic; they therefore voted, in August, 1688, that the
laboratory of the College should be accommodated to the preparation of
medicines, and another room prepared for their reception; and that the
contributors to the expense should manage the charity.

It was now expected that the apothecaries would have undertaken the care
of providing medicines; but they took another course.  Thinking the whole
design pernicious to their interest, they endeavoured to raise a faction
against it in the College, and found some physicians mean enough to
solicit their patronage by betraying to them the counsels of the College.
The greater part, however, enforced by a new edict, in 1694, the former
order of 1687, and sent it to the Mayor and Aldermen, who appointed a
committee to treat with the College and settle the mode of administering
the charity.

It was desired by the aldermen that the testimonials of churchwardens and
overseers should be admitted; and that all hired servants, and all
apprentices to handicraftsmen, should be considered as _poor_.  This
likewise was granted by the College.

It was then considered who should distribute the medicines, and who
should settle their prices.  The physicians procured some apothecaries to
undertake the dispensation, and offered that the warden and company of
the apothecaries should adjust the price.  This offer was rejected; and
the apothecaries who had engaged to assist the charity were considered as
traitors to the company, threatened with the imposition of troublesome
offices, and deterred from the performance of their engagements.  The
apothecaries ventured upon public opposition, and presented a kind of
remonstrance against the design to the committee of the City, which the
physicians condescended to confute: and at last the traders seem to have
prevailed among the sons of trade; for the proposal of the College having
been considered, a paper of approbation was drawn up, but postponed and
forgotten.

The physicians still persisted; and in 1696 a subscription was raised by
themselves according to an agreement prefixed to “The Dispensary.”  The
poor were, for a time, supplied with medicines; for how long a time I
know not.  The medicinal charity, like others, began with ardour, but
soon remitted, and at last died gradually away.

About the time of the subscription begins the action of “The Dispensary.”
The poem, as its subject was present and popular, co-operated with
passions and prejudices then prevalent, and, with such auxiliaries to its
intrinsic merit, was universally and liberally applauded.  It was on the
side of charity against the intrigues of interest; and of regular
learning against licentious usurpation of medical authority, and was
therefore naturally favoured by those who read and can judge of poetry.

In 1697 Garth spoke that which is now called “The Harveian Oration;”
which the authors of “The Biographia” mention with more praise than the
passage quoted in their notes will fully justify.  Garth, speaking of the
mischiefs done by quacks, has these expressions: “Non tamen telis
vulnerat ista agyrtarum colluvies, sed theriaca quâdam magis perniciosâ,
non pyrio, sed pulvere nescio quo exotico certat, non globulis plumbeis,
sed pilulis æque lethalibus interficit.”  This was certainly thought fine
by the author, and is still admired by his biographer.  In October, 1702,
he became one of the censors of the College.

Garth, being an active and zealous Whig, was a member of the Kit-Cat
Club, and, by consequence, familiarly known to all the great men of that
denomination.  In 1710, when the government fell into other hands, he
writ to Lord Godolphin, on his dismission, a short poem, which was
criticised in the _Examiner_, and so successfully either defended or
excused by Mr. Addison that, for the sake of the vindication, it ought to
be preserved.

At the accession of the present family his merits were acknowledged and
rewarded.  He was knighted with the sword of his hero, Marlborough; and
was made Physician-in-Ordinary to the King, and Physician-General to the
army.  He then undertook an edition of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” translated
by several hands; which he recommended by a preface, written with more
ostentation than ability; his notions are half-formed, and his materials
immethodically confused.  This was his last work.  He died January 18th,
1717–18, and was buried at Harrow-on-the-Hill.

His personal character seems to have been social and liberal.  He
communicated himself through a very wide extent of acquaintance; and
though firm in a party, at a time when firmness included virulence, yet
he imparted his kindness to those who were not supposed to favour his
principles.  He was an early encourager of Pope, and was at once the
friend of Addison and of Granville.  He is accused of voluptuousness and
irreligion; and Pope, who says that “if ever there was a good Christian,
without knowing himself to be so, it was Dr. Garth,” seems not able to
deny what he is angry to hear and loth to confess.

Pope afterwards declared himself convinced that Garth died in the
communion of the Church of Rome, having been privately reconciled.  It is
observed by Lowth that there is less distance than is thought between
scepticism and Popery; and that a mind wearied with perpetual doubt,
willingly seeks repose in the bosom of an infallible Church.

His poetry has been praised at least equally to its merit.  In “The
Dispensary” there is a strain of smooth and free versification; but few
lines are eminently elegant.  No passages fall below mediocrity, and few
rise much above it.  The plan seems formed without just proportion to the
subject; the means and end have no necessary connection.  Resnel, in his
preface to Pope’s Essay, remarks that Garth exhibits no discrimination of
characters; and that what any one says might, with equal propriety, have
been said by another.  The general design is, perhaps, open to criticism;
but the composition can seldom be charged with inaccuracy or negligence.
The author never slumbers in self-indulgence; his full vigour is always
exerted; scarcely a line is left unfinished; nor is it easy to find an
expression used by constraint, or a thought imperfectly expressed.  It
was remarked by Pope, that “The Dispensary” had been corrected in every
edition, and that every change was an improvement.  It appears, however,
to want something of poetical ardour, and something of general
delectation; and therefore, since it has been no longer supported by
accidental and intrinsic popularity, it has been scarcely able to support
itself.



ROWE.


NICHOLAS ROWE was born at Little Beckford, in Bedfordshire, in 1673.  His
family had long possessed a considerable estate, with a good house, at
Lambertoun in Devonshire.  The ancestor from whom he descended in a
direct line received the arms borne by his descendants for his bravery in
the Holy War.  His father, John Rowe, who was the first that quitted his
paternal acres to practise any part of profit, professed the law, and
published Benlow’s and Dallison’s Reports in the reign of James the
Second, when, in opposition to the notions then diligently propagated of
dispensing power, he ventured to remark how low his authors rated the
prerogative.  He was made a serjeant, and died April 30, 1692.  He was
buried in the Temple church.

Nicholas was first sent to a private school at Highgate; and, being
afterwards removed to Westminster, was at twelve years chosen one of the
King’s Scholars.  His master was Busby, who suffered none of his scholars
to let their powers lie useless; and his exercises in several languages
are said to have been written with uncommon degrees of excellence, and
yet to have cost him very little labour.  At sixteen he had, in his
father’s opinion, made advances in learning sufficient to qualify him for
the study of law, and was entered a student of the Middle Temple, where
for some time he read statutes and reports with proficiency proportionate
to the force of his mind, which was already such that he endeavoured to
comprehend law, not as a series of precedents, or collection of positive
precepts, but as a system of rational government and impartial justice.
When he was nineteen, he was, by the death of his father, left more to
his own direction, and probably from that time suffered law gradually to
give way to poetry.  At twenty-five he produced the _Ambitious
Step-Mother_, which was received with so much favour that he devoted
himself from that time wholly to elegant literature.

His next tragedy (1702) was Tamerlane, in which, under the name of
Tamerlane, he intended to characterise King William, and Louis the
Fourteenth under Bajazet.  The virtues of Tamerlane seem to have been
arbitrarily assigned him by his poet, for I know not that history gives
any other qualities than those which make a conqueror.  The fashion,
however, of the time was to accumulate upon Louis all that can raise
horror and detestation; and whatever good was withheld from him, that it
might not be thrown away was bestowed upon King William.  This was the
tragedy which Rowe valued most, and that which probably, by the help of
political auxiliaries, excited most applause; but occasional poetry must
often content itself with occasional praise.  Tamerlane has for a long
time been acted only once a year, on the night when King William landed.
Our quarrel with Louis has been long over; and it now gratifies neither
zeal nor malice to see him painted with aggravated features, like a
Saracen upon a sign.

_The Fair Penitent_, his next production (1703), is one of the most
pleasing tragedies on the stage, where it still keeps its turns of
appearing, and probably will long keep them, for there is scarcely any
work of any poet at once so interesting by the fable, and so delightful
by the language.  The story is domestic, and therefore easily received by
the imagination, and assimilated to common life; the diction is
exquisitely harmonious, and soft or sprightly as occasion requires.

The character of Lothario seems to have been expanded by Richardson into
Lovelace; but he has excelled his original in the moral effect of the
fiction.  Lothario, with gaiety which cannot be hated, and bravery which
cannot be despised, retains too much of the spectator’s kindness.  It was
in the power of Richardson alone to teach us at once esteem and
detestation, to make virtuous resentment overpower all the benevolence
which wit, elegance, and courage, naturally excite; and to lose at last
the hero in the villain.  The fifth act is not equal to the former; the
events of the drama are exhausted, and little remains but to talk of what
is past.  It has been observed that the title of the play does not
sufficiently correspond with the behaviour of Calista, who at last shows
no evident signs of repentance, but may be reasonably suspected of
feeling pain from detection rather than from guilt, and expresses more
shame than sorrow, and more rage than shame.

His next (1706) was _Ulysses_; which, with the common fate of
mythological stories, is now generally neglected.  We have been too early
acquainted with the poetical heroes to expect any pleasure from their
revival; to show them as they have already been shown, is to disgust by
repetition; to give them new qualities, or new adventures, is to offend
by violating received notions.

“_The Royal Convert_” (1708) seems to have a better claim to longevity.
The fable is drawn from an obscure and barbarous age, to which fictions
are more easily and properly adapted; for when objects are imperfectly
seen, they easily take forms from imagination.  The scene lies among our
ancestors in our own country, and therefore very easily catches
attention.  Rodogune is a personage truly tragical, of high spirit, and
violent passions, great with tempestuous dignity, and wicked with a soul
that would have been heroic if it had been virtuous.  The motto seems to
tell that this play was not successful.

Rowe does not always remember what his characters require.  In
_Tamerlane_ there is some ridiculous mention of the God of Love; and
Rodogune, a savage Saxon, talks of Venus and the eagle that bears the
thunder of Jupiter.

This play discovers its own date, by a prediction of the Union, in
imitation of Cranmer’s prophetic promises to Henry VIII.  The anticipated
blessings of union are not very naturally introduced, nor very happily
expressed.  He once (1706) tried to change his hand.  He ventured on a
comedy, and produced the _Biter_, with which, though it was unfavourably
treated by the audience, he was himself delighted; for he is said to have
sat in the house laughing with great vehemence, whenever he had, in his
own opinion, produced a jest.  But finding that he and the public had no
sympathy of mirth, he tried at lighter scenes no more.

After the _Royal Convert_ (1714) appeared _Jane Shore_, written, as its
author professes, _in imitation of Shakespeare’s style_.  In what he
thought himself an imitator of Shakespeare it is not easy to conceive.
The numbers, the diction, the sentiments, and the conduct, everything in
which imitation can consist, are remote in the utmost degree from the
manner of Shakespeare, whose dramas it resembles only as it is an English
story, and as some of the persons have their names in history.  This
play, consisting chiefly of domestic scenes and private distress, lays
hold upon the heart.  The wife is forgiven because she repents, and the
husband is honoured because he forgives.  This, therefore, is one of
those pieces which we still welcome on the stage.

His last tragedy (1715) was _Lady Jane Grey_.  This subject had been
chosen by Mr. Smith, whose papers were put into Rowe’s hands such as he
describes them in his preface.  This play has likewise sunk into
oblivion.  From this time he gave nothing more to the stage.

Being by a competent fortune exempted from any necessity of combating his
inclination, he never wrote in distress, and therefore does not appear to
have ever written in haste.  His works were finished to his own
approbation, and bear few marks of negligence or hurry.  It is remarkable
that his prologues and epilogues are all his own, though he sometimes
supplied others; he afforded help, but did not solicit it.

As his studies necessarily made him acquainted with Shakespeare, and
acquaintance produced veneration, he undertook (1709) an edition of his
works, from which he neither received much praise, nor seems to have
expected it; yet I believe those who compare it with former copies will
find that he has done more than he promised; and that, without the pomp
of notes or boasts of criticism, many passages are happily restored.  He
prefixed a life of the author, such as tradition, then almost expiring,
could supply, and a preface, which cannot be said to discover much
profundity or penetration.  He at least contributed to the popularity of
his author.  He was willing enough to improve his fortune by other arts
than poetry.  He was under-secretary for three years when the Duke of
Queensberry was Secretary of State, and afterwards applied to the Earl of
Oxford for some public employment.  Oxford enjoined him to study Spanish;
and when, some time afterwards, he came again, and said that he had
mastered it, dismissed him with this congratulation, “Then, sir, I envy
you the pleasure of reading ‘Don Quixote’ in the original.”

This story is sufficiently attested; but why Oxford, who desired to be
thought a favourer of literature, should thus insult a man of
acknowledged merit, or how Rowe, who was so keen a Whig that he did not
willingly converse with men of the opposite party, could ask preferment
from Oxford, it is not now possible to discover.  Pope, who told the
story, did not say on what occasion the advice was given; and, though he
owned Rowe’s disappointment, doubted whether any injury was intended him,
but thought it rather Lord Oxford’s _odd way_.

It is likely that he lived on discontented through the rest of Queen
Anne’s reign; but the time came at last when he found kinder friends.  At
the accession of King George he was made Poet-Laureate—I am afraid, by
the ejection of poor Nahum Tate, who (1716) died in the Mint, where he
was forced to seek shelter by extreme poverty.  He was made likewise one
of the land-surveyors of the customs of the Port of London.  The Prince
of Wales chose him Clerk of his Council; and the Lord Chancellor Parker,
as soon as he received the seals, appointed him, unasked, Secretary of
the Presentations.  Such an accumulation of employments undoubtedly
produced a very considerable revenue.

Having already translated some parts of Lucan’s “Pharsalia,” which had
been published in the _Miscellanies_, and doubtless received many
praises, he undertook a version of the whole work, which he lived to
finish, but not to publish.  It seems to have been printed under the care
of Dr. Welwood, who prefixed the author’s life, in which is contained the
following character:—

    “As to his person, it was graceful and well made; his face regular,
    and of a manly beauty.  As his soul was well lodged, so its rational
    and animal faculties excelled in a high degree.  He had a quick and
    fruitful invention, a deep penetration, and a large compass of
    thought, with singular dexterity and easiness in making his thoughts
    to be understood.  He was master of most parts of polite learning,
    especially the classical authors, both Greek and Latin; understood
    the French, Italian, and Spanish languages, and spoke the first
    fluently, and the other two tolerably well.  He had likewise read
    most of the Greek and Roman histories in their original languages,
    and most that are wrote in English, French, Italian, and Spanish.  He
    had a good taste in philosophy; and, having a firm impression of
    religion upon his mind, he took great delight in divinity and
    ecclesiastical history, in both of which he made great advances in
    the times he retired into the country, which was frequent.  He
    expressed on all occasions his full persuasion of the truth of
    revealed religion; and, being a sincere member of the Established
    Church himself, he pitied, but condemned not, those that dissented
    from it.  He abhorred the principles of persecuting men upon the
    account of their opinions in religion; and, being strict in his own,
    he took it not upon him to censure those of another persuasion.  His
    conversation was pleasant, witty, and learned, without the least
    tincture of affectation or pedantry; and his inimitable manner of
    diverting and enlivening the company made it impossible for any one
    to be out of humour when he was in it.  Envy and detraction seemed to
    be entirely foreign to his constitution; and whatever provocations he
    met with at any time, he passed them over without the least thought
    of resentment or revenge.  As Homer had a Zoilus, so Mr. Rowe had
    sometimes his; for there were not wanting malevolent people, and
    pretenders to poetry too, that would now and then bark at his best
    performances; but he was so conscious of his own genius, and had so
    much good-nature, as to forgive them, nor could he ever be tempted to
    return them an answer.

    “The love of learning and poetry made him not the less fit for
    business, and nobody applied himself closer to it when it required
    his attendance.  The late Duke of Queensberry, when he was Secretary
    of State, made him his secretary for public affairs; and when that
    truly great man came to know him well, he was never so pleased as
    when Mr. Rowe was in his company.  After the duke’s death, all
    avenues were stopped to his preferment; and during the rest of that
    reign he passed his time with the Muses and his books, and sometimes
    the conversation of his friends.  When he had just got to be easy in
    his fortune, and was in a fair way to make it better, death swept him
    away, and in him deprived the world of one of the best men, as well
    as one of the best geniuses, of the age.  He died like a Christian
    and a philosopher, in charity with all mankind, and with an absolute
    resignation to the will of God.  He kept up his good-humour to the
    last; and took leave of his wife and friends, immediately before his
    last agony, with the same tranquillity of mind, and the same
    indifference for life, as though he had been upon taking but a short
    journey.  He was twice married—first to a daughter of Mr. Parsons,
    one of the auditors of the revenue; and afterwards to a daughter of
    Mr. Devenish, of a good family in Dorsetshire.  By the first he had a
    son; and by the second a daughter, married afterwards to Mr. Fane.
    He died 6th December, 1718, in the forty-fifth year of his age, and
    was buried on the 19th of the same month in Westminster Abbey, in the
    aisle where many of our English poets are interred, over against
    Chaucer, his body being attended by a select number of his friends,
    and the dean and choir officiating at the funeral.”

To this character, which is apparently given with the fondness of a
friend, may be added the testimony of Pope, who says, in a letter to
Blount, “Mr. Rowe accompanied me, and passed a week in the Forest.  I
need not tell you how much a man of his turn entertained me; but I must
acquaint you, there is a vivacity and gaiety of disposition, almost
peculiar to him, which make it impossible to part from him without that
uneasiness which generally succeeds all our pleasure.”

Pope has left behind him another mention of his companion less
advantageous, which is thus reported by Dr. Warburton:—

    “Rowe, in Mr. Pope’s opinion, maintained a decent character, but had
    no heart.  Mr. Addison was justly offended with some behaviour which
    arose from that want, and estranged himself from him, which Rowe felt
    very severely.  Mr. Pope, their common friend, knowing this, took an
    opportunity, at some juncture of Mr. Addison’s advancement, to tell
    him how poor Rowe was grieved at his displeasure, and what
    satisfaction he expressed at Mr. Addison’s good fortune, which he
    expressed so naturally that he (Mr. Pope) could not but think him
    sincere.  Mr. Addison replied, ‘I do not suspect that he feigned; but
    the levity of his heart is such, that he is struck with any new
    adventure, and it would affect him just in the same manner if he
    heard I was going to be hanged.’  Mr. Pope said he could not deny but
    Mr. Addison understood Rowe well.”

This censure time has not left us the power of confirming or refuting;
but observation daily shows that much stress is not to be laid on
hyperbolical accusations and pointed sentences, which even he that utters
them desires to be applauded rather than credited.  Addison can hardly be
supposed to have meant all that he said.  Few characters can bear the
microscopic scrutiny of wit quickened by anger; and, perhaps, the best
advice to authors would be, that they should keep out of the way of one
another.

Rowe is chiefly to be considered as a tragic writer and a translator.  In
his attempt at comedy he failed so ignominiously that his _Biter_ is not
inserted in his works: and his occasional poems and short compositions
are rarely worthy either praise or censure, for they seem the casual
sports of a mind seeking rather to amuse its leisure than to exercise its
powers.  In the construction of his dramas there is not much art; he is
not a nice observer of the unities.  He extends time and varies places as
his convenience requires.  To vary the place is not, in my opinion, any
violation of nature, if the change be made between the acts, for it is no
less easy for the spectator to suppose himself at Athens in the second
act, than at Thebes in the first; but to change the scene, as is done by
Rowe, in the middle of an act, is to add more acts to the play, since an
act is so much of the business as is transacted without interruption.
Rowe, by this licence, easily extricates himself from difficulties; as in
Jane Grey, when we have been terrified with all the dreadful pomp of
public execution; and are wondering how the heroine or the poet will
proceed, no sooner has Jane pronounced some prophetic rhymes than—pass
and be gone—the scene closes, and Pembroke and Gardiner are turned out
upon the stage.

I know not that there can be found in his plays any deep search into
nature, any accurate discriminations of kindred qualities, or nice
display of passion in its progress; all is general and undefined.  Nor
does he much interest or affect the auditor, except in Jane Shore, who is
always seen and heard with pity.  Alicia is a character of empty noise,
with no resemblance to real sorrow or to natural madness.

Whence, then, has Rowe his reputation?  From the reasonableness and
propriety of some of his scenes, from the elegance of his diction, and
the suavity of his verse.  He seldom moves either pity or terror, but he
often elevates the sentiments; he seldom pierces the breast, but he
always delights the ear, and often improves the understanding.  His
translation of the “Golden Verses,” and of the first book of Quillet’s
poem, have nothing in them remarkable.  The “Golden Verses” are tedious.

The version of Lucan is one of the greatest productions of English
poetry, for there is perhaps none that so completely exhibits the genius
and spirit of the original.  Lucan is distinguished by a kind of
dictatorial or philosophic dignity, rather, as Quintilian observes,
declamatory than poetical; full of ambitious morality and pointed
sentences, comprised in vigorous and animated lines.  This character Rowe
has very diligently and successfully preserved.  His versification, which
is such as his contemporaries practised, without any attempt at
innovation or improvement, seldom wants either melody or force.  His
author’s sense is sometimes a little diluted by additional infusions, and
sometimes weakened by too much expansion.  But such faults are to be
expected in all translations, from the constraint of measures and
dissimilitude of languages.  The “Pharsalia” of Rowe deserves more notice
than it obtains, and as it is more read will be more esteemed.



GAY.


JOHN GAY, descended from an old family that had been long in possession
of the manor of Goldworthy, in Devonshire, was born in 1688, at or near
Barnstaple, where he was educated by Mr. Luck, who taught the school of
that town with good reputation, and, a little before he retired from it,
published a volume of Latin and English verses.  Under such a master he
was likely to form a taste for poetry.  Being born without prospect of
hereditary riches, he was sent to London in his youth, and placed
apprentice with a silk mercer.  How long he continued behind the counter,
or with what degree of softness and dexterity he received and
accommodated the ladies, as he probably took no delight in telling it, is
not known.  The report is that he was soon weary of either the restraint
or servility of his occupation, and easily persuaded his master to
discharge him.

The Duchess of Monmouth, remarkable for inflexible perseverance in her
demand to be treated as a princess, in 1712 took Gay into her service as
secretary: by quitting a shop for such service he might gain leisure, but
he certainly advanced little in the boast of independence.  Of his
leisure he made so good use that he published next year a poem on “Rural
Sports,” and inscribed it to Mr. Pope, who was then rising fast into
reputation.  Pope was pleased with the honour, and when he became
acquainted with Gay, found such attractions in his manners and
conversation that he seems to have received him into his inmost
confidence; and a friendship was formed between them which lasted to
their separation by death, without any known abatement on either part.
Gay was the general favourite of the whole association of wits; but they
regarded him as a playfellow rather than a partner, and treated him with
more fondness than respect.

Next year he published “The Shepherd’s Week,” six English pastorals, in
which the images are drawn from real life, such as it appears among the
rustics in parts of England remote from London.  Steele, in some papers
of the _Guardian_, had praised Ambrose Philips as the pastoral writer
that yielded only to Theocritus, Virgil, and Spenser.  Pope, who had also
published pastorals, not pleased to be overlooked, drew up a comparison
of his own compositions with those of Philips, in which he covertly gave
himself the preference, while he seemed to disown it.  Not content with
this, he is supposed to have incited Gay to write “The Shepherd’s Week,”
to show that, if it be necessary to copy nature with minuteness, rural
life must be exhibited such as grossness and ignorance have made it.  So
far the plan was reasonable; but the pastorals are introduced by a
_Proeme_, written with such imitation as they could attain of obsolete
language, and, by consequence, in a style that was never spoken nor
written in any language or in any place.  But the effect of reality and
truth became conspicuous, even when the intention was to show them
grovelling and degraded.  These pastorals became popular, and were read
with delight as just representations of rural manners and occupations by
those who had no interest in the rivalry of the poets, nor knowledge of
the critical dispute.

In 1713 he brought a comedy called _The Wife of Bath_ upon the stage, but
it received no applause; he printed it, however, and seventeen years
after, having altered it and, as he thought, adapted it more to the
public taste, he offered it again to the town; but, though he was flushed
with the success of the _Beggar’s Opera_, had the mortification to see it
again rejected.

In the last year of Queen Anne’s life Gay was made secretary to the Earl
of Clarendon, Ambassador to the Court of Hanover.  This was a station
that naturally gave him hopes of kindness from every party; but the
Queen’s death put an end to her favours, and he had dedicated his
“Shepherd’s Week” to Bolingbroke, which Swift considered as the crime
that obstructed all kindness from the House of Hanover.  He did not,
however, omit to improve the right which his office had given him to the
notice of the Royal Family.  On the arrival of the Princess of Wales he
wrote a poem, and obtained so much favour that both the Prince and the
Princess went to see his _What D’ye Call It_, a kind of mock tragedy, in
which the images were comic and the action grave; so that, as Pope
relates, Mr. Cromwell, who could not hear what was said, was at a loss
how to reconcile the laughter of the audience with the solemnity of the
scene.

Of this performance the value certainly is but little; but it was one of
the lucky trifles that give pleasure by novelty, and was so much favoured
by the audience that envy appeared against it in the form of criticism;
and Griffin, a player, in conjunction with Mr. Theobald, a man afterwards
more remarkable, produced a pamphlet called “The Key to the What D’ye
Call It,” “which,” says Gay, “calls me a blockhead, and Mr. Pope a
knave.”

But fortune has always been inconstant.  Not long afterwards (1717) he
endeavoured to entertain the town with _Three Hours after Marriage_, a
comedy written, as there is sufficient reason for believing, by the joint
assistance of Pope and Arbuthnot.  One purpose of it was to bring into
contempt Dr. Woodward, the fossilist, a man not really or justly
contemptible.  It had the fate which such outrages deserve.  The scene in
which Woodward was directly and apparently ridiculed, by the introduction
of a mummy and a crocodile, disgusted the audience, and the performance
was driven off the stage with general condemnation.

Gay is represented as a man easily incited to hope, and deeply depressed
when his hopes were disappointed.  This is not the character of a hero,
but it may naturally imply something more generally welcome, a soft and
civil companion.  Whoever is apt to hope good from others is diligent to
please them; but he that believes his powers strong enough to force their
own way, commonly tries only to please himself.  He had been simple
enough to imagine that those who laughed at the _What D’ye Call It_ would
raise the fortune of its author, and, finding nothing done, sunk into
dejection.  His friends endeavoured to divert him.  The Earl of
Burlington sent him (1716) into Devonshire, the year after Mr. Pulteney
took him to Aix, and in the following year Lord Harcourt invited him to
his seat, where, during his visit, two rural lovers were killed with
lightning, as is particularly told in Pope’s “Letters.”

Being now generally known, he published (1720) his poems by subscription,
with such success that he raised a thousand pounds, and called his
friends to a consultation what use might be best made of it.  Lewis, the
steward of Lord Oxford, advised him to intrust it to the Funds, and live
upon the interest; Arbuthnot bade him to intrust it to Providence, and
live upon the principal; Pope directed him, and was seconded by Swift, to
purchase an annuity.

Gay in that disastrous year had a present from young Craggs of some South
Sea Stock, and once supposed himself to be master of twenty thousand
pounds.  His friends persuaded him to sell his share; but he dreamed of
dignity and splendour, and could not bear to obstruct his own fortune.
He was then importuned to sell as much as would purchase a hundred a year
for life, “which,” says Penton, “will make you sure of a clean shirt and
a shoulder of mutton every day.”  This counsel was rejected; the profit
and principal were lost, and Gay sunk under the calamity so low that his
life became in danger.  By the care of his friends, among whom Pope
appears to have shown particular tenderness, his health was restored;
and, returning to his studies, he wrote a tragedy called _The Captives_,
which he was invited to read before the Princess of Wales.  When the hour
came, he saw the Princess and her ladies all in expectation, and,
advancing with reverence too great for any other attention, stumbled at a
stool, and, falling forwards, threw down a weighty Japan screen.  The
Princess started, the ladies screamed, and poor Gay, after all the
disturbance, was still to read his play.

The fate of _The Captives_, which was acted at Drury Lane in 1723–4, I
know not; but he now thought himself in favour, and undertook (1726) to
write a volume of “Fables” for the improvement of the young Duke of
Cumberland.  For this he is said to have been promised a reward, which he
had doubtless magnified with all the wild expectations of indigence and
vanity.

Next year the Prince and Princess became King and Queen, and Gay was to
be great and happy; but on the settlement of the household, he found
himself appointed gentleman usher to the Princess Louisa.  By this offer
he thought himself insulted, and sent a message to the Queen that he was
too old for the place.  There seem to have been many machinations
employed afterwards in his favour, and diligent court was paid to Mrs.
Howard, afterwards Countess of Suffolk, who was much beloved by the King
and Queen, to engage her interest for his promotion; but solicitation,
verses, and flatteries were thrown away; the lady heard them, and did
nothing.  All the pain which he suffered from neglect, or, as he perhaps
termed it, the ingratitude of the Court, may be supposed to have been
driven away by the unexampled success of the _Beggar’s Opera_.  This
play, written in ridicule of the musical Italian drama, was first offered
to Cibber and his brethren at Drury Lane and rejected: it being then
carried to Rich, had the effect, as was ludicrously said, of making Gay
_rich_ and Rich _gay_.  Of this lucky piece, as the reader cannot but
wish to know the original and progress, I have inserted the relation
which Spence has given in Pope’s words:—

    “Dr. Swift had been observing once to Mr. Gay what an odd pretty sort
    of a thing a Newgate Pastoral might make.  Gay was inclined to try at
    such a thing for some time; but afterwards thought it would be better
    to write a comedy on the same plan.  This was what gave rise to the
    _Beggar’s Opera_.  He began on it, and when first he mentioned it to
    Swift, the doctor did not much like the project.  As he carried it
    on, he showed what he wrote to both of us, and we now and then gave a
    correction, or a word or two of advice; but it was wholly of his own
    writing.  When it was done, neither of us thought it would succeed.
    We showed it to Congreve, who, after reading it over, said it would
    either take greatly or be damned confoundedly.  We were all, at the
    first night of it, in great uncertainty of the event, till we were
    very much encouraged by overhearing the Duke of Argyll, who sat in
    the next box to us, say, ‘It will do—it must do!  I see it in the
    eyes of them.’  This was a good while before the first act was over,
    and so gave us ease soon; for that Duke (besides his own good taste)
    has a particular knack, as any one now living, in discovering the
    taste of the public.  He was quite right in this, as usual; the
    good-nature of the audience appeared stronger and stronger every act,
    and ended in a clamour of applause.”

Its reception is thus recorded in the notes to the “Dunciad”:—

    “This piece was received with greater applause than was ever known.
    Besides being acted in London sixty-three days without interruption,
    and renewed the next season with equal applause, it spread into all
    the great towns of England; was played in many places to the
    thirtieth and fortieth time; at Bath and Bristol fifty, etc.  It made
    its progress into Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, where it was
    performed twenty-four days successively.  The ladies carried about
    with them the favourite songs of it in fans, and houses were
    furnished with it in screens.  The fame of it was not confined to the
    author only.  The person who acted Polly, till then obscure, became
    all at once the favourite of the town; her pictures were engraved and
    sold in great numbers; her life written, books of letters and verses
    to her published, and pamphlets made even of her sayings and jests.
    Furthermore, it drove out of England (for that season) the Italian
    Opera, which had carried all before it for ten years.”

Of this performance, when it was printed, the reception was different,
according to the different opinions of its readers.  Swift commended it
for the excellence of its morality, as a piece that “placed all kinds of
vice in the strongest and most odious light;” but others, and among them
Dr. Herring, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, censured it as giving
encouragement, not only to vice, but to crimes, by making a highwayman
the hero and dismissing him at last unpunished.  It has been even said
that after the exhibition of the _Beggar’s Opera_ the gangs of robbers
were evidently multiplied.

Both these decisions are surely exaggerated.  The play, like many others,
was plainly written only to divert, without any moral purpose, and is
therefore not likely to do good; nor can it be conceived, without more
speculation than life requires or admits, to be productive of much evil.
Highwaymen and housebreakers seldom frequent the playhouse, or mingle in
any elegant diversion; nor is it possible for any one to imagine that he
may rob with safety, because he sees Macheath reprieved upon the stage.
This objection, however, or some other rather political than moral,
obtained such prevalence that when Gay produced a second part under the
name of Polly, it was prohibited by the Lord Chamberlain; and he was
forced to recompense his repulse by a subscription, which is said to have
been so liberally bestowed that what he called oppression ended in
profit.  The publication was so much favoured that though the first part
gained him four hundred pounds, near thrice as much was the profit of the
second.  He received yet another recompense for this supposed hardship,
in the affectionate attention of the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry,
into whose house he was taken, and with whom he passed the remaining part
of his life.  The Duke, considering his want of economy, undertook the
management of his money, and gave it to him as he wanted it.  But it is
supposed that the discountenance of the Court sunk deep into his heart,
and gave him more discontent than the applauses or tenderness of his
friends could overpower.  He soon fell into his old distemper, an
habitual colic, and languished, though with many intervals of ease and
cheerfulness, till a violent fit at last seized him and carried him to
the grave, as Arbuthnot reported, with more precipitance than he had ever
known.  He died on the 4th of December, 1732, and was buried in
Westminster Abbey.  The letter which brought an account of his death to
Swift, was laid by for some days unopened, because when he received it,
he was impressed with the preconception of some misfortune.

After his death was published a second volume of “Fables,” more political
than the former.  His opera of Achilles was acted, and the profits were
given to two widow sisters, who inherited what he left, as his lawful
heirs; for he died without a will, though he had gathered three thousand
pounds.  There have appeared likewise under his name a comedy called the
_Distressed Wife_, and the _Rehearsal at Gotham_, a piece of humour.

The character given him by Pope is this, that “he was a natural man,
without design, who spoke what he thought, and just as he thought it,”
and that “he was of a timid temper, and fearful of giving offence to the
great;” which caution, however, says Pope, was of no avail.

As a poet he cannot be rated very high.  He was, I once heard a female
critic remark, “of a lower order.”  He had not in any great degree the
_mens divinior_, the dignity of genius.  Much, however, must be allowed
to the author of a new species of composition, though it be not of the
highest kind.  We owe to Gay the ballad opera, a mode of comedy which at
first was supposed to delight only by its novelty, but has now, by the
experience of half a century, been found so well accommodated to the
disposition of a popular audience that it is likely to keep long
possession of the stage.  Whether this new drama was the product of
judgment or of luck, the praise of it must be given to the inventor; and
there are many writers read with more reverence to whom such merit or
originality cannot be attributed.

His first performance, the _Rural Sports_, is such as was easily planned
and executed; it is never contemptible, nor ever excellent.  _The Fan_ is
one of those mythological fictions which antiquity delivers ready to the
hand, but which, like other things that lie open to every one’s use, are
of little value.  The attention naturally retires from a new tale of
Venus, Diana, and Minerva.

His “Fables” seem to have been a favourite work; for, having published
one volume, he left another behind him.  Of this kind of Fables the
author does not appear to have formed any distinct or settled notion.
Phædrus evidently confounds them with Tales, and Gay both with Tales and
Allegorical Prosopopoeias.  A Fable or Apologue, such as is now under
consideration, seems to be, in its genuine state, a narrative in which
beings irrational, and sometimes inanimate, _arbores loquuntur_, _non
tantum feræ_, are, for the purpose of moral instruction, feigned to act
and speak with human interests and passions.  To this description the
compositions of Gay do not always conform.  For a fable he gives now and
then a tale, or an abstracted allegory; and from some, by whatever name
they may be called, it will be difficult to extract any moral principle.
They are, however, told with liveliness, the versification is smooth, and
the diction, though now and then a little constrained by the measure or
the rhyme, is generally happy.

To “Trivia” may be allowed all that it claims; it is sprightly, various,
and pleasant.  The subject is of that kind which Gay was by nature
qualified to adorn, yet some of his decorations may be justly wished
away.  An honest blacksmith might have done for Patty what is performed
by Vulcan.  The appearance of Cloacina is nauseous and superfluous; a
shoe-boy could have been produced by the casual cohabitation of mere
mortals.  Horace’s rule is broken in both cases; there is no _dignus
vindice nodus_, no difficulty that required any supernatural
interposition.  A patten may be made by the hammer of a mortal, and a
bastard may be dropped by a human strumpet.  On great occasions, and on
small, the mind is repelled by useless and apparent falsehood.

Of his little poems the public judgment seems to be right; they are
neither much esteemed nor totally despised.  The story of “The
Apparition” is borrowed from one of the tales of Poggio.  Those that
please least are the pieces to which Gulliver gave occasion, for who can
much delight in the echo of an unnatural fiction?

“Dione” is a counterpart to “Amynta” and “Pastor Fido” and other trifles
of the same kind, easily imitated, and unworthy of imitation.  What the
Italians call comedies from a happy conclusion, Gay calls a tragedy from
a mournful event, but the style of the Italians and of Gay is equally
tragical.  There is something in the poetical Arcadia so remote from
known reality and speculative possibility that we can never support its
representation through a long work.  A pastoral of an hundred lines may
be endured, but who will hear of sheep and goats, and myrtle bowers and
purling rivulets, through five acts?  Such scenes please barbarians in
the dawn of literature, and children in the dawn of life, but will be for
the most part thrown away as men grow wise and nations grow learned.



TICKELL.


THOMAS TICKELL, the son of the Rev. Richard Tickell, was born in 1686, at
Bridekirk, in Cumberland, and in 1701 became a member of Queen’s College
in Oxford; in 1708 he was made Master of Arts, and two years afterwards
was chosen Fellow, for which, as he did not comply with the statutes by
taking orders, he obtained a dispensation from the Crown.  He held his
fellowship till 1726, and then vacated it by marrying, in that year, at
Dublin.

Tickell was not one of those scholars who wear away their lives in
closets; he entered early into the world and was long busy in public
affairs, in which he was initiated under the patronage of Addison, whose
notice he is said to have gained by his verses in praise of Rosamond.  To
those verses it would not have been just to deny regard, for they contain
some of the most elegant encomiastic strains; and among the innumerable
poems of the same kind it will be hard to find one with which they need
to fear a comparison.  It may deserve observation that when Pope wrote
long afterwards in praise of Addison, he has copied—at least, has
resembled—Tickell.

       “Let joy salute fair Rosamonda’s shade,
    And wreaths of myrtle crown the lovely maid.
    While now perhaps with Dido’s ghost she roves,
    And hears and tells the story of their loves,
    Alike they mourn, alike they bless their fate,
    Since Love, which made them wretched, made them great.
    Nor longer that relentless doom bemoan,
    Which gained a Virgil and an Addison.”—TICKELL.

       “Then future ages with delight shall see
    How Plato’s, Bacon’s, Newton’s, looks agree;
    Or in fair series laurelled bards be shown,
    A Virgil there, and here an Addison.”—POPE.

He produced another piece of the same kind at the appearance of _Cato_,
with equal skill, but not equal happiness.

When the Ministers of Queen Anne were negotiating with France, Tickell
published “The Prospect of Peace,” a poem of which the tendency was to
reclaim the nation from the pride of conquest to the pleasures of
tranquillity.  How far Tickell, whom Swift afterwards mentioned as
Whiggissimus, had then connected himself with any party, I know not; this
poem certainly did not flatter the practices, or promote the opinions, of
the men by whom he was afterwards befriended.

Mr. Addison, however he hated the men then in power, suffered his
friendship to prevail over his public spirit, and gave in the _Spectator_
such praises of Tickell’s poem that when, after having long wished to
peruse it, I laid hold of it at last, I thought it unequal to the honours
which it had received, and found it a piece to be approved rather than
admired.  But the hope excited by a work of genius, being general and
indefinite, is rarely gratified.  It was read at that with so much favour
that six editions were sold.

At the arrival of King George, he sang “The Royal Progress,” which, being
inserted in the _Spectator_, is well known, and of which it is just to
say that it is neither high nor low.

The poetical incident of most importance in Tickell’s life was his
publication of the first book of the “Iliad,” as translated by himself,
an apparent opposition to Pope’s “Homer,” of which the first part made
its entrance into the world at the same time.  Addison declared that the
rival versions were both good, but that Tickell’s was the best that ever
was made; and with Addison, the wits, his adherents and followers, were
certain to concur.  Pope does not appear to have been much dismayed,
“for,” says he, “I have the town—that is, the mob—on my side.”  But he
remarks “that it is common for the smaller party to make up in diligence
what they want in numbers.  He appeals to the people as his proper
judges, and if they are not inclined to condemn him, he is in little care
about the highflyers at Button’s.”

Pope did not long think Addison an impartial judge, for he considered him
as the writer of Tickell’s version.  The reasons for his suspicion I will
literally transcribe from Mr. Spence’s Collection:—

    “There had been a coldness,” said Mr. Pope, “between Mr. Addison and
    me for some time, and we had not been in company together, for a good
    while, anywhere but at Button’s Coffee House, where I used to see him
    almost every day.  On his meeting me there, one day in particular, he
    took me aside and said he should be glad to dine with me at such a
    tavern, if I stayed till those people were gone (Budgell and
    Philips).  He went accordingly, and after dinner Mr. Addison said
    ‘that he had wanted for some time to talk with me: that his friend
    Tickell had formerly, whilst at Oxford, translated the first book of
    the Iliad; that he designed to print it, and had desired him to look
    it over; that he must therefore beg that I would not desire him to
    look over my first book, because, if he did, it would have the air of
    double-dealing.’  I assured him that I did not at all take it ill of
    Mr. Tickell that he was going to publish his translation; that he
    certainly had as much right to translate any author as myself; and
    that publishing both was entering on a fair stage.  I then added that
    I would not desire him to look over my first book of the Iliad,
    because he had looked over Mr. Tickell’s, but could wish to have the
    benefit of his observations on my second, which I had then finished,
    and which Mr. Tickell had not touched upon.  Accordingly I sent him
    the second book the next morning, and Mr. Addison a few days after
    returned it, with very high commendations.  Soon after it was
    generally known that Mr. Tickell was publishing the first book of the
    Iliad, I met Dr. Young in the street, and upon our falling into that
    subject, the doctor expressed a great deal of surprise at Tickell’s
    having had such a translation so long by him.  He said that it was
    inconceivable to him, and that there must be some mistake in the
    matter; that each used to communicate to the other whatever verses
    they wrote, even to the least things; that Tickell could not have
    been busied in so long a work there without his knowing something of
    the matter; and that he had never heard a single word of it till on
    this occasion.  This surprise of Dr. Young, together with what Steele
    has said against Tickell in relation to this affair, make it highly
    probable that there was some underhand dealing in that business; and
    indeed Tickell himself, who is a very fair worthy man, has since, in
    a manner, as good as owned it to me.  When it was introduced into a
    conversation between Mr. Tickell and Mr. Pope by a third person,
    Tickell did not deny it, which, considering his honour and zeal for
    his departed friend, was the same as owning it.”

Upon these suspicions, with which Dr. Warburton hints that other
circumstances concurred, Pope always in his “Art of Sinking” quotes this
book as the work of Addison.

To compare the two translations would be tedious; the palm is now given
universally to Pope, but I think the first lines of Tickell’s were rather
to be preferred; and Pope seems to have since borrowed something from
them in the correction of his own.

When the Hanover succession was disputed, Tickell gave what assistance
his pen would supply.  His “Letter to Avignon” stands high among party
poems; it expresses contempt without coarseness, and superiority without
insolence.  It had the success which it deserved, being five times
printed.

He was now intimately united to Mr. Addison, who, when he went into
Ireland as secretary to the Lord Sunderland, took him thither, and
employed him in public business; and when (1717) afterwards he rose to be
Secretary of State, made him Under-Secretary.  Their friendship seems to
have continued without abatement; for, when Addison died, he left him the
charge of publishing his works, with a solemn recommendation to the
patronage of Craggs.  To these works he prefixed an elegy on the author,
which could owe none of its beauties to the assistance which might be
suspected to have strengthened or embellished his earlier compositions;
but neither he nor Addison ever produced nobler lines than are contained
in the third and fourth paragraphs; nor is a more elegant funeral poem to
be found in the whole compass of English literature.  He was afterwards
(about 1725) made secretary to the Lords Justices of Ireland, a place of
great honour; in which he continued till 1740, when he died on the 23rd
of April at Bath.

Of the poems yet unmentioned, the longest is “Kensington Gardens,” of
which the versification is smooth and elegant, but the fiction
unskilfully compounded of Grecian deities and Gothic fairies.  Neither
species of those exploded beings could have done much; and when they are
brought together, they only make each other contemptible.  To Tickell,
however, cannot be refused a high place among the minor poets; nor should
it be forgotten that he was one of the contributors to the _Spectator_.
With respect to his personal character, he is said to have been a man of
gay conversation, at least a temperate lover of wine and company, and in
his domestic relations without censure.



SOMERVILE.


OF Mr. Somervile’s life I am not able to say anything that can satisfy
curiosity.  He was a gentleman whose estate lay in Warwickshire; his
house, where he was born in 1693, is called Edston, a seat inherited from
a long line of ancestors; for he was said to be of the first family in
his county.  He tells of himself that he was born near the Avon’s banks.
He was bred at Winchester school, and was elected fellow of New College.
It does not appear that in the places of his education he exhibited any
uncommon proofs of genius or literature.  His powers were first displayed
in the country, where he was distinguished as a poet, a gentleman, and a
skilful and useful justice of the peace.

Of the close of his life, those whom his poems have delighted will read
with pain the following account, copied from the “Letters” of his friend
Shenstone, by whom he was too much resembled:—

“—Our old friend Somervile is dead!  I did not imagine I could have been
so sorry as I find myself on this occasion.  _Sublatum quærimus_.  I can
now excuse all his foibles; impute them to age, and to distress of
circumstances: the last of these considerations wrings my very soul to
think on.  For a man of high spirit conscious of having (at least in one
production) generally pleased the world, to be plagued and threatened by
wretches that are low in every sense; to be forced to drink himself into
pains of the body, in order to get rid of the pains of the mind is a
misery.”—He died July 19, 1742, and was buried at Wotton, near Henley on
Arden.

His distresses need not be much pitied: his estate is said to be fifteen
hundred a year, which by his death has devolved to Lord Somervile of
Scotland.  His mother, indeed, who lived till ninety, had a jointure of
six hundred.

It is with regret that I find myself not better enabled to exhibit
memorials of a writer who at least must be allowed to have set a good
example to men of his own class, by devoting part of his time to elegant
knowledge; and who has shown, by the subjects which his poetry has
adorned, that it is practicable to be at once a skilful sportsman and a
man of letters.

Somervile has tried many modes of poetry; and though perhaps he has not
in any reached such excellence as to raise much envy, it may commonly be
said at least, that “he writes very well for a gentleman.”  His serious
pieces are sometimes elevated; and his trifles are sometimes elegant.  In
his verses to Addison, the couplet which mentions Clio is written with
the most exquisite delicacy of praise; it exhibits one of those happy
strokes that are seldom attained.  In his Odes to Marlborough there are
beautiful lines; but in the second Ode he shows that he knew little of
his hero, when he talks of his private virtues.  His subjects are
commonly such as require no great depth of thought or energy of
expression.  His Fables are generally stale, and therefore excite no
curiosity.  Of his favourite, “The Two Springs,” the fiction is
unnatural, and the moral inconsequential.  In his Tales there is too much
coarseness, with too little care of language, and not sufficient rapidity
of narration.  His great work is his Chase, which he undertook in his
maturer age, when his ear was improved to the approbation of blank verse,
of which, however, his two first lines give a bad specimen.  To this poem
praise cannot be totally denied.  He is allowed by sportsmen to write
with great intelligence of his subject, which is the first requisite to
excellence; and though it is impossible to interest the common readers of
verse in the dangers or pleasures of the chase, he has done all that
transition and variety could easily effect; and has with great propriety
enlarged his plan by the modes of hunting used in other countries.

With still less judgment did he choose blank verse as the vehicle of
“Rural Sports.”  If blank verse be not tumid and gorgeous, it is crippled
prose; and familiar images in laboured language have nothing to recommend
them but absurd novelty, which, wanting the attractions of nature, cannot
please long.  One excellence of the “Splendid Shilling” is, that it is
short.  Disguise can gratify no longer than it deceives.



THOMSON.


JAMES THOMSON, the son of a minister well esteemed for his piety and
diligence, was born September 7, 1700, at Ednam, in the shire of
Roxburgh, of which his father was pastor.  His mother, whose name was
Hume, inherited as co-heiress a portion of a small estate.  The revenue
of a parish in Scotland is seldom large; and it was probably in
commiseration of the difficulty with which Mr. Thomson supported his
family, having nine children, that Mr. Riccarton, a neighbouring
minister, discovering in James uncommon promises of future excellence,
undertook to superintend his education, and provide him books.  He was
taught the common rudiments of learning at the school of Jedburgh, a
place which he delights to recollect in his poem of “Autumn;” but was not
considered by his master as superior to common boys, though in those
early days he amused his patron and his friends with poetical
compositions; with which, however, he so little pleased himself that on
every New Year’s Day he threw into the fire all the productions of the
foregoing year.

From the school he was removed to Edinburgh, where he had not resided two
years when his father died, and left all his children to the care of
their mother, who raised upon her little estate what money a mortgage
could afford; and, removing with her family to Edinburgh, lived to see
her son rising into eminence.

The design of Thomson’s friends was to breed him a minister.  He lived at
Edinburgh, at a school, without distinction or expectation, till at the
usual time he performed a probationary exercise by explaining a psalm.
His diction was so poetically splendid, that Mr. Hamilton, the professor
of divinity, reproved him for speaking language unintelligible to a
popular audience; and he censured one of his expressions as indecent, if
not profane.  This rebuke is reported to have repressed his thoughts of
an ecclesiastical character, and he probably cultivated with new
diligence his blossoms of poetry, which, however, were in some danger of
a blast; for, submitting his productions to some who thought themselves
qualified to criticise, he heard of nothing but faults; but, finding
other judges more favourable, he did not suffer himself to sink into
despondence.  He easily discovered that the only stage on which a poet
could appear with any hope of advantage was London; a place too wide for
the operation of petty competition and private malignity, where merit
might soon become conspicuous, and would find friends as soon as it
became reputable to befriend it.  A lady who was acquainted with his
mother advised him to the journey, and promised some countenance or
assistance, which at last he never received; however, he justified his
adventure by her encouragement, and came to seek in London patronage and
fame.  At his arrival he found his way to Mr. Mallet, then tutor to the
sons of the Duke of Montrose.  He had recommendations to several persons
of consequence, which he had tied up carefully in his handkerchief; but
as he passed along the street, with the gaping curiosity of a newcomer,
his attention was upon everything rather than his pocket, and his
magazine of credentials was stolen from him.

His first want was a pair of shoes.  For the supply of all his
necessities, his whole fund was his “Winter,” which for a time could find
no purchaser; till at last Mr. Millan was persuaded to buy it at a low
price; and this low price he had for some time reason to regret; but, by
accident, Mr. Whately, a man not wholly unknown among authors, happening
to turn his eye upon it, was so delighted that he ran from place to place
celebrating its excellence.  Thomson obtained likewise the notice of
Aaron Hill, whom, being friendless and indigent, and glad of kindness, he
courted with every expression of servile adulation.

“Winter” was dedicated to Sir Spencer Compton, but attracted no regard
from him to the author; till Aaron Hill awakened his attention by some
verses addressed to Thomson, and published in one of the newspapers,
which censured the great for their neglect of ingenious men.  Thomson
then received a present of twenty guineas, of which he gives this account
to Mr. Hill:—

    “I hinted to you in my last that on Saturday morning I was with Sir
    Spencer Compton.  A certain gentleman, without my desire, spoke to
    him concerning me: his answer was that I had never come near him.
    Then the gentleman put the question, if he desired that I should wait
    on him?  He returned, he did.  On this the gentleman gave me an
    introductory letter to him.  He received me in what they commonly
    call a civil manner; asked me some common-place questions, and made
    me a present of twenty guineas.  I am very ready to own that the
    present was larger than my performance deserved; and shall ascribe it
    to his generosity, or any other cause, rather than the merit of the
    address.”

The poem, which, being of a new kind, few would venture at first to like,
by degrees gained upon the public; and one edition was very speedily
succeeded by another.

Thomson’s credit was now high, and every day brought him new friends;
among others Dr. Rundle, a man afterwards unfortunately famous, sought
his acquaintance, and found his qualities such that he recommended him to
the Lord Chancellor Talbot.

“Winter” was accompanied, in many editions, not only with a preface and
dedication, but with poetical praises by Mr. Hill, Mr. Mallet (then
Malloch), and Mira, the fictitious name of a lady once too well known.
Why the dedications are, to “Winter” and the other Seasons, contrarily to
custom, left out in the collected works, the reader may inquire.

The next year (1727) he distinguished himself by three publications: of
“Summer,” in pursuance of his plan; of “A Poem on the Death of Sir Isaac
Newton,” which he was enabled to perform as an exact philosopher by the
instruction of Mr. Gray; and of “Britannia,” a kind of poetical invective
against the Ministry, whom the nation then thought not forward enough in
resenting the depredations of the Spaniards.  By this piece he declared
himself an adherent to the Opposition, and had therefore no favour to
expect from the Court.

Thomson, having been some time entertained in the family of Lord Binning,
was desirous of testifying his gratitude by making him the patron of his
“Summer;” but the same kindness which had first disposed Lord Binning to
encourage him, determined him to refuse the dedication, which was by his
advice addressed to Mr. Dodington, a man who had more power to advance
the reputation and fortune of a poet.

“Spring” was published next year, with a dedication to the Countess of
Hertford, whose practice it was to invite every summer some poet into the
country, to hear her verses and assist her studies.  This honour was one
summer conferred on Thomson, who took more delight in carousing with Lord
Hertford and his friends than assisting her ladyship’s poetical
operations, and therefore never received another summons.

“Autumn,” the season to which the “Spring” and “Summer” are preparatory,
still remained unsung, and was delayed till he published (1730) his works
collected.

He produced in 1727 the tragedy of Sophonisba, which raised such
expectation that every rehearsal was dignified with a splendid audience,
collected to anticipate the delight that was preparing for the public.
It was observed, however, that nobody was much affected, and that the
company rose as from a moral lecture.  It had upon the stage no unusual
degree of success.  Slight accidents will operate upon the taste of
pleasure.  There is a feeble line in the play:—

                        “O Sophonisba, Sophonisba, O!”

This gave occasion to a waggish parody—

                    “O, Jemmy Thomson, Jemmy Thomson, O!”

which for a while was echoed through the town.

I have been told by Savage, that of the prologue to _Sophonisba_, the
first part was written by Pope, who could not be persuaded to finish it;
and that the concluding lines were added by Mallet.

Thomson was not long afterwards, by the influence of Dr. Rundle, sent to
travel with Mr. Charles Talbot, the eldest son of the Chancellor.  He was
yet young enough to receive new impressions, to have his opinions
rectified and his views enlarged; nor can he be supposed to have wanted
that curiosity which is inseparable from an active and comprehensive
mind.  He may therefore now be supposed to have revelled in all the joys
of intellectual luxury; he was every day feasted with instructive
novelties; he lived splendidly without expense: and might expect when he
returned home a certain establishment.

At this time a long course of opposition to Sir Robert Walpole had filled
the nation with clamours for liberty, of which no man felt the want, and
with care for liberty which was not in danger.  Thomson, in his travels
on the Continent, found or fancied so many evils arising from the tyranny
of other governments, that he resolved to write a very long poem, in five
parts, upon Liberty.  While he was busy on the first book, Mr. Talbot
died; and Thomson, who had been rewarded for his attendance by the place
of secretary of the briefs, pays in the initial lines a decent tribute to
his memory.  Upon this great poem two years were spent, and the author
congratulated himself upon it as his noblest work; but an author and his
reader are not always of a mind.  Liberty called in vain upon her
votaries to read her praises, and reward her encomiast: her praises were
condemned to harbour spiders, and to gather dust: none of Thomson’s
performances were so little regarded.  The judgment of the public was not
erroneous; the recurrence of the same images must tire in time; an
enumeration of examples to prove a position which nobody denied, as it
was from the beginning superfluous, must quickly grow disgusting.

The poem of “Liberty” does not now appear in its original state; but,
when the author’s works were collected after his death, was shortened by
Sir George Lyttelton, with a liberty which, as it has a manifest tendency
to lessen the confidence of society, and to confound the characters of
authors, by making one man write by the judgment of another, cannot be
justified by any supposed propriety of the alteration, or kindness of the
friend.  I wish to see it exhibited as its author left it.

Thomson now lived in ease and plenty, and seems for a while to have
suspended his poetry: but he was soon called back to labour by the death
of the Chancellor, for his place then became vacant; and though the Lord
Hardwicke delayed for some time to give it away, Thomson’s bashfulness or
pride, or some other motive perhaps not more laudable, withheld him from
soliciting; and the new Chancellor would not give him what he would not
ask.  He now relapsed to his former indigence; but the Prince of Wales
was at that time struggling for popularity, and by the influence of Mr.
Lyttelton professed himself the patron of wit; to him Thomson was
introduced, and being gaily interrogated about the state of his affairs
said “that they were in a more poetical posture than formerly,” and had a
pension allowed him of one hundred pounds a year.

Being now obliged to write, he produced (1738) the tragedy of
_Agamemnon_, which was much shortened in the representation.  It had the
fate which most commonly attends mythological stories, and was only
endured, but not favoured.  It struggled with such difficulty through the
first night that Thomson, coming late to his friends with whom he was to
sup, excused his delay by telling them how the sweat of his distress had
so disordered his wig that he could not come till he had been refitted by
a barber.  He so interested himself in his own drama that, if I remember
right, as he sat in the upper gallery, he accompanied the players by
audible recitation, till a friendly hint frighted him to silence.  Pope
countenanced Agamemnon by coming to it, the first night, and was welcomed
to the theatre by a general clap; he had much regard for Thomson, and
once expressed it in a poetical epistle sent to Italy, of which, however,
he abated the value by transplanting some of the lines into his Epistle
to Arbuthnot.

About this time (1737) the Act was passed for licensing plays, of which
the first operation was the prohibition of _Gustavus Vasa_, a tragedy of
Mr. Brooke, whom the public recompensed by a very liberal subscription;
the next was the refusal of _Edward and Eleonora_, offered by Thomson.
It is hard to discover why either play should have been obstructed.
Thomson likewise endeavoured to repair his loss by a subscription, of
which I cannot now tell the success.  When the public murmured at the
unkind treatment of Thomson, one of the Ministerial writers remarked that
“he had taken a _Liberty_ which was not agreeable to _Britannia_ in any
_Season_.”  He was soon after employed, in conjunction with Mr. Mallet,
to write the masque of _Alfred_, which was acted before the Prince at
Cliefden House.

His next work (1745) was, _Tancred and Sigismunda_, the most successful
of all his tragedies, for it still keeps its turn upon the stage.  It may
be doubted whether he was, either by the bent of nature or habits of
study, much qualified for tragedy.  It does not appear that he had much
sense of the pathetic; and his diffusive and descriptive style produced
declamation rather than dialogue.  His friend Mr. Lyttelton was now in
power, and conferred upon him the office of Surveyor-General of the
Leeward Islands; from which, when his deputy was paid, he received about
three hundred pounds a year.

The last piece that he lived to publish was the “Castle of Indolence,”
which was many years under his hand, but was at last finished with great
accuracy.  The first canto opens a scene of lazy luxury that fills the
imagination.  He was now at ease, but was not long to enjoy it, for, by
taking cold on the water between London and Kew, he caught a disorder,
which, with some careless exasperation, ended in a fever that put an end
to his life, August 27, 1748.  He was buried in the church of Richmond,
without an inscription; but a monument has been erected to his memory in
Westminster Abbey.

Thomson was of stature above the middle size, and “more fat than bard
beseems,” of a dull countenance and a gross, unanimated, uninviting
appearance; silent in mingled company, but cheerful among select friends,
and by his friends very tenderly and warmly beloved.  He left behind him
the tragedy of _Coriolanus_, which was, by the zeal of his patron, Sir
George Lyttelton, brought upon the stage for the benefit of his family,
and recommended by a prologue, which Quin, who had long lived with
Thomson in fond intimacy, spoke in such a manner as showed him “to be,”
on that occasion, “no actor.”  The commencement of this benevolence is
very honourable to Quin, who is reported to have delivered Thomson, then
known to him only for his genius, from an arrest by a very considerable
present; and its continuance is honourable to both, for friendship is not
always the sequel of obligation.  By this tragedy a considerable sum was
raised, of which part discharged his debts, and the rest was remitted to
his sisters, whom, however removed from them by place or condition, he
regarded with great tenderness, as will appear by the following letter,
which I communicate with much pleasure, as it gives me at once an
opportunity of recording the fraternal kindness of Thomson, and
reflecting on the friendly assistance of Mr. Boswell, from whom I
received it:—

                         “Hagley in Worcestershire, October the 4th, 1747.

    “MY DEAR SISTER,—I thought you had known me better than to interpret
    my silence into a decay of affection, especially as your behaviour
    has always been such as rather to increase than diminish it.  Don’t
    imagine, because I am a bad correspondent, that I can ever prove an
    unkind friend and brother.  I must do myself the justice to tell you
    that my affections are naturally very fixed and constant; and if I
    had ever reason of complaint against you (of which, by-the-bye, I
    have not the least shadow), I am conscious of so many defects in
    myself as dispose me to be not a little charitable and forgiving.

    “It gives me the truest heart-felt satisfaction to hear you have a
    good kind husband, and are in easy contented circumstances; but were
    they otherwise, that would only awaken and heighten my tenderness
    towards you.  As our good and tender-hearted parents did not live to
    receive any material testimonies of that highest human gratitude I
    owed them (than which nothing could have given me equal pleasure),
    the only return I can make them now is by kindness to those they left
    behind them.  Would to God poor Lizy had lived longer, to have been a
    farther witness of the truth of what I say and that I might have had
    the pleasure of seeing once more a sister who so truly deserved my
    esteem and love!  But she is happy, while we must toil a little
    longer here below: let us, however, do it cheerfully and gratefully,
    supported by the pleasing hope of meeting you again on a safer shore,
    where to recollect the storms and difficulties of life will not
    perhaps be inconsistent with that blissful state.  You did right to
    call your daughter by her name: for you must needs have had a
    particular tender friendship for one another, endeared as you were by
    nature, by having passed the affectionate years of your youth
    together: and by that great softener and engager of hearts, mutual
    hardship.  That it was in my power to ease it a little, I account one
    of the most exquisite pleasures of my life.  But enough of this
    melancholy, though not unpleasing, strain.

    “I esteem you for your sensible and disinterested advice to Mr. Bell,
    as you will see by my letter to him.  As I approve entirely of his
    marrying again, you may readily ask me why I don’t marry at all.  My
    circumstances have hitherto been so variable and uncertain in this
    fluctuating world, as induce to keep me from engaging in such a
    state: and now, though they are more settled, and of late (which you
    will be glad to hear) considerably improved, I begin to think myself
    too far advanced in life for such youthful undertakings, not to
    mention some other petty reasons that are apt to startle the delicacy
    of difficult old bachelors.  I am, however, not a little suspicious
    that, was I to pay a visit to Scotland (which I have some thought of
    doing soon), I might possibly be tempted to think of a thing not
    easily repaired if done amiss.  I have always been of opinion that
    none make better wives than the ladies of Scotland; and yet who more
    forsaken than they, while the gentlemen are continually running
    abroad all the world over?  Some of them, it is true, are wise enough
    to return for a wife.  You see, I am beginning to make interest
    already with the Scots ladies.  But no more of this infectious
    subject.  Pray let me hear from you now and then; and though I am not
    a regular correspondent, yet perhaps I may mend in that respect.
    Remember me kindly to your husband, and believe me to be

                                          “Your most affectionate Brother,
                                                          “JAMES THOMSON.”

    (Addressed) “To Mrs. Thomson in Lanark.”

The benevolence of Thomson was fervid, but not active; he would give on
all occasions what assistance his purse would supply, but the offices of
intervention or solicitation he could not conquer his sluggishness
sufficiently to perform.  The affairs of others, however, were not more
neglected than his own.  He had often felt the inconveniences of
idleness, but he never cured it; and was so conscious of his own
character that he talked of writing an Eastern tale “Of the Man who Loved
to be in Distress.”  Among his peculiarities was a very unskilful and
inarticulate manner of pronouncing any lofty or solemn composition.  He
was once reading to Dodington, who, being himself a reader eminently
elegant, was so much provoked by his odd utterance that he snatched the
paper from his hands and told him that he did not understand his own
verses.

The biographer of Thomson has remarked that an author’s life is best read
in his works; his observation was not well timed.  Savage, who lived much
with Thomson, once told me how he heard a lady remarking that she could
gather from his works three-parts of his character: that he was “a great
lover, a great swimmer, and rigorously abstinent;” “but,” said Savage,
“he knows not any love but that of the sex; he was, perhaps, never in
cold water in his life; and he indulges himself in all the luxury that
comes within his reach.”  Yet Savage always spoke with the most eager
praise of his social qualities, his warmth and constancy of friendship,
and his adherence to his first acquaintance when the advancement of his
reputation had left them behind him.

As a writer, he is entitled to one praise of the highest kind: his mode
of thinking and of expressing his thoughts is original.  His blank verse
is no more the blank verse of Milton, or of any other poet, than the
rhymes of Prior are the rhymes of Cowley.  His numbers, his pauses, his
diction, are of his own growth, without transcription, without imitation.
He thinks in a peculiar train, and he thinks always as a man of genius;
he looks round on Nature and on Life with the eye which Nature bestows
only on a poet; the eye that distinguishes in everything presented to its
view whatever there is on which imagination can delight to be detained,
and with a mind that at once comprehends the vast and attends to the
minute.  The reader of the “Seasons” wonders that he never saw before
what Thomson shows him, and that he never yet has felt what Thomson
impresses.  His is one of the works in which blank verse seems properly
used.  Thomson’s wide expansion of general views, and his enumeration of
circumstantial varieties, would have been obstructed and embarrassed by
the frequent intersections of the sense, which are the necessary effects
of rhyme.  His descriptions of extended scenes and general effects bring
before us the whole magnificence of Nature, whether pleasing or dreadful.
The gaiety of Spring, the splendour of Summer, the tranquillity of
Autumn, and the horror of Winter, take in their turns possession of the
mind.  The poet leads us through the appearances of things as they are
successively varied by the vicissitudes of the year, and imparts to us so
much of his own enthusiasm that our thoughts expand with his imagery and
kindle with his sentiments.  Nor is the naturalist without his part in
the entertainment, for he is assisted to recollect and to combine, to
arrange his discoveries, and to amplify the sphere of his contemplation.
The great defect of the “Seasons” is want of method; but for this I know
not that there was any remedy.  Of many appearances subsisting all at
once, no rule can be given why one should be mentioned before another;
yet the memory wants the help of order, and the curiosity is not excited
by suspense or expectation.  His diction is in the highest degree florid
and luxuriant, such as may be said to be to his images and thoughts “both
their lustre and their shade;” such as invests them with splendour,
through which, perhaps, they are not always easily discerned.  It is too
exuberant, and sometimes may be charged with filling the ear more than
the mind.

These poems, with which I was acquainted at their first appearance, I
have since found altered and enlarged by subsequent revisals, as the
author supposed his judgment to grow more exact, and as books or
conversation extended his knowledge and opened his prospects.  They are,
I think, improved in general; yet I know not whether they have not lost
part of what Temple calls their “race,” a word which, applied to wines in
its primitive sense, means the flavour of the soil.

“Liberty,” when it first appeared, I tried to read, and soon desisted.  I
have never tried again, and therefore will not hazard either praise or
censure.  The highest praise which he has received ought not to be
suppressed: it is said by Lord Lyttelton, in the Prologue to his
posthumous play, that his works contained

              “No line which, dying, he could wish to blot.”



WATTS.


THE poems of Dr. Watts were, by my recommendation, inserted in the late
Collection, the readers of which are to impute to me whatever pleasure or
weariness they may find in the perusal of Blackmore, Watts, Pomfret, and
Yalden.

Isaac Watts was born July 17, 1674, at Southampton, where his father, of
the same name, kept a boarding-school for young gentlemen, though common
report makes him a shoemaker.  He appears, from the narrative of Dr.
Gibbons, to have been neither indigent nor illiterate.

Isaac, the eldest of nine children, was given to books from his infancy,
and began, we are told, to learn Latin when he was four years old—I
suppose, at home.  He was afterwards taught Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, by
Mr. Pinhorne, a clergyman, master of the Free School at Southampton, to
whom the gratitude of his scholar afterwards inscribed a Latin ode.  His
proficiency at school was so conspicuous that a subscription was proposed
for his support at the University, but he declared his resolution of
taking his lot with the Dissenters.  Such he was as every Christian
Church would rejoice to have adopted.  He therefore repaired, in 1690, to
an academy taught by Mr. Rowe, where he had for his companions and fellow
students Mr. Hughes the poet, and Dr. Horte, afterwards Archbishop of
Tuam.  Some Latin Essays, supposed to have been written as exercises at
this academy, show a degree of knowledge, both philosophical and
theological, such as very few attain by a much longer course of study.
He was, as he hints in his “Miscellanies,” a maker of verses from fifteen
to fifty, and in his youth he appears to have paid attention to Latin
poetry.  His verses to his brother, in the glyconic measure, written when
he was seventeen, are remarkably easy and elegant.  Some of his other
odes are deformed by the Pindaric folly then prevailing, and are written
with such neglect of all metrical rules as is without example among the
ancients; but his diction, though perhaps not always exactly pure, has
such copiousness and splendour as shows that he was but a very little
distance from excellence.  His method of study was to impress the
contents of his books upon his memory by abridging them, and by
interleaving them to amplify one system with supplements from another.

With the congregation of his tutor, Mr. Rowe, who were, I believe,
Independents, he communicated in his nineteenth year.  At the age of
twenty he left the academy, and spent two years in study and devotion at
the house of his father, who treated him with great tenderness, and had
the happiness, indulged to few parents, of living to see his son eminent
for literature and venerable for piety.  He was then entertained by Sir
John Hartopp five years, as domestic tutor to his son, and in that time
particularly devoted himself to the study of the Holy Scriptures; and,
being chosen assistant to Dr. Chauncey, preached the first time on the
birthday that completed his twenty-fourth year, probably considering that
as the day of a second nativity, by which he entered on a new period of
existence.

In about three years he succeeded Dr. Chauncey; but soon after his
entrance on his charge he was seized by a dangerous illness, which sunk
him to such weakness that the congregation thought an assistant
necessary, and appointed Mr. Price.  His health then returned gradually,
and he performed his duty till (1712) he was seized by a fever of such
violence and continuance, that from the feebleness which it brought upon
him he never perfectly recovered.  This calamitous state made the
compassion of his friends necessary, and drew upon him the attention of
Sir Thomas Abney, who received him into his house, where, with a
constancy of friendship and uniformity of conduct not often to be found,
he was treated for thirty-six years with all the kindness that friendship
could prompt, and all the attention that respect could dictate.  Sir
Thomas died about eight years afterwards, but he continued with the lady
and her daughters to the end of his life.  The lady died about a year
after him.

A coalition like this, a state in which the notions of patronage and
dependence were overpowered by the perception of reciprocal benefits,
deserves a particular memorial; and I will not withhold from the reader
Dr. Gibbons’s representation, to which regard is to be paid as to the
narrative of one who writes what he knows, and what is known likewise to
multitudes besides:—

    “Our next observation shall be made upon that remarkably kind
    Providence which brought the Doctor into Sir Thomas Abney’s family,
    and continued him there till his death, a period of no less than
    thirty-six years.  In the midst of his sacred labours for the glory
    of God, and good of his generation, he is seized with a most violent
    and threatening fever, which leaves him oppressed with great
    weakness, and puts a stop at least to his public services for four
    years.  In this distressing season, doubly so to his active and pious
    spirit, he is invited to Sir Thomas Abney’s family, nor ever removes
    from it till he had finished his days.  Here he enjoyed the
    uninterrupted demonstrations of the truest friendship.  Here, without
    any care of his own, he had everything which could contribute to the
    enjoyment of life, and favour the unwearied pursuit of his studies.
    Here he dwelt in a family which, for piety, order, harmony, and every
    virtue, was a house of God.  Here he had the privilege of a country
    recess, the fragrant bower, the spreading lawn, the flowery garden,
    and other advantages, to soothe his mind and aid his restoration to
    health; to yield him, whenever he chose them, most grateful intervals
    from his laborious studies, and enable him to return to them with
    redoubled vigour and delight.  Had it not been for this most happy
    event, he might, as to outward view, have feebly, it may be
    painfully, dragged on through many more years of languor, and
    inability for public service, and even for profitable study, or
    perhaps might have sunk into his grave under the overwhelming load of
    infirmities in the midst of his days; and thus the Church and world
    would have been deprived of those many excellent sermons and works
    which he drew up and published during his long residence in this
    family.  In a few years after his coming hither, Sir Thomas Abney
    dies; but his amiable consort survives, who shows the Doctor the same
    respect and friendship as before, and most happily for him and great
    numbers besides; for, as her riches were great, her generosity and
    munificence were in full proportion; her thread of life was drawn out
    to a great age, even beyond that of the Doctor’s, and thus this
    excellent man, through her kindness, and that of her daughter, the
    present Mrs. Elizabeth Abney, who in a like degree esteemed and
    honoured him, enjoyed all the benefits and felicities he experienced
    at his first entrance into this family till his days were numbered
    and finished, and, like a shock of corn in its season, he ascended
    into the regions of perfect and immortal life and joy.”

If this quotation has appeared long, let it be considered that it
comprises an account of six-and-thirty years, and those the years of Dr.
Watts.

From the time of his reception into this family his life was no otherwise
diversified than by successive publications.  The series of his works I
am not able to deduce; their number and their variety show the
intenseness of his industry and the extent of his capacity.  He was one
of the first authors that taught the Dissenters to court attention by the
graces of language.  Whatever they had among them before, whether of
learning or acuteness, was commonly obscured and blunted by coarseness
and inelegance of style.  He showed them that zeal and purity might be
expressed and enforced by polished diction.  He continued to the end of
his life a teacher of a congregation, and no reader of his works can
doubt his fidelity or diligence.  In the pulpit, though his low stature,
which very little exceeded five feet, graced him with no advantages of
appearance, yet the gravity and propriety of his utterance made his
discourses very efficacious.  I once mentioned the reputation which Mr.
Foster had gained by his proper delivery, to my friend Dr. Hawkesworth,
who told me that in the art of pronunciation he was far inferior to Dr.
Watts.  Such was his flow of thoughts, and such his promptitude of
language, that in the latter part of his life he did not precompose his
cursory sermons, but, having adjusted the heads and sketched out some
particulars, trusted for success to his extemporary powers.  He did not
endeavour to assist his eloquence by any gesticulations; for, as no
corporeal actions have any correspondence with theological truth, he did
not see how they could enforce it.  At the conclusion of weighty
sentences he gave time, by a short pause, for the proper impression.

To stated and public instruction he added familiar visits and personal
application, and was careful to improve the opportunities which
conversation offered of diffusing and increasing the influence of
religion.  By his natural temper he was quick of resentment; but by his
established and habitual practice he was gentle, modest, and inoffensive.
His tenderness appeared in his attention to children, and to the poor.
To the poor, while he lived in the family of his friend, he allowed the
third part of his annual revenue; though the whole was not a hundred a
year; and for children he condescended to lay aside the scholar, the
philosopher, and the wit, to write little poems of devotion, and systems
of instruction, adapted to their wants and capacities, from the dawn of
reason through its gradations of advance in the morning of life.  Every
man acquainted with the common principles of human action will look with
veneration on the writer who is at one time combating Locke, and at
another making a catechism for children in their fourth year.  A
voluntary descent from the dignity of science is perhaps the hardest
lesson that humility can teach.

As his mind was capacious, his curiosity excursive, and his industry
continual, his writings are very numerous and his subjects various.  With
his theological works I am only enough acquainted to admire his meekness
of opposition, and his mildness of censure.  It was not only in his book,
but in his mind, that orthodoxy was united with charity.

Of his philosophical pieces, his “Logic” has been received into the
Universities, and therefore wants no private recommendation; if he owes
part of it to Le Clerc, it must be considered that no man who undertakes
merely to methodise or illustrate a system pretends to be its author.

In his metaphysical disquisitions it was observed by the late learned Mr.
Dyer, that he confounded the idea of _space_ with that of _empty space_,
and did not consider that though space might be without matter, yet
matter being extended could not be without space.

Few books have been perused by me with greater pleasure than his
“Improvement of the Mind,” of which the radical principle may indeed be
found in Locke’s “Conduct of the Understanding;” but they are so expanded
and ramified by Watts, as to confer upon him the merit of a work in the
highest degree useful and pleasing.  Whoever has the care of instructing
others may be charged with deficiency in his duty if this book is not
recommended.

I have mentioned his treatises of theology as distinct from his other
productions; but the truth is that whatever he took in hand was, by his
incessant solicitude for souls, converted to theology.  As piety
predominated in his mind, it is diffused over his works.  Under his
direction it may be truly said, _Theologiæ philosophia ancillatur_
(Philosophy is subservient to evangelical instruction).  It is difficult
to read a page without learning, or at least wishing, to be better.  The
attention is caught by indirect instruction; and he that sat down only to
reason is on a sudden compelled to pray.  It was therefore with great
propriety that, in 1728, he received from Edinburgh and Aberdeen an
unsolicited diploma, by which he became a Doctor of Divinity.  Academical
honours would have more value if they were always bestowed with equal
judgment.  He continued many years to study and to preach, and to do good
by his instruction and example, till at last the infirmities of age
disabled him from the more laborious part of his ministerial functions,
and, being no longer capable of public duty, he offered to remit the
salary appendent to it; but his congregation would not accept the
resignation.  By degrees his weakness increased, and at last confined him
to his chamber and his bed, where he was worn gradually away without
pain, till he expired November 25th 1748, in the seventy-fifth year of
his age.

Few men have left behind such purity of character, or such monuments of
laborious piety.  He has provided instruction for all ages—from those who
are lisping their first lessons, to the enlightened readers of
Malebranche and Locke; he has left neither corporeal nor spiritual nature
unexamined; he has taught the art of reasoning, and the science of the
stars.  His character, therefore, must be formed from the multiplicity
and diversity of his attainments, rather than from any single
performance, for it would not be safe to claim for him the highest rank
in any single denomination of literary dignity; yet, perhaps, there was
nothing in which he would not have excelled, if he had not divided his
powers to different pursuits.

As a poet, had he been only a poet, he would probably have stood high
among the authors with whom he is now associated.  For his judgment was
exact, and he noted beauties and faults with very nice discernment; his
imagination, as the “Dacian Battle” proves, was vigorous and active, and
the stores of knowledge were large by which his fancy was to be supplied.
His ear was well tuned, and his diction was elegant and copious.  But his
devotional poetry is, like that of others, unsatisfactory.  The paucity
of its topics enforces perpetual repetition, and the sanctity of the
matter rejects the ornaments of figurative diction.  It is sufficient for
Watts to have done better than others what no man has done well.  His
poems on other subjects seldom rise higher than might be expected from
the amusements of a man of letters, and have different degrees of value
as they are more or less laboured, or as the occasion was more or less
favourable to invention.  He writes too often without regular measures,
and too often in blank verse; the rhymes are not always sufficiently
correspondent.  He is particularly unhappy in coining names expressive of
characters.  His lines are commonly smooth and easy, and his thoughts
always religiously pure; but who is there that, to so much piety and
innocence, does not wish for a greater measure of sprightliness and
vigour?  He is at least one of the few poets with whom youth and
ignorance may be safely pleased; and happy will be that reader whose mind
is disposed, by his verses or his prose, to imitate him in all but his
non-conformity, to copy his benevolence to man, and his reverence to God.



A. PHILIPS.


OF the birth or early part of the life of Ambrose Philips I have not been
able to find any account.  His academical education he received at St.
John’s College in Cambridge, where he first solicited the notice of the
world by some English verses, in the collection published by the
University on the death of Queen Mary.  From this time how he was
employed, or in what station he passed his life, is not yet discovered.
He must have published his “Pastorals” before the year 1708, because they
are evidently prior to those of Pope.  He afterwards (1709) addressed to
the universal patron, the Duke of Dorset, a “Poetical Letter from
Copenhagen,” which was published in the _Tatler_, and is by Pope, in one
of his first Letters, mentioned with high praise as the production of a
man “who could write very nobly.”

Philips was a zealous Whig, and therefore easily found access to Addison
and Steele; but his ardour seems not to have procured him anything more
than kind words, since he was reduced to translate the “Persian Tales”
for Tonson, for which he was afterwards reproached, with this addition of
contempt, that he worked for half-a-crown.  The book is divided into many
sections, for each of which, if he received half-a-crown, his reward, as
writers then were paid, was very liberal; but half-a-crown had a mean
sound.  He was employed in promoting the principles of his party, by
epitomising Hacket’s “Life of Archbishop Williams.”  The original book is
written with such depravity of genius, such mixture of the fop and
pedant, as has not often appeared.  The epitome is free enough from
affectation, but has little spirit or vigour.

In 1712 he brought upon the stage _The Distressed Mother_, almost a
translation of Racine’s _Andromaque_.  Such a work requires no uncommon
powers, but the friends of Philips exerted every art to promote his
interest. Before the appearance of the play a whole _Spectator_, none
indeed of the best, was devoted to its praise; while it yet continued to
be acted, another _Spectator_ was written to tell what impression it made
upon Sir Roger, and on the first night a select audience, says Pope, was
called together to applaud it.  It was concluded with the most successful
Epilogue that was ever yet spoken on the English theatre.  The three
first nights it was recited twice, and not only continued to be demanded
through the run, as it is termed, of the play, but whenever it is
recalled to the stage, where by peculiar fortune, though a copy from the
French, it yet keeps its place, the Epilogue is still expected, and is
still spoken.

The propriety of Epilogues in general, and consequently of this, was
questioned by a correspondent of the _Spectator_, whose letter was
undoubtedly admitted for the sake of the answer, which soon followed,
written with much zeal and acrimony.  The attack and the defence equally
contributed to stimulate curiosity and continue attention.  It may be
discovered in the defence that Prior’s Epilogue to _Phædra_ had a little
excited jealousy, and something of Prior’s plan may be discovered in the
performance of his rival.  Of this distinguished Epilogue the reputed
author was the wretched Budgell, whom Addison used to denominate “the man
who calls me cousin;” and when he was asked how such a silly fellow could
write so well, replied, “The Epilogue was quite another thing when I saw
it first.”  It was known in Tonson’s family, and told to Garrick, that
Addison was himself the author of it, and that, when it had been at first
printed with his name, he came early in the morning, before the copies
were distributed, and ordered it to be given to Budgell, that it might
add weight to the solicitation which he was then making for a place.

Philips was now high in the ranks of literature.  His play was applauded;
his translations from Sappho had been published in the _Spectator_; he
was an important and distinguished associate of clubs, witty and
poetical; and nothing was wanting to his happiness but that he should be
sure of its continuance.  The work which had procured him the first
notice from the public was his “Six Pastorals,” which, flattering the
imagination with Arcadian scenes, probably found many readers, and might
have long passed as a pleasing amusement had they not been unhappily too
much commended.

The rustic poems of Theocritus were so highly valued by the Greeks and
Romans that they attracted the imitation of Virgil, whose Eclogues seem
to have been considered as precluding all attempts of the same kind; for
no shepherds were taught to sing by any succeeding poet, till Nemesian
and Calphurnius ventured their feeble efforts in the lower age of Latin
literature.

At the revival of learning in Italy it was soon discovered that a
dialogue of imaginary swains might be composed with little difficulty,
because the conversation of shepherds excludes profound or refined
sentiment; and for images and descriptions, satyrs and fauns, and naiads
and dryads, were always within call; and woods and meadows, and hills and
rivers, supplied variety of matter, which, having a natural power to
soothe the mind, did not quickly cloy it.

Petrarch entertained the learned men of his age with the novelty of
modern pastorals in Latin.  Being not ignorant of Greek, and finding
nothing in the word _eclogue_ of rural meaning, he supposed it to be
corrupted by the copiers, and therefore called his own productions
_Æglogues_, by which he meant to express the talk of goat-herds, though
it will mean only the talk of goats.  This new name was adopted by
subsequent writers, and among others by our Spenser.

More than a century afterwards (1498) Mantuan published his Bucolics with
such success that they were soon dignified by Badius with a comment, and,
as Scaliger complained, received into schools, and taught as classical;
his complaint was vain, and the practice, however injudicious, spread far
and continued long.  Mantuan was read, at least in some of the inferior
schools of this kingdom, to the beginning of the present century.  The
speakers of Mantuan carried their disquisitions beyond the country to
censure the corruptions of the Church, and from him Spenser learned to
employ his swains on topics of controversy.  The Italians soon
transferred pastoral poetry into their own language.  Sannazaro wrote
“Arcadia” in prose and verse; Tasso and Guarini wrote “Favole
Boschareccie,” or Sylvan Dramas; and all nations of Europe filled volumes
with Thyrsis and Damon, and Thestylis and Phyllis.

Philips thinks it “somewhat strange to conceive how, in an age so
addicted to the Muses, pastoral poetry never comes to be so much as
thought upon.”  His wonder seems very unseasonable; there had never, from
the time of Spenser, wanted writers to talk occasionally of Arcadia and
Strephon, and half the book, in which he first tried his powers, consists
of dialogues on Queen Mary’s death, between Tityrus and Corydon, or
Mopsus and Menalcas.  A series or book of pastorals, however, I know not
that anyone had then lately published.

Not long afterwards Pope made the first display of his powers in four
pastorals, written in a very different form.  Philips had taken Spenser,
and Pope took Virgil for his pattern.  Philips endeavoured to be natural,
Pope laboured to be elegant.

Philips was now favoured by Addison and by Addison’s companions, who were
very willing to push him into reputation.  The _Guardian_ gave an account
of Pastoral, partly critical and partly historical; in which, when the
merit of the modern is compared, Tasso and Guarini are censured for
remote thoughts and unnatural refinements, and, upon the whole, the
Italians and French are all excluded from rural poetry, and the pipe of
the pastoral muse is transmitted by lawful inheritance from Theocritus to
Virgil, from Virgil to Spenser, and from Spenser to Philips.  With this
inauguration of Philips his rival Pope was not much delighted; he
therefore drew a comparison of Philips’s performance with his own, in
which, with an unexampled and unequalled artifice of irony, though he has
himself always the advantage, he gives the preference to Philips.  The
design of aggrandising himself he disguised with such dexterity that,
though Addison discovered it, Steele was deceived, and was afraid of
displeasing Pope by publishing his paper.  Published however it was
(_Guardian_, No. 40), and from that time Pope and Philips lived in a
perpetual reciprocation of malevolence.  In poetical powers, of either
praise or satire, there was no proportion between the combatants; but
Philips, though he could not prevail by wit, hoped to hurt Pope with
another weapon, and charged him, as Pope thought with Addison’s
approbation, as disaffected to the Government.  Even with this he was not
satisfied, for, indeed, there is no appearance that any regard was paid
to his clamours.  He proceeded to grosser insults, and hung up a rod at
Button’s, with which he threatened to chastise Pope, who appears to have
been extremely exasperated, for in the first edition of his Letters he
calls Philips “rascal,” and in the last still charges him with detaining
in his hands the subscriptions for “Homer” delivered to him by the
Hanover Club.  I suppose it was never suspected that he meant to
appropriate the money; he only delayed, and with sufficient meanness, the
gratification of him by whose prosperity he was pained.

Men sometimes suffer by injudicious kindness; Philips became ridiculous,
without his own fault, by the absurd admiration of his friends, who
decorated him with honorary garlands, which the first breath of
contradiction blasted.

When upon the succession of the House of Hanover every Whig expected to
be happy, Philips seems to have obtained too little notice; he caught few
drops of the golden shower, though he did not omit what flattery could
perform.  He was only made a commissioner of the lottery (1717), and,
what did not much elevate his character, a justice of the peace.

The success of his first play must naturally dispose him to turn his
hopes towards the stage; he did not, however, soon commit himself to the
mercy of an audience, but contented himself with the fame already
acquired, till after nine years he produced (1722) _The Briton_, a
tragedy which, whatever was its reception, is now neglected; though one
of the scenes, between Vanoc the British Prince and Valens the Roman
General, is confessed to be written with great dramatic skill, animated
by spirit truly poetical.  He had not been idle though he had been
silent, for he exhibited another tragedy the same year on the story of
_Humphry_, _Duke of Gloucester_.  This tragedy is only remembered by its
title.

His happiest undertaking was (1711) of a paper called _The Freethinker_,
in conjunction with associates, of whom one was Dr. Boulter, who, then
only minister of a parish in Southwark, was of so much consequence to the
Government that he was made first Bishop of Bristol, and afterwards
Primate of Ireland, where his piety and his charity will be long
honoured.  It may easily be imagined that what was printed under the
direction of Boulter would have nothing in it indecent or licentious; its
title is to be understood as implying only freedom from unreasonable
prejudice.  It has been reprinted in volumes, but is little read; nor can
impartial criticism recommend it as worthy of revival.

Boulter was not well qualified to write diurnal essays, but he knew how
to practise the liberality of greatness and the fidelity of friendship.
When he was advanced to the height of ecclesiastical dignity, he did not
forget the companion of his labours.  Knowing Philips to be slenderly
supported, he took him to Ireland as partaker of his fortune, and, making
him his secretary, added such preferments as enabled him to represent the
county of Armagh in the Irish Parliament.  In December, 1726, he was made
secretary to the Lord Chancellor, and in August, 1733, became Judge of
the Prerogative Court.

After the death of his patron he continued some years in Ireland, but at
last longing, as it seems, for his native country, he returned (1748) to
London, having doubtless survived most of his friends and enemies, and
among them his dreaded antagonist Pope.  He found, however, the Duke of
Newcastle still living, and to him he dedicated his poems collected into
a volume.

Having purchased an annuity of £400, he now certainly hoped to pass some
years of life in plenty and tranquillity; but his hope deceived him: he
was struck with a palsy, and died June 18, 1749, in his seventy-eighth
year.

Of his personal character all that I have heard is, that he was eminent
for bravery and skill in the sword, and that in conversation he was
solemn and pompous.  He had great sensibility of censure, if judgment may
be made by a single story which I heard long ago from Mr. Ing, a
gentleman of great eminence in Staffordshire.  “Philips,” said he, “was
once at table, when I asked him, ‘How came thy king of Epirus to drive
oxen, and to say, “I’m goaded on by love”?’  After which question he
never spoke again.”

Of _The Distressed Mother_ not much is pretended to be his own, and
therefore it is no subject of criticism: his other two tragedies, I
believe, are not below mediocrity, nor above it.  Among the poems
comprised in the late Collection, the “Letter from Denmark” may be justly
praised; the Pastorals, which by the writer of the _Guardian_ were ranked
as one of the four genuine productions of the rustic Muse, cannot surely
be despicable.  That they exhibit a mode of life which did not exist, nor
ever existed, is not to be objected: the supposition of such a state is
allowed to be pastoral.  In his other poems he cannot be denied the
praise of lines sometimes elegant; but he has seldom much force or much
comprehension.  The pieces that please best are those which, from Pope
and Pope’s adherents, procured him the name of “Namby-Pamby,” the poems
of short lines, by which he paid his court to all ages and characters,
from Walpole the “steerer of the realm,” to Miss Pulteney in the nursery.
The numbers are smooth and sprightly, and the diction is seldom faulty.
They are not loaded with much thought, yet, if they had been written by
Addison, they would have had admirers: little things are not valued but
when they are done by those who can do greater.

In his translations from “Pindar” he found the art of reaching all the
obscurity of the Theban bard, however he may fall below his sublimity; he
will be allowed, if he has less fire, to have more smoke.  He has added
nothing to English poetry, yet at least half his book deserves to be
read: perhaps he valued most himself that part which the critic would
reject.



WEST.


GILBERT WEST is one of the writers of whom I regret my inability to give
a sufficient account; the intelligence which my inquiries have obtained
is general and scanty.  He was the son of the Rev. Dr. West; perhaps him
who published “Pindar” at Oxford about the beginning of this century.
His mother was sister to Sir Richard Temple, afterwards Lord Cobham.  His
father, purposing to educate him for the Church, sent him first to Eton,
and afterwards to Oxford; but he was seduced to a more airy mode of life,
by a commission in a troop of horse, procured him by his uncle.  He
continued some time in the army, though it is reasonable to suppose that
he never sunk into a mere soldier, nor ever lost the love, or much
neglected the pursuit, of learning; and afterwards, finding himself more
inclined to civil employment, he laid down his commission, and engaged in
business under the Lord Townshend, then Secretary of State, with whom he
attended the King to Hanover.

His adherence to Lord Townshend ended in nothing but a nomination (May,
1729) to be Clerk-Extraordinary of the Privy Council, which produced no
immediate profit; for it only placed him in a state of expectation and
right of succession, and it was very long before a vacancy admitted him
to profit.

Soon afterwards he married, and settled himself in a very pleasant house
at Wickham, in Kent, where he devoted himself to learning and to piety.
Of his learning the late Collection exhibits evidence, which would have
been yet fuller if the dissertations which accompany his version of
“Pindar” had not been improperly omitted.  Of his piety the influence
has, I hope, been extended far by his “Observations on the Resurrection,”
published in 1747, for which the University of Oxford created him a
Doctor of Laws, by diploma (March 30, 1748), and would doubtless have
reached yet further had he lived to complete what he had for some time
meditated—the “Evidences of the Truth of the New Testament.”  Perhaps it
may not be without effect to tell that he read the prayers of the public
Liturgy every morning to his family, and that on Sunday evening he called
his servants into the parlour and read to them first a sermon and then
prayers.  Crashaw is now not the only maker of verses to whom may be
given the two venerable names of Poet and Saint.  He was very often
visited by Lyttelton and Pitt, who, when they were weary of faction and
debates, used at Wickham to find books and quiet, a decent table, and
literary conversation.  There is at Wickham a walk made by Pitt; and,
what is of far more importance, at Wickham, Lyttelton received that
conviction which produced his “Dissertation on St. Paul.”  These two
illustrious friends had for a while listened to the blandishments of
infidelity; and when West’s book was published, it was bought by some who
did not know his change of opinion, in expectation of new objections
against Christianity; and as infidels do not want malignity, they
revenged the disappointment by calling him a Methodist.

Mr. West’s income was not large; and his friends endeavoured, but without
success, to obtain an augmentation.  It is reported that the education of
the young Prince was offered to him, but that he required a more
extensive power of superintendence than it was thought proper to allow
him.  In time, however, his revenue was improved; he lived to have one of
the lucrative clerkships of the Privy Council (1752); and Mr. Pitt at
last had it in his power to make him Treasurer of Chelsea Hospital.  He
was now sufficiently rich; but wealth came too late to be long enjoyed;
nor could it secure him from the calamities of life; he lost (1755) his
only son; and the year after (March 26) a stroke of the palsy brought to
the grave one of the few poets to whom the grave might be without its
terrors.

Of his translations I have only compared the first Olympic Ode with the
original, and found my expectation surpassed, both by its elegance and
its exactness.  He does not confine himself to his author’s train of
stanzas; for he saw that the difference of languages required a different
mode of versification.  The first strophe is eminently happy; in the
second he has a little strayed from Pindar’s meaning, who says, “If thou,
my soul, wishest to speak of games, look not in the desert sky for a
planet hotter than the sun; nor shall we tell of nobler games than those
of Olympia.”  He is sometimes too paraphrastical.  Pindar bestows upon
Hiero an epithet which, in one word, signifies _delighting in horses_; a
word which, in the translation, generates these lines:—

    “Hiero’s royal brows, whose care
       Tends the courser’s noble breed,
    Pleased to nurse the pregnant mare,
       Pleased to train the youthful steed.”

Pindar says of Pelops, that “he came alone in the dark to the White Sea;”
and West—

    “Near the billow-beaten side
    Of the foam-besilvered main,
    Darkling, and alone, he stood:”

which, however, is less exuberant than the former passage.

A work of this kind must, in a minute examination, discover many
imperfections; but West’s version, so far as I have considered it,
appears to be the product of great labour and great abilities.

His “Institution of the Garter” (1742) is written with sufficient
knowledge of the manners that prevailed in the age to which it is
referred, and with great elegance of diction; but, for want of a process
of events, neither knowledge nor elegance preserves the reader from
weariness.

His “Imitations of Spenser” are very successfully performed, both with
respect to the metre, the language, and the fiction; and being engaged at
once by the excellence of the sentiments, and the artifice of the copy,
the mind has two amusements together.  But such compositions are not to
be reckoned among the great achievements of intellect, because their
effect is local and temporary; they appeal not to reason or passion, but
to memory, and presuppose an accidental or artificial state of mind.  An
imitation of Spenser is nothing to a reader, however acute, by whom
Spenser has never been perused.  Works of this kind may deserve praise,
as proofs of great industry and great nicety of observation; but the
highest praise, the praise of genius, they cannot claim.  The noblest
beauties of art are those of which the effect is co-extended with
rational nature, or at least with the whole circle of polished life; what
is less than this can be only pretty, the plaything of fashion, and the
amusement of a day.

There is in the _Adventurer_ a paper of verses given to one of the
authors as Mr. West’s, and supposed to have been written by him.  It
should not be concealed, however, that it is printed with Mr. Jago’s name
in Dodsley’s Collection, and is mentioned as his in a letter of
Shenstone’s.  Perhaps West gave it without naming the author, and
Hawkesworth, receiving it from him, thought it his; for his he thought
it, as he told me, and as he tells the public.



COLLINS.


WILLIAM COLLINS was born at Chichester, on the 25th day of December,
about 1720.  His father was a hatter of good reputation.  He was in 1733,
as Dr. Warton has kindly informed me, admitted scholar of Winchester
College, where he was educated by Dr. Burton.  His English exercises were
better than his Latin.  He first courted the notice of the public by some
verses to a “Lady weeping,” published in _The Gentleman’s Magazine_
(January, 1739).

In 1740 he stood first in the list of the scholars to be received in
succession at New College, but unhappily there was no vacancy.  He became
a Commoner of Queen’s College, probably with a scanty maintenance; but
was, in about half a year, elected a Demy of Magdalen College, where he
continued till he had taken a Bachelor’s degree, and then suddenly left
the University; for what reason I know not that he told.

He now (about 1744) came to London a literary adventurer, with many
projects in his head, and very little money in his pocket.  He designed
many works; but his great fault was irresolution; or the frequent calls
of immediate necessity broke his scheme, and suffered him to pursue no
settled purpose.  A man doubtful of his dinner, or trembling at a
creditor, is not much disposed to abstracted meditation or remote
inquiries.  He published proposals for a “History of the Revival of
Learning;” and I have heard him speak with great kindness of Leo X., and
with keen resentment of his tasteless successor.  But probably not a page
of his history was ever written.  He planned several tragedies, but he
only planned them.  He wrote now and then odes and other poems, and did
something, however little.  About this time I fell into his company.  His
appearance was decent and manly; his knowledge considerable, his views
extensive, his conversation elegant, and his disposition cheerful.  By
degrees I gained his confidence; and one day was admitted to him when he
was immured by a bailiff that was prowling in the street.  On this
occasion recourse was had to the booksellers, who, on the credit of a
translation of Aristotle’s “Poetics,” which he engaged to write with a
large commentary, advanced as much money as enabled him to escape into
the country.  He showed me the guineas safe in his hand.  Soon afterwards
his uncle, Mr. Martin, a lieutenant-colonel, left him about £2000; a sum
which Collins could scarcely think exhaustible, and which he did not live
to exhaust. The guineas were then repaid, and the translation neglected.
But man is not born for happiness.  Collins, who, while he studied to
live, felt no evil but poverty, no sooner lived to study than his life
was assailed by more dreadful calamities—disease and insanity.

Having formerly written his character, while perhaps it was yet more
distinctly impressed upon my memory, I shall insert it here.

“Mr. Collins was a man of extensive literature, and of vigorous
faculties.  He was acquainted not only with the learned tongues, but with
the Italian, French, and Spanish languages.  He had employed his mind
chiefly on works of fiction, and subjects of fancy; and, by indulging
some peculiar habits of thought, was eminently delighted with those
flights of imagination which pass the bounds of nature, and to which the
mind is reconciled only by a passive acquiescence in popular traditions.
He loved fairies, genii, giants, and monsters; he delighted to rove
through the meanders of enchantment, to gaze on the magnificence of
golden palaces, to repose by the waterfalls of Elysian gardens.  This
was, however, the character rather of his inclination than his genius;
the grandeur of wildness, and the novelty of extravagance, were always
desired by him, but not always attained.  Yet, as diligence is never
wholly lost, if his efforts sometimes caused harshness and obscurity,
they likewise produced in happier moments sublimity and splendour.  This
idea which he had formed of excellence led him to Oriental fictions and
allegorical imagery, and, perhaps, while he was intent upon description,
he did not sufficiently cultivate sentiment.  His poems are the
productions of a mind not deficient in fire, nor unfurnished with
knowledge either of books or life, but somewhat obstructed in its
progress by deviation in quest of mistaken beauties.

“His morals were pure, and his opinions pious; in a long continuance of
poverty, and long habits of dissipation, it cannot be expected that any
character should be exactly uniform.  There is a degree of want by which
the freedom of agency is almost destroyed; and long association with
fortuitous companions will at last relax the strictness of truth, and
abate the fervour of sincerity.  That this man, wise and virtuous as he
was, passed always unentangled through the snares of life, it would be
prejudice and temerity to affirm; but it may be said that at least he
preserved the source of action unpolluted, that his principles were never
shaken, that his distinctions of right and wrong were never confounded,
and that his faults had nothing of malignity or design, but proceeded
from some unexpected pressure, or casual temptation.

“The latter part of his life cannot be remembered but with pity and
sadness.  He languished some years under that depression of mind which
enchains the faculties without destroying them, and leaves reason the
knowledge of right without the power of pursuing it.  These clouds which
he perceived gathering on his intellect he endeavoured to disperse by
travel, and passed into France; but found himself constrained to yield to
his malady, and returned.  He was for some time confined in a house of
lunatics, and afterwards retired to the care of his sister in Chichester,
where death, in 1756, came to his relief.

“After his return from France, the writer of this character paid him a
visit at Islington, where he was waiting for his sister, whom he had
directed to meet him.  There was then nothing of disorder discernible in
his mind by any but himself; but he had withdrawn from study, and
travelled with no other book than an English Testament, such as children
carry to the school.  When his friend took it into his hand, out of
curiosity to see what companion a man of letters had chosen, ‘I have but
one book,’ said Collins, ‘but that is the best.’”

Such was the fate of Collins, with whom I once delighted to converse, and
whom I yet remember with tenderness.

He was visited at Chichester, in his last illness, by his learned friends
Dr. Warton and his brother, to whom he spoke with disapprobation of his
“Oriental Eclogues,” as not sufficiently expressive of Asiatic manners,
and called them his “Irish Eclogues.”  He showed them, at the same time,
an ode inscribed to Mr. John Home, on the superstitions of the Highlands,
which they thought superior to his other works, but which no search has
yet found.  His disorder was no alienation of mind, but general laxity
and feebleness—a deficiency rather of his vital than his intellectual
powers.  What he spoke wanted neither judgment nor spirit; but a few
minutes exhausted him, so that he was forced to rest upon the couch, till
a short cessation restored his powers, and he was again able to talk with
his former vigour.  The approaches of this dreadful malady he began to
feel soon after his uncle’s death; and, with the usual weakness of men so
diseased, eagerly snatched that temporary relief with which the table and
the bottle flatter and seduce.  But his health continually declined, and
he grew more and more burthensome to himself.

To what I have formerly said of his writings may be added, that his
diction was often harsh, unskilfully laboured, and injudiciously
selected.  He affected the obsolete when it was not worthy of revival:
and he puts his words out of the common order, seeming to think, with
some later candidates for fame, that not to write prose is certainly to
write poetry.  His lines commonly are of slow motion, clogged and impeded
with clusters of consonants.  As men are often esteemed who cannot be
loved, so the poetry of Collins may sometimes extort praise when it gives
little pleasure.

Mr. Collins’s first production is added here from the _Poetical
Calendar_:—

                             TO MISS AURELIA C—R,
                   ON HER WEEPING AT HER SISTER’S WEDDING.

    “Cease, fair Aurelia, cease to mourn;
       Lament not Hannah’s happy state;
    You may be happy in your turn,
       And seize the treasure you regret.
    With Love united Hymen stands,
       And softly whispers to your charms,
    ‘Meet but your lover in my bands,
       You’ll find your sister in his arms.’”



DYER.


JOHN DYER, of whom I have no other account to give than his own letters,
published with Hughes’s correspondence, and the notes added by the
editor, have afforded me, was born in 1700, the second son of Robert Dyer
of Aberglasney, in Caermarthenshire, a solicitor of great capacity and
note.  He passed through Westminster school under the care of Dr. Freind,
and was then called home to be instructed in his father’s profession.
But his father died soon, and he took no delight in the study of the law;
but, having always amused himself with drawing, resolved to turn painter,
and became pupil to Mr. Richardson, an artist then of high reputation,
but now better known by his books than by his pictures.

Having studied a while under his master, he became, as he tells his
friend, an itinerant painter, and wandered about South Wales and the
parts adjacent; but he mingled poetry with painting, and about 1727
[1726] printed “Grongar Hill” in Lewis’s Miscellany.  Being, probably,
unsatisfied with his own proficiency, he, like other painters, travelled
to Italy; and coming back in 1740, published the “Ruins of Rome.”  If his
poem was written soon after his return, he did not make use of his
acquisitions in painting, whatever they might be; for decline of health
and love of study determined him to the Church.  He therefore entered
into orders; and, it seems, married about the same time a lady of the
name of Ensor; “whose grandmother,” says he, “was a Shakspeare, descended
from a brother of everybody’s Shakspeare;” by her, in 1756, he had a son
and three daughters living.

His ecclesiastical provision was for a long time but slender.  His first
patron, Mr. Harper, gave him, in 1741, Calthorp in Leicestershire, of
eighty pounds a year, on which he lived ten years, and then exchanged it
for Belchford, in Lincolnshire, of seventy-five.  His condition now began
to mend.  In 1751 Sir John Heathcote gave him Coningsby, of one hundred
and forty pounds a year; and in 1755 the Chancellor added Kirkby, of one
hundred and ten.  He complains that the repair of the house at Coningsby,
and other expenses, took away the profit.  In 1757 he published “The
Fleece,” his greatest poetical work; of which I will not suppress a
ludicrous story.  Dodsley the bookseller was one day mentioning it to a
critical visitor, with more expectation of success than the other could
easily admit.  In the conversation the author’s age was asked; and being
represented as advanced in life, “He will,” said the critic, “be buried
in woollen.”  He did not indeed long survive that publication, nor long
enjoy the increase of his preferments, for in 1758 he died.

Dyer is not a poet of bulk or dignity sufficient to require an elaborate
criticism.  “Grongar Hill” is the happiest of his productions: it is not
indeed very accurately written; but the scenes which it displays are so
pleasing, the images which they raise are so welcome to the mind, and the
reflections of the writer so consonant to the general sense or experience
of mankind, that when it is once read, it will be read again.  The idea
of the “Ruins of Rome” strikes more, but pleases less, and the title
raises greater expectation than the performance gratifies.  Some
passages, however, are conceived with the mind of a poet; as when, in the
neighbourhood of dilapidating edifices, he says,

             “The Pilgrim oft
    At dead of night, ’mid his orison hears
    Aghast the voice of Time, disparting tow’rs
    Tumbling all precipitate down dashed,
    Rattling around, loud thund’ring to the Moon.”

Of “The Fleece,” which never became popular, and is now universally
neglected, I can say little that is likely to recall it to attention.
The woolcomber and the poet appear to me such discordant natures, that an
attempt to bring them together is to _couple the serpent with the fowl_.
When Dyer, whose mind was not unpoetical, has done his utmost, by
interesting his reader in our native commodity by interspersing rural
imagery, and incidental digressions, by clothing small images in great
words, and by all the writer’s arts of delusion, the meanness naturally
adhering, and the irreverence habitually annexed to trade and
manufacture, sink him under insuperable oppression; and the disgust which
blank verse, encumbering and encumbered, superadds to an unpleasing
subject, soon repels the reader, however willing to be pleased.

Let me, however, honestly report whatever may counterbalance this weight
of censure.  I have been told that Akenside, who, upon a poetical
question, has a right to be heard, said, “That he would regulate his
opinion of the reigning taste by the fate of Dyer’s ‘Fleece;’ for, if
that were ill-received, he should not think it any longer reasonable to
expect fame from excellence.”



SHENSTONE.


WILLIAM SHENSTONE, the son of Thomas Shenstone and Anne Pen, was born in
November, 1714, at the Leasowes in Hales-Owen, one of those insulated
districts which, in the division of the kingdom, was appended, for some
reason not now discoverable, to a distant county; and which, though
surrounded by Warwickshire and Worcestershire, belongs to Shropshire,
though perhaps thirty miles distant from any other part of it.  He
learned to read of an old dame, whom his poem of the “Schoolmistress” has
delivered to posterity; and soon received such delight from books, that
he was always calling for fresh entertainment, and expected that, when
any of the family went to market, a new book should be brought him,
which, when it came, was in fondness carried to bed and laid by him.  It
is said, that, when his request had been neglected, his mother wrapped up
a piece of wood of the same form, and pacified him for the night.  As he
grew older, he went for a while to the Grammar-school in Hales-Owen, and
was placed afterwards with Mr. Crumpton, an eminent schoolmaster at
Solihul, where he distinguished himself by the quickness of his progress.

When he was young (June, 1724) he was deprived of his father, and soon
after (August, 1726) of his grandfather; and was, with his brother, who
died afterwards unmarried, left to the care of his grandmother, who
managed the estate.

From school he was sent in 1732 to Pembroke College in Oxford, a society
which for half a century has been eminent for English poetry and elegant
literature.  Here it appears that he found delight and advantage; for he
continued his name in the book ten years, though he took no degree.
After the first four years he put on the civilian’s gown, but without
showing any intention to engage in the profession.  About the time when
he went to Oxford, the death of his grandmother devolved his affairs to
the care of the Rev. Mr. Dolman, of Brome in Staffordshire, whose
attention he always mentioned with gratitude.  At Oxford he employed
himself upon English poetry; and in 1737 published a small Miscellany,
without his name.  He then for a time wandered about, to acquaint himself
with life, and was sometimes at London, sometimes at Bath, or any other
place of public resort; but he did not forget his poetry.  He published
in 1741 his “Judgment of Hercules,” addressed to Mr. Lyttelton, whose
interest he supported with great warmth at an election: this was next
year followed by the “Schoolmistress.”

Mr. Dolman, to whose care he was indebted for his ease and leisure, died
in 1745, and the care of his own fortune now fell upon him.  He tried to
escape it awhile, and lived at his house with his tenants, who were
distantly related; but, finding that imperfect possession inconvenient,
he took the whole estate into his own hands, more to the improvement of
its beauty than the increase of its produce.  Now was excited his delight
in rural pleasures and his ambition of rural elegance; he began from this
time to point his prospects, to diversify his surface, to entangle his
walks, and to wind his waters, which he did with such judgment and such
fancy as made his little domain the envy of the great and the admiration
of the skilful; a place to be visited by travellers and copied by
designers.  Whether to plant a walk in undulating curves, and to place a
bench at every turn where there is an object to catch the view, to make
the water run where it will be heard, and to stagnate where it will be
seen, to leave intervals where the eye will be pleased, and to thicken
the plantation where there is something to be hidden, demands any great
powers of mind, I will not inquire: perhaps a sullen and surly spectator
may think such performances rather the sport than the business of human
reason.  But it must be at least confessed that to embellish the form of
Nature is an innocent amusement, and some praise must be allowed, by the
most supercilious observer, to him who does best what such multitudes are
contending to do well.

This praise was the praise of Shenstone; but, like all other modes of
felicity, it was not enjoyed without its abatements.  Lyttelton was his
neighbour and his rival, whose empire, spacious and opulent, looked with
disdain on the _petty state_ that _appeared behind it_.  For a while the
inhabitants of Hagley affected to tell their acquaintance of the little
fellow that was trying to make himself admired; but when by degrees the
Leasowes forced themselves into notice, they took care to defeat the
curiosity which they could not suppress by conducting their visitants
perversely to inconvenient points of view, and introducing them at the
wrong end of a walk to detect a deception; injuries of which Shenstone
would heavily complain.  Where there is emulation there will be vanity;
and where there is vanity there will be folly.

The pleasure of Shenstone was all in his eye; he valued what he valued
merely for its looks.  Nothing raised his indignation more than to ask if
there were any fishes in his water.  His house was mean, and he did not
improve it; his care was of his grounds.  When he came home from his
walks, he might find his floors flooded by a shower through the broken
roof; but could spare no money for its reparation.  In time his expenses
brought clamours about him that overpowered the lamb’s bleat and the
linnet’s song, and his groves were haunted by beings very different from
fauns and fairies.  He spent his estate in adorning it, and his death was
probably hastened by his anxieties.  He was a lamp that spent its oil in
blazing.  It is said that, if he had lived a little longer, he would have
been assisted by a pension: such bounty could not have been ever more
properly bestowed; but that it was ever asked is not certain; it is too
certain that it never was enjoyed.  He died at Leasowes, of a putrid
fever, about five on Friday morning, February 11, 1763, and was buried by
the side of his brother in the churchyard of Hales-Owen.

He was never married, though he might have obtained the lady, whoever she
was, to whom his “Pastoral Ballad” was addressed.  He is represented by
his friend Dodsley as a man of great tenderness and generosity, kind to
all that were within his influence; but, if once offended, not easily
appeased; inattentive to economy, and careless of his expenses; in his
person he was larger than the middle-size, with something clumsy in his
form; very negligent of his clothes, and remarkable for wearing his grey
hair in a particular manner, for he held that the fashion was no rule of
dress, and that every man was to suit his appearance to his natural form.
His mind was not very comprehensive, nor his curiosity active; he had no
value for those parts of knowledge which he had not himself cultivated.
His life was unstained by any crime.  The “Elegy on Jesse,” which has
been supposed to relate an unfortunate and criminal amour of his own, was
known by his friends to have been suggested by the story of Miss Godfrey
in Richardson’s “Pamela.”

What Gray thought of his character, from the perusal of his Letters, was
this:—

    “I have read, too, an octavo volume of Shenstone’s Letters.  Poor
    man! he was always wishing for money, for fame, and other
    distinctions; and his whole philosophy consisted in living against
    his will in retirement, and in a place which his taste had adorned,
    but which he only enjoyed when people of note came to see and commend
    it.  His correspondence is about nothing else but this place and his
    own writings, with two or three neighbouring clergymen, who wrote
    verses too.”

His poems consist of elegies, odes, and ballads, humorous sallies, and
moral pieces.  His conception of an Elegy he has in his Preface very
judiciously and discriminately explained.  It is, according to his
account, the effusion of a contemplative mind, sometimes plaintive, and
always serious, and therefore superior to the glitter of slight
ornaments.  His compositions suit not ill to this description.  His
topics of praise are the domestic virtues, and his thoughts are pure and
simple, but wanting combination; they want variety.  The peace of
solitude, the innocence of inactivity, and the unenvied security of an
humble station, can fill but a few pages.  That of which the essence is
uniformity will be soon described.  His elegies have, therefore, too much
resemblance of each other.  The lines are sometimes, such as Elegy
requires, smooth and easy; but to this praise his claim is not constant;
his diction is often harsh, improper, and affected, his words ill-coined
or ill-chosen, and his phrase unskilfully inverted.

The Lyric Poems are almost all of the light and airy kind, such as trip
lightly and nimbly along, without the load of any weighty meaning.  From
these, however, “Rural Elegance” has some right to be excepted.  I once
heard it praised by a very learned lady; and, though the lines are
irregular, and the thoughts diffused with too much verbosity, yet it
cannot be denied to contain both philosophical argument and poetical
spirit.  Of the rest I cannot think any excellent; the “Skylark” pleases
me best, which has, however, more of the epigram than of the ode.

But the four parts of his “Pastoral Ballad” demand particular notice.  I
cannot but regret that it is pastoral: an intelligent reader acquainted
with the scenes of real life sickens at the mention of the _crook_, the
_pipe_, the _sheep_, and the _kids_, which it is not necessary to bring
forward to notice; for the poet’s art is selection, and he ought to show
the beauties without the grossness of the country life.  His stanza seems
to have been chosen in imitation of Rowe’s “Despairing Shepherd.”  In the
first are two passages, to which if any mind denies its sympathy, it has
no acquaintance with love or nature:—

    “I prized every hour that went by,
       Beyond all that had pleased me before:
    But now they are past, and I sigh,
       And I grieve that I prized them no more.

    When forced the fair nymph to forego,
       What anguish I felt in my heart!
    Yet I thought (but it might not be so)
       ’Twas with pain that she saw me depart.

    She gazed, as I slowly withdrew,
       My path I could hardly discern;
    So sweetly she bade me adieu,
       I thought that she bade me return.”

In the second this passage has its prettiness; though it be not equal to
the former:—

    “I have found out a gift for my fair:
       I have found where the wood pigeons breed:
    But let me that plunder forbear,
       She will say ’twas a barbarous deed:

    For he ne’er could be true, she averred,
       Who could rob a poor bird of its young;
    And I loved her the more when I heard
       Such tenderness fall from her tongue.”

In the third he mentions the common-places of amorous poetry with some
address:—

    “’Tis his with mock passion to glow!
       ’Tis his in smooth tales to unfold,
    How her face is as bright as the snow,
       And her bosom, be sure, is as cold:

    How the nightingales labour the strain,
       With the notes of this charmer to vie:
    How they vary their accents in vain,
       Repine at her triumphs, and die.”

In the fourth I find nothing better than this natural strain of Hope:—

    “Alas! from the day that we met,
       What hope of an end to my woes,
    When I cannot endure to forget
       The glance that undid my repose?

    Yet Time may diminish the pain:
       The flower, and the shrub, and the tree,
    Which I reared for her pleasure in vain,
       In time may have comfort for me.”

His “Levities” are by their title exempted from the severities of
criticism, yet it may be remarked in a few words that his humour is
sometimes gross, and seldom sprightly.

Of the Moral Poems, the first is the “Choice of Hercules,” from Xenophon.
The numbers are smooth, the diction elegant, and the thoughts just; but
something of vigour is still to be wished, which it might have had by
brevity and compression.  His “Fate of Delicacy” has an air of gaiety,
but not a very pointed and general moral.  His blank verses, those that
can read them, may probably find to be like the blank verses of his
neighbours.  “Love and Honour” is derived from the old ballad, “Did you
not hear of a Spanish Lady?”—I wish it well enough to wish it were in
rhyme.

The “Schoolmistress,” of which I know not what claim it has to stand
among the Moral Works, is surely the most pleasing of Shenstone’s
performances.  The adoption of a particular style, in light and short
compositions, contributes much to the increase of pleasure: we are
entertained at once with two imitations of nature in the sentiments, of
the original author in the style, and between them the mind is kept in
perpetual employment.

The general recommendation of Shenstone is easiness and simplicity; his
general defect is want of comprehension and variety.  Had his mind been
better stored with knowledge, whether he could have been great, I know
not; he could certainly have been agreeable.



YOUNG.


THE following life was written, at my request, by a gentleman (Mr.
Herbert Croft) who had better information than I could easily have
obtained; and the public will perhaps wish that I had solicited and
obtained more such favours from him:—

    “Dear Sir,—In consequence of our different conversations about
    authentic materials for the Life of Young, I send you the following
    details:”—

Of great men something must always be said to gratify curiosity.  Of the
illustrious author of the “Night Thoughts” much has been told of which
there never could have been proofs, and little care appears to have been
taken to tell that of which proofs, with little trouble, might have been
procured.

Edward Young was born at Upham, near Winchester, in June, 1681.  He was
the son of Edward Young, at that time Fellow of Winchester College, and
Rector of Upham, who was the son of Jo. Young, of Woodhay, in Berkshire,
styled by Wood, _gentleman_.  In September, 1682, the poet’s father was
collated to the prebend of Gillingham Minor, in the church of Sarum, by
Bishop Ward.  When Ward’s faculties were impaired through age, his duties
were necessarily performed by others.  We learn from Wood that, at a
visitation of Sprat’s, July the 12th, 1686, the prebendary preached a
Latin sermon, afterwards published, with which the Bishop was so pleased,
that he told the chapter he was concerned to find the preacher had one of
the worst prebends in their Church.  Some time after this, in consequence
of his merit and reputation, or of the interest of Lord Bradford, to
whom, in 1702, he dedicated two volumes of sermons, he was appointed
chaplain to King William and Queen Mary, and preferred to the Deanery of
Sarum.  Jacob, who wrote in 1720, says, “he was Chaplain and Clerk of the
Closet to the late Queen, who honoured him by standing godmother to the
poet.”  His Fellowship of Winchester he resigned in favour of a gentleman
of the name of Harris, who married his only daughter.  The Dean died at
Sarum, after a short illness, in 1705, in the sixty-third year of his
age.  On the Sunday after his decease, Bishop Burnet preached at the
cathedral, and began his sermon with saying, “Death has been of late
walking round us, and making breach upon breach upon us, and has now
carried away the head of this body with a stroke, so that he, whom you
saw a week ago distributing the holy mysteries, is now laid in the dust.
But he still lives in the many excellent directions he has left us both
how to live and how to die.”

The dean placed his son upon the foundation at Winchester College, where
he had himself been educated.  At this school Edward Young remained till
the election after his eighteenth birthday, the period at which those
upon the foundation are superannuated.  Whether he did not betray his
abilities early in life, or his masters had not skill enough to discover
in their pupil any marks of genius for which he merited reward, or no
vacancy at Oxford offered them an opportunity to bestow upon him the
reward provided for merit by William of Wykeham; certain it is, that to
an Oxford fellowship our poet did not succeed.  By chance, or by choice,
New College cannot claim the honour of numbering among its fellows him
who wrote the “Night Thoughts.”

On the 13th of October, 1703, he was entered an independent member of New
College, that he might live at little expense in the warden’s lodgings,
who was a particular friend of his father’s, till he should be qualified
to stand for a fellowship at All Souls.  In a few months the warden of
New College died.  He then removed to Corpus College.  The president of
this society, from regard also for his father, invited him thither, in
order to lessen his academical expenses.  In 1708 he was nominated to a
law-fellowship at All Souls by Archbishop Tenison, into whose hands it
came by devolution.  Such repeated patronage, while it justifies Burnet’s
praise of the father, reflects credit on the conduct of the son.  The
manner in which it was exerted seems to prove that the father did not
leave behind him much wealth.

On the 23rd of April, 1714, Young took his degree of bachelor of civil
laws, and his doctor’s degree on the 10th of June, 1719.  Soon after he
went to Oxford he discovered, it is said, an inclination for pupils.
Whether he ever commenced tutor is not known.  None has hitherto boasted
to have received his academical instruction from the author of “Night
Thoughts.”  It is probable that his College was proud of him no less as a
scholar than as a poet; for in 1716, when the foundation of the
Codrington Library was laid, two years after he had taken his bachelor’s
degree, Young was appointed to speak the Latin oration.  This is at least
particular for being dedicated in English “To the Ladies of the
Codrington Family.”  To these ladies he says “that he was unavoidably
flung into a singularity, by being obliged to write an epistle dedicatory
void of commonplace, and such an one was never published before by any
author whatever; that this practice absolved them from any obligation of
reading what was presented to them; and that the bookseller approved of
it, because it would make people stare, was absurd enough and perfectly
right.”  Of this oration there is no appearance in his own edition of his
works; and prefixed to an edition by Curll and Tonson, in 1741, is a
letter from Young to Curll, if we may credit Curll, dated December the
9th, 1739, wherein he says that he has not leisure to review what he
formerly wrote, and adds, “I have not the ‘Epistle to Lord Lansdowne.’
If you will take my advice, I would have you omit that, and the oration
on Codrington.  I think the collection will sell better without them.”

There are who relate that, when first Young found himself independent,
and his own master at All Souls, he was not the ornament to religion and
morality which he afterwards became.  The authority of his father,
indeed, had ceased, some time before, by his death; and Young was
certainly not ashamed to be patronised by the infamous Wharton.  But
Wharton befriended in Young, perhaps, the poet, and particularly the
tragedian.  If virtuous authors must be patronised only by virtuous
peers, who shall point them out?  Yet Pope is said by Ruffhead to have
told Warburton that “Young had much of a sublime genius, though without
common sense; so that his genius, having no guide, was perpetually liable
to degenerate into bombast.  This made him pass a _foolish youth_, the
sport of peers and poets: but his having a very good heart enabled him to
support the clerical character when he assumed it, first with decency,
and afterwards with honour.”

They who think ill of Young’s morality in the early part of his life may
perhaps be wrong; but Tindal could not err in his opinion of Young’s
warmth and ability in the cause of religion.  Tindal used to spend much
of his time at All Souls.  “The other boys,” said the atheist, “I can
always answer, because I always know whence they have their arguments,
which I have read a hundred times; but that fellow Young is continually
pestering me with something of his own.”

After all, Tindal and the censurers of Young may be reconcilable.  Young
might, for two or three years, have tried that kind of life, in which his
natural principles would not suffer him to wallow long.  If this were so,
he has left behind him not only his evidence in favour of virtue, but the
potent testimony of experience against vice.  We shall soon see that one
of his earliest productions was more serious than what comes from the
generality of unfledged poets.

Young perhaps ascribed the good fortune of Addison to the “Poem to his
Majesty,” presented with a copy of verses, to Somers: and hoped that he
also might soar to wealth and honours on wings of the same kind.  His
first poetical flight was when Queen Anne called up to the House of Lords
the sons of the Earls of Northampton and Aylesbury, and added, in one
day, ten others to the number of Peers.  In order to reconcile the people
to one, at least, of the new lords, he published, in 1712, “An Epistle to
the Right Honourable George Lord Lansdowne.”  In this composition the
poet pours out his panegyric with the extravagance of a young man, who
thinks his present stock of wealth will never be exhausted.  The poem
seems intended also to reconcile the public to the late peace.  This is
endeavoured to be done by showing that men are slain in war, and that in
peace “harvests wave, and commerce swells her sail.”  If this be
humanity, for which he meant it, is it politics?  Another purpose of this
epistle appears to have been to prepare the public for the reception of
some tragedy he might have in hand.  His lordship’s patronage, he says,
will not let him “repent his passion for the stage;” and the particular
praise bestowed on _Othello_ and _Oroonoko_ looks as if some such
character as Zanga was even then in contemplation.  The affectionate
mention of the death of his friend Harrison of New College, at the close
of this poem, is an instance of Young’s art, which displayed itself so
wonderfully some time afterwards in the “Night Thoughts,” of making the
public a party in his private sorrow.  Should justice call upon you to
censure this poem, it ought at least to be remembered that he did not
insert it in his works; and that in the letter to Curll, as we have seen,
he advises its omission.  The booksellers, in the late body of English
poetry, should have distinguished what was deliberately rejected by the
respective authors.  This I shall be careful to do with regard to Young.
“I think,” says he, “the following pieces in _four_ volumes to be the
most excusable of all that I have written; and I wish _less apology_ was
less needful for these.  As there is no recalling what is got abroad, the
pieces here republished I have revised and corrected, and rendered them
as _pardonable_ as it was in my power to do.”

Shall the gates of repentance be shut only against literary sinners?

When Addison published “Cato” in 1713, Young had the honour of prefixing
to it a recommendatory copy of verses.  This is one of the pieces which
the author of the “Night Thoughts” did not republish.

On the appearance of his poem on the “Last Day,” Addison did not return
Young’s compliment; but “The Englishman” of October 29, 1713, which was
probably written by Addison, speaks handsomely of this poem.  The “Last
Day” was published soon after the peace.  The Vice-Chancellor’s
_imprimatur_ (for it was printed at Oxford) is dated the 19th, 1713.
From the exordium, Young appears to have spent some time on the
composition of it.  While other bards “with Britain’s hero set their
souls on fire,” he draws, he says, a deeper scene.  Marlborough _had
been_ considered by Britain as her _hero_; but, when the “Last Day” was
published, female cabal had blasted for a time the laurels of Blenheim.
This serious poem was finished by Young as early as 1710, before he was
thirty; for part of it is printed in the _Tatler_.  It was inscribed to
the queen, in a dedication, which, for some reason, he did not admit into
his works.  It tells her that his only title to the great honour he now
does himself is the obligation which he formerly received from her royal
indulgence.  Of this obligation nothing is now known, unless he alluded
to her being his godmother.  He is said indeed to have been engaged at a
settled stipend as a writer for the Court.  In Swift’s “Rhapsody on
Poetry” are these lines, speaking of the Court:—

    “Whence Gay was banished in disgrace,
    Where Pope will never show his face,
    Where Y— must torture his invention
    To flatter knaves, or lose his pension.”

That Y— means Young seems clear from four other lines in the same poem:—

    “Attend, ye Popes, and Youngs, and Gays,
    And tune your harps and strew your bays;
    Your panegyrics here provide;
    You cannot err on flattery’s side.”

Yet who shall say with certainty that Young was a pensioner?  In all
modern periods of this country, have not the writers on one side been
regularly called Hirelings, and on the other Patriots?

Of the dedication the complexion is clearly political.  It speaks in the
highest terms of the late peace; it gives her Majesty praise indeed for
her victories, but says that the author is more pleased to see her rise
from this lower world, soaring above the clouds, passing the first and
second heavens, and leaving the fixed stars behind her; nor will he lose
her there, he says, but keep her still in view through the boundless
spaces on the other side of creation, in her journey towards eternal
bliss, till he behold the heaven of heavens open, and angels receiving
and conveying her still onward from the stretch of his imagination, which
tires in her pursuit, and falls back again to earth.

The queen was soon called away from this lower world, to a place where
human praise or human flattery, even less general than this, are of
little consequence.  If Young thought the dedication contained only the
praise of truth, he should not have omitted it in his works.  Was he
conscious of the exaggeration of party?  Then he should not have written
it.  The poem itself is not without a glance towards politics,
notwithstanding the subject.  The cry that the Church was in danger had
not yet subsided.  The “Last Day,” written by a layman, was much approved
by the ministry and their friends.

Before the queen’s death, “The Force of Religion, or Vanquished Love,”
was sent into the world.  This poem is founded on the execution of Lady
Jane Grey and her husband, Lord Guildford, 1554, a story chosen for the
subject of a tragedy by Edmund Smith, and wrought into a tragedy by Rowe.
The dedication of it to the Countess of Salisbury does not appear in his
own edition.  He hopes it may be some excuse for his presumption that the
story could not have been read without thoughts of the Countess of
Salisbury, though it had been dedicated to another.  “To behold,” he
proceeds, “a person _only_ virtuous, stirs in us a prudent regret; to
behold a person _only_ amiable to the sight, warms us with a religious
indignation; but to turn our eyes to a Countess of Salisbury, gives us
pleasure and improvement; it works a sort of miracle, occasions the bias
of our nature to fall off from sin, and makes our very senses and
affections converts to our religion, and promoters of our duty.”  His
flattery was as ready for the other sex as for ours, and was at least as
well adapted.

August the 27th, 1714, Pope writes to his friend Jervas, that he is just
arrived from Oxford; that every one is much concerned for the queen’s
death, but that no panegyrics are ready yet for the king.  Nothing like
friendship has yet taken place between Pope and Young, for, soon after
the event which Pope mentions, Young published a poem on the queen’s
death, and his Majesty’s accession to the throne.  It is inscribed to
Addison, then secretary to the Lords Justices.  Whatever were the
obligations which he had formerly received from Anne, the poet appears to
aim at something of the same sort from George.  Of the poem the intention
seems to have been, to show that he had the same extravagant strain of
praise for a king as for a queen.  To discover, at the very onset of a
foreigner’s reign, that the gods bless his new subjects in such a king is
something more than praise.  Neither was this deemed one of his excusable
pieces.  We do not find it in his works.

Young’s father had been well acquainted with Lady Anne Wharton, the first
wife of Thomas Wharton, Esq., afterwards Marquis of Wharton; a lady
celebrated for her poetical talents by Burnet and by Waller.

To the Dean of Sarum’s visitation sermon, already mentioned, were added
some verses “by that excellent poetess, Mrs. Anne Wharton,” upon its
being translated into English, at the instance of Waller by Atwood.
Wharton, after he became ennobled, did not drop the son of his old
friend.  In him, during the short time he lived, Young found a patron,
and in his dissolute descendant a friend and a companion.  The marquis
died in April, 1715.  In the beginning of the next year, the young
marquis set out upon his travels, from which he returned in about a
twelvemonth.  The beginning of 1717 carried him to Ireland: where, says
the Biographia, “on the score of his extraordinary qualities, he had the
honour done him of being admitted, though under age, to take his seat in
the House of Lords.”  With this unhappy character it is not unlikely that
Young went to Ireland.  From his letter to Richardson on “Original
Composition,” it is clear he was, at some period of his life, in that
country.  “I remember,” says he, in that letter, speaking of Swift, “as I
and others were taking with him an evening walk, about a mile out of
Dublin, he stopped short; we passed on; but perceiving he did not follow
us, I went back, and found him fixed as a statue, and earnestly gazing
upward at a noble elm, which in its uppermost branches was much withered
and decayed.  Pointing at it, he said, ‘I shall be like that tree, I
shall die at top.’”  Is it not probable, that this visit to Ireland was
paid when he had an opportunity of going thither with his avowed friend
and patron?

From “The Englishman” it appears that a tragedy by Young was in the
theatre so early as 1713.  Yet _Busiris_ was not brought upon Drury Lane
stage till 1719.  It was inscribed to the Duke of Newcastle, “because the
late instances he had received of his grace’s undeserved and uncommon
favour, in an affair of some consequence, foreign to the theatre, had
taken from him the privilege of choosing a patron.”  The Dedication he
afterwards suppressed.

_Busiris_ was followed in the year 1721 by _The Revenge_.  He dedicated
this famous tragedy to the Duke of Wharton.  “Your Grace,” says the
Dedication, “has been pleased to make yourself accessory to the following
scenes, not only by suggesting the most beautiful incident in them, but
by making all possible provision for the success of the whole.”  That his
grace should have suggested the incident to which he alludes, whatever
that incident might have been, is not unlikely.  The last mental exertion
of the superannuated young man, in his quarters at Lerida, in Spain, was
some scenes of a tragedy on the story of Mary Queen of Scots.

Dryden dedicated “Marriage a la Mode” to Wharton’s infamous relation
Rochester, whom he acknowledges not only as the defender of his poetry,
but as the promoter of his fortune.  Young concludes his address to
Wharton thus—“My present fortune is his bounty, and my future his care;
which I will venture to say will be always remembered to his honour,
since he, I know, intended his generosity as an encouragement to merit,
though through his very pardonable partiality to one who bears him so
sincere a duty and respect, I happen to receive the benefit of it.”  That
he ever had such a patron as Wharton, Young took all the pains in his
power to conceal from the world, by excluding this dedication from his
works.  He should have remembered that he at the same time concealed his
obligation to Wharton for _the most beautiful incident_ in what is surely
not his least beautiful composition.  The passage just quoted is, in a
poem afterwards addressed to Walpole, literally copied:

    “Be this thy partial smile from censure free!
    ’Twas meant for merit, though it fell on me.”

While Young, who, in his “Love of Fame,” complains grievously how often
“dedications wash an Æthiop white,” was painting an amiable Duke of
Wharton in perishable prose, Pope was, perhaps, beginning to describe the
“scorn and wonder of his days” in lasting verse.  To the patronage of
such a character, had Young studied men as much as Pope, he would have
known how little to have trusted.  Young, however, was certainly indebted
to it for something material; and the duke’s regard for Young, added to
his lust of praise, procured to All Souls College a donation, which was
not forgotten by the poet when he dedicated _The Revenge_.

It will surprise you to see me cite second Atkins, Case 136, Stiles
_versus_ the Attorney-General, March 14, 1740, as authority for the life
of a poet.  But biographers do not always find such certain guides as the
oaths of the persons whom they record.  Chancellor Hardwicke was to
determine whether two annuities, granted by the Duke of Wharton to Young,
were for legal considerations.  One was dated the 24th March, 1719, and
accounted for his grace’s bounty in a style princely and commendable, if
not legal—“considering that the public good is advanced by the
encouragement of learning and the polite arts, and being pleased therein
with the attempts of Dr. Young, in consideration thereof, and of the love
I bear him, &c.”  The other was dated the 10th of July, 1722.

Young, on his examination, swore that he quitted the Exeter family, and
refused an annuity of £100 which had been offered him for life if he
would continue tutor to Lord Burleigh, upon the pressing solicitations of
the Duke of Wharton, and his grace’s assurances of providing for him in a
much more ample manner.  It also appeared that the duke had given him a
bond for £600 dated the 15th of March, 1721, in consideration of his
taking several journeys, and being at great expenses, in order to be
chosen member of the House of Commons, at the duke’s desire, and in
consideration of his not taking two livings of £200 and £400 in the gift
of All Souls College, on his grace’s promises of serving and advancing
him in the world.

Of his adventures in the Exeter family I am unable to give any account.
The attempt to get into Parliament was at Cirencester, where Young stood
a contested election.  His grace discovered in him talents for oratory as
well as for poetry.  Nor was this judgment wrong.  Young, after he took
orders, became a very popular preacher, and was much followed for the
grace and animation of his delivery.  By his oratorical talents he was
once in his life, according to the Biographia, deserted.  As he was
preaching in his turn at St. James’s, he plainly perceived it was out of
his power to command the attention of his audience.  This so affected the
feelings of the preacher, that he sat back in the pulpit, and burst into
tears.  But we must pursue his poetical life.

In 1719 he lamented the death of Addison, in a letter addressed to their
common friend Tickell.  For the secret history of the following lines, if
they contain any, it is now vain to seek:

    “_In joy once joined_, in sorrow, now, for years—
    Partner in grief, and brother of my tears,
    Tickell, accept this verse, thy mournful due.”

From your account of Tickell it appears that he and Young used to
“communicate to each other whatever verses they wrote, even to the least
things.”

In 1719 appeared a “Paraphrase on Part of the Book of Job.”  Parker, to
whom it is dedicated, had not long, by means of the seals, been qualified
for a patron.  Of this work the author’s opinion may be known from his
letter to Curll: “You seem, in the Collection you propose, to have
omitted what I think may claim the first place in it; I mean ‘a
Translation from part of Job,’ printed by Mr. Tonson.”  The Dedication,
which was only suffered to appear in Mr. Tonson’s edition, while it
speaks with satisfaction of his present retirement, seems to make an
unusual struggle to escape from retirement.  But every one who sings in
the dark does not sing from joy.  It is addressed, in no common strain 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 possible to fix the dates without
the assistance of first editions, which, as you had occasion to observe
in your account of Dryden, are with difficulty found.  We must then have
referred to the poems, to discover when they were written.  For these
internal notes of time we should not have referred in vain.  The first
Satire laments, that “Guilt’s chief foe in Addison is fled.”  The second,
addressing himself, asks:—

    “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 Universal Passion.”  These passages fix the appearance of
the first to about 1725, the time at which it came out.  As Young seldom
suffered his pen to dry after he had once dipped it in poetry, we may
conclude that he began his Satires soon after he had written the
“Paraphrase on Job.”  The last Satire was certainly finished in the
beginning of the year 1726.  In December, 1725, the King, in his passage
from Helvoetsluys, escaped with great difficulty from a storm by landing
at Rye; and the conclusion of the Satire turns the escape into a miracle,
in such an encomiastic strain of compliment as poetry too often seeks to
pay to royalty.  From the sixth of these poems we learn,

    “’Midst empire’s charms, how Carolina’s heart
    Glowed with the love of virtue and of art.”

Since the grateful poet tells us, in the next couplet,

    “Her favour is diffused to that degree,
    Excess of goodness! it has dawned on me.”

Her Majesty had stood godmother, and given her name, to the daughter of
the lady whom Young married in 1731; and had perhaps shown some attention
to Lady Elizabeth’s future husband.

The fifth Satire, “On Women,” was not published till 1727; and the sixth
not till 1728.

To these poems, when, in 1728, he gathered them into one publication, he
prefixed a Preface, in which he observes that “no man can converse much
in the world, but at what he meets with he must either be insensible or
grieve, or be angry or smile.  Now to smile at it, and turn it into
ridicule,” he adds, “I think most eligible, as it hurts ourselves least,
and gives vice and folly the greatest offence.  Laughing at the
misconduct of the world will, in a great measure, ease us of any more
disagreeable passion about it.  One passion is more effectually driven
out by another than by reason, whatever some teach.”  So wrote, and so of
course thought, the lively and witty satirist at the grave age of almost
fifty, who, many years earlier in life, wrote the “Last Day.”  After all,
Swift pronounced of these Satires, that they should either have been more
angry or more merry.

Is it not somewhat singular that Young preserved, without any palliation,
this Preface, so bluntly decisive in favour of laughing at the world, in
the same collection of his works which contains the mournful, angry,
gloomy “Night Thoughts!”  At the conclusion of the Preface he applies
Plato’s beautiful fable of the “Birth of Love” to modern poetry, with the
addition, “that Poetry, like Love, is a little subject to blindness,
which makes her mistake her way to preferments and honours; and that she
retains a dutiful admiration of her father’s family; 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
something like blindness in the flattery which he sometimes forced her,
and her sister Prose, to utter?  She was always, indeed, taught by him to
entertain a most dutiful admiration of riches; but surely Young, though
nearly related to Poetry, had no connection 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 Universal
Passion” he acquired no vulgar fortune—more than three thousand pounds.
A considerable sum had already been swallowed up in the South Sea.  For
this loss he took the vengeance of an author.  His Muse makes poetical
use more than once of a South Sea Dream.

It is related by Mr. Spence, in his “Manuscript Anecdotes,” on the
authority of Mr. Rawlinson, that Young, upon the publication of his
“Universal Passion,” received from the Duke of Grafton two thousand
pounds; and that, when one of his friends exclaimed, “Two thousand pounds
for a poem!” he said it was the best bargain he ever made in his life,
for the poem was worth four thousand.  This story may be true; but it
seems to have been raised from the two answers of Lord Burghley and Sir
Philip Sidney in Spenser’s Life.

After inscribing his Satires, not perhaps without the hopes of
preferments and honours, to such 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 addressed a poem to
Sir Robert Walpole, of which the title sufficiently explains the
intention.  If Young must be acknowledged a ready celebrator, he did not
endeavour, or did not choose, to be a lasting one.  “The Instalment” is
among the pieces he did not admit into the number of his _excusable
writings_.  Yet it contains a couplet which pretends to pant after the
power of bestowing immortality:—

    “Oh! how I long, enkindled by the theme,
    In deep eternity to launch thy name!”

The bounty of the former reign seems to have been continued, possibly
increased, in this.  Whatever it might have been, the poet thought he
deserved it; for he was not ashamed to acknowledge what, without his
acknowledgment, would now perhaps never have been known:—

    “My breast, O Walpole, glows with grateful fire.
    The streams of royal bounty, turned by thee,
    Refresh the dry remains of poesy.”

If the purity of modern patriotism will term Young a pensioner, it must
at least be confessed he was a grateful one.

The reign of the new monarch was ushered in by Young with “Ocean, an
Ode.”  The hint of it was taken from the royal speech, which recommended
the increase and the encouragement of the seamen; that they might be
“invited, rather than compelled by force and violence, to enter into the
service of their country”—a plan which humanity must lament that policy
has not even yet been able, or willing, to carry into execution.
Prefixed to the original publication were an “Ode to the King, Pater
Patriæ,” and an “Essay on Lyric Poetry.”  It is but justice to confess
that he preserved neither of them; and that the Ode itself, which in the
first edition, and in the last, consists of seventy-three stanzas, in the
author’s own edition is reduced to forty-nine.  Among the omitted
passages is a “Wish,” that concluded the poem, which few would have
suspected Young of forming; and of which few, after having formed it,
would confess something like their shame by suppression.  It stood
originally so high in the author’s opinion, that he entitled the poem,
“Ocean, an Ode.  Concluding with a Wish.”  This wish consists of thirteen
stanzas.  The first runs thus:—

          “O may I _steal_
          Along the _vale_
    Of humble life, secure from foes!
          My friend sincere,
          My judgment clear,
    And gentle business my repose!”

The three last stanzas are not more remarkable for just rhymes; but,
altogether, they will make rather a curious page in the life of Young:—

          “Prophetic schemes,
          And golden dreams,
    May I, unsanguine, cast away!
          Have what I _have_,
          And live, not _leave_,
    Enamoured of the present day!

          “My hours my own!
          My faults unknown!
    My chief revenue in content!
          Then leave one _beam_
          Of honest _fame_!
    And scorn the laboured monument!

          “Unhurt my urn
          Till that great TURN
    When mighty Nature’s self shall die,
          Time cease to glide,
          With human pride,
    Sunk in the ocean of eternity!”

It is whimsical that he, who was soon to bid adieu to rhyme, should fix
upon a measure in which rhyme abounds even to satiety.  Of this he said,
in his “Essay on Lyric Poetry,” prefixed to the poem—“For the more
_harmony_ likewise I chose the frequent return of rhyme, which laid me
under great difficulties.  But difficulties overcome give grace and
pleasure.  Nor can I account for the _pleasure of rhyme in general_ (of
which the moderns are too fond) but from this truth.”  Yet the moderns
surely deserve not much censure for their fondness of what, by their own
confession, affords pleasure, and abounds in harmony.  The next paragraph
in his Essay did not occur to him when he talked of “that great turn” in
the stanza just quoted.  “But then the writer must take care that the
difficulty is overcome.  That is, he must make rhyme consistent with as
perfect sense and expression as could be expected if he was perfectly
free from that shackle.”  Another part of this Essay will convict the
following stanza of what every reader will discover in it “involuntary
burlesque:—

          “The northern blast,
          The shattered mast,
    The syrt, the whirlpool, and the rock,
          The breaking spout,
          The _stars gone out_,
    The boiling strait, the monster’s shock.”

But would the English poets fill quite so many volumes if all their
productions were to be tried, like this, by an elaborate essay on each
particular species of poetry of which they exhibit specimens?

If Young be not a lyric poet, he is at least a critic in that sort of
poetry; and, if his lyric poetry can be proved bad, it was first proved
so by his own criticism.  This surely is candid.

Milbourne was styled by Pope “the fairest of critics,” only because he
exhibited his own version of “Virgil” to be compared with Dryden’s, which
he condemned, and with which every reader had it not otherwise in his
power to compare it.  Young was surely not the most unfair of poets for
prefixing to a lyric composition an “Essay on Lyric Poetry,” so just and
impartial as to condemn himself.

We shall soon come to a work, before which we find indeed no critical
essay, but which disdains to shrink from the touchstone of the severest
critic; and which certainly, as I remember to have heard you say, if it
contains some of the worst, contains also some of the best things in the
language.

Soon after the appearance of “Ocean,” when he was almost fifty, Young
entered into orders.  In April, 1728, not long after he had put on the
gown, he was appointed chaplain to George II.

The tragedy of _The Brothers_, which was already in rehearsal, he
immediately withdrew from the stage.  The managers resigned it with some
reluctance to the delicacy of the new clergyman.  The Epilogue to _The
Brothers_, the only appendages to any of his three plays which he added
himself, is, I believe, the only one of the kind.  He calls it an
historical Epilogue.  Finding that “Guilt’s dreadful close his narrow
scene denied,” he, in a manner, continues the tragedy in the Epilogue,
and relates how Rome revenged the shade of Demetrius, and punished
Perseus “for this night’s deed.”

Of Young’s taking orders something is told by the biographer of Pope,
which places the easiness and simplicity of the poet in a singular light.
When he determined on the Church he did not address himself to Sherlock,
to Atterbury, or to Hare, for the best instructions in theology, but to
Pope, who, in a youthful frolic, advised the diligent perusal of Thomas
Aquinas.  With this treasure Young retired from interruption to an
obscure place in the suburbs.  His poetical guide to godliness hearing
nothing of him during half a year, and apprehending he might have carried
the jest too far, sought after him, and found him just in time to prevent
what Ruffhead calls “an irretrievable derangement.”

That attachment to his favourite study, which made him think a poet the
surest guide to his new profession left him little doubt whether poetry
was the surest path to its honours and preferments.  Not long indeed
after he took orders he published in prose (1728) “A True Estimate of
Human Life,” dedicated, notwithstanding the Latin quotations with which
it abounds, to the Queen; and a sermon preached before the House of
Commons, 1729, on the martyrdom of King Charles, entitled, “An Apology
for Princes; or, the Reverence due to Government.”  But the “Second
Course,” the counterpart of his “Estimate,” without which it cannot be
called “A True Estimate,” though in 1728 it was announced as “soon to be
published,” never appeared, and his old friends the Muses were not
forgotten.  In 1730 he relapsed to poetry, and sent into the world
“Imperium Pelagi: a Naval Lyric, written in imitation of Pindar’s Spirit,
occasioned by his Majesty’s return from Hanover, September, 1729, and the
succeeding peace.”  It is inscribed to the Duke of Chandos.  In the
Preface we are told that the Ode is the most spirited kind of poetry, and
that the Pindaric is the most spirited kind of Ode.  “This I speak,” he
adds, “with sufficient candour at my own very great peril.  But truth has
an eternal title to our confession, though we are sure to suffer by it.”
Behold, again, the fairest of poets.  Young’s “Imperium Pelagi” was
ridiculed in Fielding’s “Tom Thumb;” but let us not forget that it was
one of his pieces which the author of the “Night Thoughts” deliberately
refused to own.  Not long after this Pindaric attempt he published two
Epistles to Pope, “Concerning the Authors of the Age,” 1730.  Of these
poems one occasion seems to have been an apprehension lest, from the
liveliness of his satires, he should not be deemed sufficiently serious
for promotion in the Church.

In July, 1730, he was presented by his College to the Rectory of Welwyn,
in Hertfordshire.  In May, 1731, he married Lady Elizabeth Lee, daughter
of the Earl of Lichfield, and widow of Colonel Lee.  His connection with
this lady arose from his father’s acquaintance, already mentioned, with
Lady Anne Wharton, who was co-heiress of Sir Henry Lee of Ditchley in
Oxfordshire.  Poetry had lately been taught by Addison to aspire to the
arms of nobility, though not with extraordinary happiness.  We may
naturally conclude that Young now gave himself up in some measure to the
comforts of his new connection, and to the expectations of that
preferment which he thought due to his poetical talents, or, at least, to
the manner in which they had so frequently been exerted.

The next production of his muse was “The Sea-piece,” in two odes.

Young enjoys the credit of what is called an “Extempore Epigram on
Voltaire,” who, when he was in England, ridiculed, in the company of the
jealous English poet, Milton’s allegory of “Sin and Death:”

    “You are so witty, profligate and thin,
    At once we think thee Milton, Death, and Sin.”

From the following passage in the poetical dedication of his “Sea-piece”
to Voltaire it seems that this extemporaneous reproof, if it must be
extemporaneous (for what few will now affirm Voltaire to have deserved
any reproof), was something longer than a distich, and something more
gentle than the distich just quoted.

    “No stranger, sir, though born in foreign climes.
       On _Dorset_ Downs, when Milton’s page,
       With Sin and Death provoked thy rage,
    Thy rage provoked who soothed with _gentle_ rhymes?”

By “Dorset Downs” he probably meant Mr. Dodington’s seat.  In Pitt’s
Poems is “An Epistle to Dr. Edward Young, at Eastbury, in Dorsetshire, on
the Review at Sarum, 1722.”

    “While with your Dodington retired you sit,
    Charmed with his flowing Burgundy and wit,” etc.

Thomson, in his Autumn, addressing Mr. Dodington calls his seat the seat
of the Muses,

    “Where, in the secret bower and winding walk,
    For virtuous Young and thee they twine the bay.”

The praises Thomson bestows but a few lines before on Philips, the second

    “Who nobly durst, in rhyme-unfettered verse,
    With British freedom sing the British song,”

added to Thomson’s example and success, might perhaps induce Young, as we
shall see presently, to write his great work without rhyme.

In 1734 he published “The Foreign Address, or the best Argument for
Peace, occasioned by the British Fleet and the Posture of Affairs.
Written in the Character of a Sailor.”  It is not to be found in the
author’s four volumes.  He now appears to have given up all hopes of
overtaking Pindar, and perhaps at last resolved to turn his ambition to
some original species of poetry.  This poem concludes with a formal
farewell to Ode, which few of Young’s readers will regret:

    “My shell, which Clio gave, which _Kings applaud_,
    Which Europe’s bleeding genius called abroad,
    Adieu!”

In a species of poetry altogether his own he next tried his skill, and
succeeded.

Of his wife he was deprived in 1741.  Lady Elizabeth had lost, after her
marriage with Young, an amiable daughter, by her former husband, just
after she was married to Mr. Temple, son of Lord Palmerston.  Mr. Temple
did not long remain after his wife, though he was married a second time
to a daughter of Sir John Barnard’s, whose son is the present peer.  Mr.
and Mrs. Temple have generally been considered as Philander and Narcissa.
From the great friendship which constantly subsisted between Mr. Temple
and Young, as well as from other circumstances, it is probable that the
poet had both him and Mrs. Temple in view for these characters; though,
at the same time, some passages respecting Philander do not appear to
suit either Mr. Temple or any other person with whom Young was known to
be connected or acquainted, while all the circumstances relating to
Narcissa have been constantly found applicable to Young’s
daughter-in-law.  At what short intervals the poet tells us he was
wounded by the deaths of the three persons particularly lamented, none
that has read the “Night Thoughts” (and who has not read them?) needs to
be informed.

    “Insatiate archer! could not one suffice?
    Thy shaft flew thrice, and thrice my peace was slain;
    And thrice, ere thrice yon moon had filled her horn.”

Yet how is it possible that Mr. and Mrs. Temple and Lady Elizabeth Young
could be these three victims, over whom Young has hitherto been pitied
for having to pour the “Midnight Sorrows” of his religious poetry?  Mrs.
Temple died in 1736; Mr. Temple four years afterwards, in 1740; and the
poet’s wife seven months after Mr. Temple, in 1741.  How could the
insatiate archer thrice slay his peace, in these three persons, “ere
thrice the moon had filled her horn.”  But in the short preface to “The
Complaint” he seriously tells us, “that the occasion of this poem was
real, not fictitious, and that the facts mentioned did naturally pour
these moral reflections on the thought of the writer.”  It is probable,
therefore, that in these three contradictory lines the poet complains
more than the father-in-law, the friend, or the widower.  Whatever names
belong to these facts, or if the names be those generally supposed,
whatever heightening a poet’s sorrow may have given the facts; to the
sorrow Young felt from them religion and morality are indebted for the
“Night Thoughts.”  There is a pleasure sure in sadness which mourners
only know!  Of these poems the two or three first have been perused
perhaps more eagerly and more frequently than the rest.  When he got as
far as the fourth or fifth his original motive for taking up the pen was
answered; his grief was naturally either diminished or exhausted.  We
still find the same pious poet, but we hear less of Philander and
Narcissa, and less of the mourner whom he loved to pity.

Mrs. Temple died of a consumption at Lyons, on her way to Nice, the year
after her marriage; that is, when poetry relates the fact, “in her bridal
hour.”  It is more than poetically true that Young accompanied her to the
Continent:

    “I flew, I snatched her from the rigid North,
    And bore her nearer to the sun.”

But in vain.  Her funeral was attended with the difficulties painted in
such animated colours in “Night the Third.”  After her death the
remainder of the party passed the ensuing winter at Nice.  The poet seems
perhaps in these compositions to dwell with more melancholy on the death
of Philander and Narcissa than of his wife.  But it is only for this
reason.  He who runs and reads may remember that in the “Night Thoughts”
Philander and Narcissa are often mentioned and often lamented.  To
recollect lamentations over the author’s wife the memory must have been
charged with distinct passages.  This lady brought him one child,
Frederick, now living, to whom the Prince of Wales was godfather.

That domestic grief is, in the first instance, to be thanked for these
ornaments to our language it is impossible to deny.  Nor would it be
common hardiness to contend that worldly discontent had no hand in these
joint productions of poetry and piety.  Yet am I by no means sure that,
at any rate, we should not have had something of the same colour from
Young’s pencil, notwithstanding the liveliness of his satires.  In so
long a life causes for discontent and occasions for grief must have
occurred.  It is not clear to me that his Muse was not sitting upon the
watch for the first which happened.  “Night Thoughts” were not uncommon
to her, even when first she visited the poet, and at a time when he
himself was remarkable neither for gravity nor gloominess.  In his “Last
Day,” almost his earliest poem, he calls her “The Melancholy Maid,”

                   “whom dismal scenes delight,
    Frequent at tombs and in the realms of Night.”

In the prayer which concludes the second book of the same poem, he says:

    “Oh! permit the gloom of solemn night
    To sacred thought may forcibly invite.
    Oh! how divine to tread the milky way,
    To the bright palace of Eternal Day!”

When Young was writing a tragedy, Grafton is said by Spence to have sent
him a human skull, with a candle in it, as a lamp, and the poet is
reported to have used it.  What he calls “The _true_ Estimate of Human
Life,” which has already been mentioned, exhibits only the wrong side of
the tapestry, and being asked why he did not show the right, he is said
to have replied that he could not.  By others it has been told me that
this was finished, but that, before there existed any copy, it was torn
in pieces by a lady’s monkey.  Still, is it altogether fair to dress up
the poet for the man, and to bring the gloominess of the “Night Thoughts”
to prove the gloominess of Young, and to show that his genius, like the
genius of Swift, was in some measure the sullen inspiration of
discontent?  From them who answer in the affirmative it should not be
concealed that, though “Invisibilia non decipiunt” appeared upon a
deception in Young’s grounds, and “Ambulantes in horto audierunt vocem
Dei” on a building in his garden, his parish was indebted to the good
humour of the author of the “Night Thoughts” for an assembly and a
bowling green.

Whether you think with me, I know not; but the famous “De mortuis nil
nisi bonum” always appeared to me to savour more of female weakness than
of manly reason.  He that has too much feeling to speak ill of the dead,
who, if they cannot defend themselves, are at least ignorant of his
abuse, will not hesitate by the most wanton calumny to destroy the quiet,
the reputation, the fortune of the living.  Yet censure is not heard
beneath the tomb, any more than praise.  “De mortuis nil nisi verum—De
vivis nil nisi bonum” would approach much nearer to good sense.  After
all, the few handfuls of remaining dust which once composed the body of
the author of the “Night Thoughts” feel not much concern whether Young
pass now for a man of sorrow or for “a fellow of infinite jest.”  To this
favour must come the whole family of Yorick.  His immortal part, wherever
that now dwells, is still less solicitous on this head.  But to a son of
worth and sensibility it is of some little consequence whether
contemporaries believe, and posterity be taught to believe, that his
debauched and reprobate life cast a Stygian gloom over the evening of his
father’s days, saved him the trouble of feigning a character completely
detestable, and succeeded at last in bringing his “grey hairs with sorrow
to the grave.”  The humanity of the world, little satisfied with
inventing perhaps a melancholy disposition for the father, proceeds next
to invent an argument in support of their invention, and chooses that
Lorenzo should be Young’s own son.  “The Biographia,” and every account
of Young, pretty roundly assert this to be the fact; of the absolute
impossibility of which, the “Biographia” itself, in particular dates,
contains undeniable evidence.  Readers I know there are of a strange turn
of mind, who will hereafter peruse the “Night Thoughts” with less
satisfaction; who will wish they had still been deceived; who will
quarrel with me for discovering that no such character as their Lorenzo
ever yet disgraced human nature or broke a father’s heart.  Yet would
these admirers of the sublime and terrible be offended should you set
them down for cruel and for savage?  Of this report, inhuman to the
surviving son, if it be true, in proportion as the character of Lorenzo
is diabolical, where are we to find the proof?  Perhaps it is clear from
the poems.

From the first line to the last of the “Night Thoughts” no one expression
can be discovered which betrays anything like the father.  In the “Second
Night” I find an expression which betrays something else—that Lorenzo was
his friend; one, it is possible, of his former companions; one of the
Duke of Wharton’s set.  The poet styles him “gay friend;” an appellation
not very natural from a pious incensed father to such a being as he
paints Lorenzo, and that being his son.  But let us see how he has
sketched this dreadful portrait, from the sight of some of whose features
the artist himself must have turned away with horror.  A subject more
shocking, if his only child really sat to him, than the crucifixion of
Michael Angelo; upon the horrid story told of which Young composed a
short poem of fourteen lines in the early part of his life, which he did
not think deserved to be republished.  In the “First Night” the address
to the poet’s supposed son is:—

    “Lorenzo, Fortune makes her court to thee.”

In the “Fifth Night:”—

    “And burns Lorenzo still for the sublime
    Of life? to hang his airy nest on high?”

Is this a picture of the son of the Rector of Welwyn?  “Eighth Night:”—

    “In foreign realms (for thou hast travelled far)”—

which even now does not apply to his son.  In “Night Five:”—

    “So wept Lorenzo fair Clarissa’s fate,
    Who gave that angel-boy on whom he dotes,
    And died to give him, orphaned in his birth!”

At the beginning of the “Fifth Night” we find:—

    “Lorenzo, to recriminate is just,
    I grant the man is vain who writes for praise.”

But, to cut short all inquiry; if any one of these passages, if any
passage in the poems, be applicable, my friend shall pass for Lorenzo.
The son of the author of the “Night Thoughts” was not old enough, when
they were written, to recriminate or to be a father.  The “Night
Thoughts” were begun immediately after the mournful event of 1741.  The
first “Nights” appear, in the books of the Company of Stationers, as the
property of Robert Dodsley, in 1742.  The Preface to “Night Seven” is
dated July 7th, 1744.  The marriage, in consequence of which the supposed
Lorenzo was born, happened in May, 1731.  Young’s child was not born till
June, 1733.  In 1741, this Lorenzo, this finished infidel, this father to
whose education Vice had for some years put the last hand, was only eight
years old.  An anecdote of this cruel sort, so open to contradiction, so
impossible to be true, who could propagate?  Thus easily are blasted the
reputation of the living and of the dead.  “Who, then, was Lorenzo?”
exclaim the readers I have mentioned.  If we cannot be sure that he was
his son, which would have been finely terrible, was he not his nephew,
his cousin?  These are questions which I do not pretend to answer.  For
the sake of human nature, I could wish Lorenzo to have been only the
creation of the poet’s fancy: like the Quintus of Anti Lucretius, “quo
nomine,” says Polignac, “quemvis Atheum intellige.”  That this was the
case many expressions in the “Night Thoughts” would seem to prove, did
not a passage in “Night Eight” appear to show that he had somebody in his
eye for the groundwork at least of the painting.  Lovelace or Lorenzo may
be feigned characters; but a writer does not feign a name of which he
only gives the initial letter:—

    “Tell not Calista.  She will laugh thee dead,
    Or send thee to her hermitage with L—.”

The “Biographia,” not satisfied with pointing out the son of Young, in
that son’s lifetime, as his father’s Lorenzo, travels out of its way into
the history of the son, and tells of his having been forbidden his
college at Oxford for misbehaviour.  How such anecdotes, were they true,
tend to illustrate the life of Young, it is not easy to discover.  Was
the son of the author of the “Night Thoughts,” indeed, forbidden his
college for a time, at one of our Universities?  The author of “Paradise
Lost” is by some supposed to have been disgracefully ejected from the
other.  From juvenile follies who is free?  But, whatever the
“Biographia” chooses to relate, the son of Young experienced no
dismission from his college, either lasting or temporary.  Yet, were
nature to indulge him with a second youth, and to leave him at the same
time the experience of that which is past, he would probably spend it
differently—who would not?—he would certainly be the occasion of less
uneasiness to his father.  But, from the same experience, he would as
certainly, in the same case, be treated differently by his father.

Young was a poet: poets, with reverence be it spoken, do not make the
best parents.  Fancy and imagination seldom deign to stoop from their
heights; always stoop unwillingly to the low level of common duties.
Aloof from vulgar life, they pursue their rapid flight beyond the ken of
mortals, and descend not to earth but when compelled by necessity.  The
prose of ordinary occurrences is beneath the dignity of poets.  He who is
connected with the author of the “Night Thoughts” only by veneration for
the Poet and the Christian may be allowed to observe that Young is one of
those concerning whom, as you remark in your account of Addison, it is
proper rather to say “nothing that is false than all that is true.”  But
the son of Young would almost sooner, I know, pass for a Lorenzo than see
himself vindicated, at the expense of his father’s memory, from follies
which, if it may be thought blameable in a boy to have committed them, it
is surely praiseworthy in a man to lament and certainly not only
unnecessary, but cruel in a biographer to record.

Of the “Night Thoughts,” notwithstanding their author’s professed
retirement, all are inscribed to great or to growing names.  He had not
yet weaned himself from earls and dukes, from the Speakers of the House
of Commons, Lords Commissioners of the Treasury, and Chancellors of the
Exchequer.  In “Night Eight” the politician plainly betrays himself:—

    “Think no post needful that demands a knave:
    When late our civil helm was shifting hands,
    So P— thought: think better if you can.”

Yet it must be confessed that at the conclusion of “Night Nine,” weary
perhaps of courting earthly patrons, he tells his soul—

                         “Henceforth
    Thy _patron_ he, whose diadem has dropped
    You gems of Heaven; Eternity thy prize;
    And leave the racers of the world their own.”

The “Fourth Night” was addressed by “a much-indebted Muse” to the
Honourable Mr. Yorke, now Lord Hardwicke, who meant to have laid the Muse
under still greater obligation, by the living of Shenfield, in Essex, if
it had become vacant.  The “First Night” concludes with this passage:—

    “Dark, though not blind, like thee, Meonides;
    Or, Milton, thee.  Ah! could I reach your strain;
    Or his who made Meonides our own!
    Man too he sung.  Immortal man I sing.
    Oh had he pressed his theme, pursued the track
    Which opens out of darkness into day!
    Oh, had he mounted on his wing of fire,
    Soared, where I sink, and sung immortal man—
    How had it blest mankind, and rescued me!”

To the author of these lines was dedicated, in 1756, the first volume of
an “Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope,” which attempted, whether
justly or not, to pluck from Pope his “Wing of Fire,” and to reduce him
to a rank at least one degree lower than the first class of English
poets.  If Young accepted and approved the dedication, he countenanced
this attack upon the fame of him whom he invokes as his Muse.

Part of “paper-sparing” Pope’s Third Book of the “Odyssey,” deposited in
the Museum, is written upon the back of a letter signed “E. Young,” which
is clearly the handwriting of our Young.  The letter, dated only May 2nd,
seems obscure; but there can be little doubt that the friendship he
requests was a literary one, and that he had the highest literary opinion
of Pope.  The request was a prologue, I am told.

                                                             “May the 2nd.

    “DEAR SIR,—Having been often from home, I know not if you have done
    me the favour of calling on me.  But, be that as it will, I much want
    that instance of your friendship I mentioned in my last; a friendship
    I am very sensible I can receive from no one but yourself.  I should
    not urge this thing so much but for very particular reasons; nor can
    you be at a loss to conceive how a ‘trifle of this nature’ may be of
    serious moment to me; and while I am in hopes of the great advantage
    of your advice about it, I shall not be so absurd as to make any
    further step without it.  I know you are much engaged, and only hope
    to hear of you at your entire leisure.

                                            “I am, sir, your most faithful
                                                    “and obedient servant,
                                                               “E. YOUNG.”

Nay, even after Pope’s death, he says in “Night Seven:”—

             “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!”

And again—

    “A friend you have, and I the same,
       Whose prudent, soft address
    Will bring to life those healing thoughts
       Which died in your distress.
    That friend, the spirit of my theme
       Extracting for your ease,
    Will leave to me the dreg, in thoughts
       Too common; such as these.”

By the same lady I was enabled to say, in her own words, that Young’s
unbounded genius appeared to greater advantage in the companion than even
in the author; that the Christian was in him a character still more
inspired, more enraptured, more sublime, than the poet; and that, in his
ordinary conversation—

    “—letting down the golden chain from high,
    He drew his audience upward to the sky.”

Notwithstanding Young had said, in his “Conjectures on Original
Composition,” that “blank verse is verse unfallen, uncursed—verse
reclaimed, re-enthroned in the true language of the gods;”
notwithstanding he administered consolation to his own grief in this
immortal language, Mrs. Boscawen was comforted in rhyme.

While the poet and the Christian were applying this comfort, Young had
himself occasion for comfort, in consequence of the sudden death of
Richardson, who was printing the former part of the poem.  Of
Richardson’s death he says—

    “When heaven would kindly set us free,
       And earth’s enchantment end;
    It takes the most effectual means,
       And robs us of a friend.”

To “Resignation” was prefixed an apology for its appearance, to which
more credit is due than to the generality of such apologies, from Young’s
unusual anxiety that no more productions of his old age should disgrace
his former fame.  In his will, dated February, 1760, he desires of his
executors, _in a particular manner_, that all his manuscript books and
writings, whatever, might be burned, except his book of accounts.  In
September, 1764, he added a kind of codicil, wherein he made it his dying
entreaty to his housekeeper, to whom he left £1,000, “that all his
manuscripts might be destroyed as soon as he was dead, which would
greatly oblige her deceased _friend_.”

It may teach mankind the uncertainty of wordly friendships to know that
Young, either by surviving those he loved, or by outliving their
affections, could only recollect the names of two _friends_, his
housekeeper and a hatter, to mention in his will; and it may serve to
repress that testamentary pride, which too often seeks for sounding names
and titles, to be informed that the author of the “Night Thoughts” did
not blush to leave a legacy to his “friend Henry Stevens, a hatter at the
Temple-gate.”  Of these two remaining friends, one went before Young.
But, at eighty-four, “where,” as he asks in _The Centaur_, “is that world
into which we were born?”  The same humility which marked a hatter and a
housekeeper for the friends of the author of the “Night Thoughts,” had
before bestowed the same title on his footman, in an epitaph in his
“Churchyard” upon James Baker, dated 1749; which I am glad to find in the
late collection of his works.  Young and his housekeeper were ridiculed,
with more ill-nature than wit, in a kind of novel published by Kidgell in
1755, called “The Card,” under the names of Dr. Elwes and Mrs. Fusby.  In
April, 1765, at an age to which few attain, a period was put to the life
of Young.  He had performed no duty for three or four years, but he
retained his intellects to the last.

Much is told in the “Biographia,” which I know not to have been true, of
the manner of his burial; of the master and children of a charity-school,
which he founded in his parish, who neglected to attend their
benefactor’s corpse; and a bell which was not caused to toll as often as
upon those occasions bells usually toll.  Had that humanity, which is
here lavished upon things of little consequence either to the living or
to the dead, been shown in its proper place to the living, I should have
had less to say about Lorenzo.  They who lament that these misfortunes
happened to Young, forget the praise he bestows upon Socrates, in the
Preface to “Night Seven,” for resenting his friend’s request about his
funeral.  During some part of his life Young was abroad, but I have not
been able to learn any particulars.  In his seventh Satire he says,

    “When, after battle, I the field have SEEN
    Spread o’er with ghastly shapes which once were men.”

It is known, also, that from this or from some other field he once
wandered into the camp with a classic in his hand, which he was reading
intently; and had some difficulty to prove that he was only an absent
poet, and not a spy.

The curious reader of Young’s life will naturally inquire to what it was
owing, that though he lived almost forty years after he took orders,
which included one whole reign uncommonly long, and part of another, he
was never thought worthy of the least preferment.  The author of the
“Night Thoughts” ended his days upon a living which came to him from his
college without any favour, and to which he probably had an eye when he
determined on the Church.  To satisfy curiosity of this kind is, at this
distance of time, far from easy.  The parties themselves know not often,
at the instant, why they are neglected, or why they are preferred.  The
neglect of Young is by some ascribed to his having attached himself to
the Prince of Wales, and to his having preached an offensive sermon at
St. James’s.  It has been told me that he had two hundred a year in the
late reign, by the patronage of Walpole; and that, whenever any one
reminded the king of Young, the only answer was, “he has a pension.”  All
the light thrown on this inquiry, by the following letter from Secker,
only serves to show at what a late period of life the author of the
“Night Thoughts” solicited preferment:—

                                     “Deanery of St. Paul’s, July 8, 1758.

    “GOOD DR. YOUNG,—I have long wondered that more suitable notice of
    your great merit hath not been taken by persons in power.  But how to
    remedy the omission I see not.  No encouragement hath ever been given
    me to mention things of this nature to his majesty.  And therefore,
    in all likelihood, the only consequence of doing it would be
    weakening the little influence which else I may possibly have on some
    other occasions.  Your fortune and your reputation set you above the
    need of advancement; and your sentiments, above that concern for it,
    on your own account, which, on that of the public, is sincerely felt
    by

                                         “Your loving Brother, THO. CANT.”

At last, at the age of fourscore, he was appointed, in 1761, Clerk of the
Closet to the Princess Dowager.  One obstacle must have stood not a
little in the way of that preferment after which his whole life seems to
have panted.  Though he took orders, he never entirely shook off
politics.  He was always the lion of his master Milton, “pawing to get
free his hinder parts.”  By this conduct, if he gained some friends, he
made many enemies.  Again: Young was a poet; and again, with reverence be
it spoken, poets by profession do not always make the best clergymen.  If
the author of the “Night Thoughts” composed many sermons, he did not
oblige the public with many.  Besides, in the latter part of his life,
Young was fond of holding himself out for a man retired from the world.
But he seemed to have forgotten that the same verse which contains
“oblitus meorum,” contains also “obliviscendus et illis.”  The brittle
chain of worldly friendship and patronage is broken as effectually, when
one goes beyond the length of it, as when the other does.  To the vessel
which is sailing from the shore, it only appears that the shore also
recedes; in life it is truly thus.  He who retires from the world will
find himself, in reality, deserted as fast, if not faster, by the world.
The public is not to be treated as the coxcomb treats his mistress; to be
threatened with desertion, in order to increase fondness.

Young seems to have been taken at his word.  Notwithstanding his frequent
complaints of being neglected, no hand was reached out to pull him from
that retirement of which he declared himself enamoured.  Alexander
assigned no palace for the residence of Diogenes, who boasted his surly
satisfaction with his tub.  Of the domestic manners and petty habits of
the author of the “Night Thoughts,” I hoped to have given you an account
from the best authority; but who shall dare to say, To-morrow I will be
wise or virtuous, or to-morrow I will do a particular thing?  Upon
inquiring for his housekeeper, I learned that she was buried two days
before I reached the town of her abode.

In a letter from Tscharner, a noble foreigner, to Count Haller, Tscharner
says, he has lately spent four days with Young at Welwyn, where the
author tastes all the ease and pleasure mankind can desire.  “Everything
about him shows the man, each individual being placed by rule.  All is
neat without art.  He is very pleasant in conversation, and extremely
polite.”  This, and more, may possibly be true; but Tscharner’s was a
first visit, a visit of curiosity and admiration, and a visit which the
author expected.

Of Edward Young an anecdote which wanders among readers is not true, that
he was Fielding’s Parson Adams.  The original of that famous painting was
William Young, who was a clergyman.  He supported an uncomfortable
existence by translating for the booksellers from Greek, and, if he did
not seem to be his own friend, was at least no man’s enemy.  Yet the
facility with which this report has gained belief in the world argues,
were it not sufficiently known that the author of the “Night Thoughts”
bore some resemblance to Adams.  The attention which Young bestowed upon
the perusal of books is not unworthy imitation.  When any passage pleased
him he appears to have folded down the leaf.  On these passages he
bestowed a second reading.  But the labours of man are too frequently
vain.  Before he returned to much of what he had once approved he died.
Many of his books, which I have seen, are by those notes of approbation
so swelled beyond their real bulk, that they will hardly shut.

    “What though we wade in wealth, or soar in fame!
    Earth’s highest station ends in _Here he lies_!
    And _dust to dust_ concludes her noblest song!”

The author of these lines is not without his ‘_Hic jacet_.’  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 stone or a
turf, will find its way, sooner or later, to the deserving.

                                    M. S.
                               Optimi parentis
                             EDWARDI YOUNG, LL.D.

                Hujus Ecclesiæ rect. et Elizabethæ fæm. prænob
                          Conjugis ejus amantissimæ
                   Pio & 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 anything 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.

                                                                     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 horror, that
oppresses distinction and disdains expression.  His story of “Jane Grey”
was never popular.  It is written with elegance enough, but Jane is too
heroic 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 sentiments,
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 lyric 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
plantation, the magnificence of vast extent and endless diversity.

His last poem was the “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 the highest vigour.  His tragedies, not making part of
the collection, I had forgotten, till Mr. Stevens 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,
terror, 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 so
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 public.  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_, which I have heard repeated with approbation by a lady, of
whose praise he would have been justly proud, and which is very
ingenious, very subtle, 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.



MALLET.


OF David Mallet, having no written memorial, I am able to give no other
account than such as is supplied by the unauthorised loquacity of common
fame, and a very slight personal knowledge.  He was by his original one
of the Macgregors, a clan that became, about sixty years ago, under the
conduct of Robin Roy, so formidable and so infamous for violence and
robbery, that the name was annulled by a legal abolition; and when they
were all to denominate themselves anew, the father, I suppose, of this
author, called himself Malloch.

David Malloch was, by the penury of his parents, compelled to be
_Janitor_ of the High School at Edinburgh, a mean office of which he did
not afterwards delight to hear.  But he surmounted the disadvantages of
his birth and fortune; for, when the Duke of Montrose applied to the
College of Edinburgh for a tutor to educate his sons, Malloch was
recommended; and I never heard that he dishonoured his credentials.  When
his pupils were sent to see the world, they were entrusted to his care;
and having conducted them round the common circle of modish travels, he
returned with them to London, where, by the influence of the family in
which he resided, he naturally gained admission to many persons of the
highest rank, and the highest character—to wits, nobles, and statesmen.
Of his works, I know not whether I can trace the series.  His first
production was, “William and Margaret;” of which, though it contains
nothing very striking or difficult, he has been envied the reputation;
and plagiarism has been boldly charged, but never proved.  Not long
afterwards he published the “Excursion” (1728); a desultory and
capricious view of such scenes of nature as his fancy led him, or his
knowledge enabled him, to describe.  It is not devoid of poetical spirit.
Many of his images are striking, and many of the paragraphs are elegant.
The cast of diction seems to be copied from Thomson, whose “Seasons” were
then in their full blossom of reputation.  He has Thomson’s beauties and
his faults.  His poem on “Verbal Criticism” (1733) was written to pay
court to Pope, on a subject which he either did not understand, or
willingly misrepresented; and is little more than an improvement, or
rather expansion, of a fragment which Pope printed in a miscellany long
before he engrafted it into a regular poem.  There is in this piece more
pertness than wit, and more confidence than knowledge.  The versification
is tolerable, nor can criticism allow it a higher praise.

His first tragedy was _Eurydice_, acted at Drury Lane in 1731; of which I
know not the reception nor the merit, but have heard it mentioned as a
mean performance.  He was not then too high to accept a prologue and
epilogue from Aaron Hill, neither of which can be much commended.  Having
cleared his tongue from his native pronunciation so as to be no longer
distinguished as a Scot, he seems inclined to disencumber himself from
all adherences of his original, and took upon him to change his name from
Scotch _Malloch_ to English _Mallet_, without any imaginable reason of
preference which the eye or ear can discover.  What other proofs he gave
of disrespect to his native country I know not; but it was remarked of
him that he was the only Scot whom Scotchmen did not commend.  About this
time Pope, whom he visited familiarly, published his “Essay on Man,” but
concealed the author; and, when Mallet entered one day, Pope asked him
slightly what there was new.  Mallet told him that the newest piece was
something called an “Essay on Man,” which he had inspected idly, and
seeing the utter inability of the author, who had neither skill in
writing nor knowledge of the subject, had tossed it away.  Pope, to
punish his self-conceit, told him the secret.

A new edition of the works of Bacon being prepared (1740) for the press,
Mallet was employed to prefix a Life, which he has written with elegance,
perhaps with some affectation; but with so much more knowledge of history
than of science, that, when he afterwards undertook the “Life of
Marlborough,” Warburton remarked that he might perhaps forget that
Marlborough was a general, as he had forgotten that Bacon was a
philosopher.

When the Prince of Wales was driven from the palace, and, setting himself
at the head of the opposition, kept a separate court, he endeavoured to
increase his popularity by the patronage of literature, and made Mallet
his under-secretary, with a salary of two hundred pounds a year; Thomson
likewise had a pension; and they were associated in the composition of
_The Masque of Alfred_, which in its original state was played at
Cliefden in 1740; it was afterwards almost wholly changed by Mallet, and
brought upon the stage at Drury Lane in 1751, but with no great success.
Mallet, in a familiar conversation with Garrick, discoursing of the
diligence which he was then exerting upon the “Life of Marlborough,” let
him know that in the series of great men quickly to be exhibited he
should _find a niche_ for the hero of the theatre.  Garrick professed to
wonder by what artifice he could be introduced: but Mallet let him know
that, by a dexterous anticipation, he should fix him in a conspicuous
place.  “Mr. Mallet,” says Garrick, in his gratitude of exultation, “have
you left off to write for the stage?”  Mallet then confessed that he had
a drama in his hands.  Garrick promised to act it; and _Alfred_ was
produced.

The long retardation of the life of the Duke of Marlborough shows, with
strong conviction, how little confidence can be placed on posthumous
renown.  When he died, it was soon determined that his story should be
delivered to posterity; and the papers supposed to contain the necessary
information were delivered to Lord Molesworth, who had been his favourite
in Flanders.  When Molesworth died, the same papers were transferred with
the same design to Sir Richard Steele, who, in some of his exigencies,
put them in pawn.  They remained with the old duchess, who in her will
assigned the task to Glover and Mallet, with a reward of a thousand
pounds, and a prohibition to insert any verses.  Glover rejected, I
suppose, with disdain, the legacy, and devolved the whole work upon
Mallet; who had from the late Duke of Marlborough a pension to promote
his industry, and who talked of the discoveries which he had made; but
left not, when he died, any historical labours behind him.  While he was
in the Prince’s service he published _Mustapha_ with a prologue by
Thomson, not mean, but far inferior to that which he had received from
Mallet for _Agamemnon_.  The epilogue, said to be written by a friend,
was composed in haste by Mallet, in the place of one promised, which was
never given.  This tragedy was dedicated to the Prince his master.  It
was acted at Drury Lane in 1739, and was well received, but was never
revived.  In 1740 he produced, as has been already mentioned, _The Masque
of Alfred_, in conjunction with Thomson.  For some time afterwards he lay
at rest.  After a long interval his next work was “Amyntor and Theodora”
(1747), a long story in blank verse; in which it cannot be denied that
there is copiousness and elegance of language, vigour of sentiment, and
imagery well adapted to take possession of the fancy.  But it is blank
verse.  This he sold to Vaillant for one hundred and twenty pounds.  The
first sale was not great, and it is now lost in forgetfulness.

Mallet, by address or accident, perhaps by his dependence on the Prince,
found his way to Bolingbroke, a man whose pride and petulance made his
kindness difficult to gain or keep, and whom Mallet was content to court
by an act which I hope was unwillingly performed.  When it was found that
Pope clandestinely printed an unauthorised pamphlet called the “Patriot
King,” Bolingbroke in a fit of useless fury resolved to blast his memory,
and employed Mallet (1749) as the executioner of his vengeance.  Mallet
had not virtue, or had not spirit, to refuse the office; and was
rewarded, not long after, with the legacy of Lord Bolingbroke’s works.

Many of the political pieces had been written during the opposition to
Walpole, and given to Francklin, as he supposed, in perpetuity.  These,
among the rest, were claimed by the will.  The question was referred to
arbitrators; but, when they decided against Mallet, he refused to yield
to the award; and, by the help of Millar the bookseller, published all
that he could find, but with success very much below his expectation.

In 1775 [_sic_], his masque of _Britannia_ was acted at Drury Lane, and
his tragedy of _Elvira_ in 1763; in which year he was appointed keeper of
the book of entries for ships in the port of London.  In the beginning of
the last war, when the nation was exasperated by ill success, he was
employed to turn the public vengeance upon Byng, and wrote a letter of
accusation under the character of a “Plain Man.”  The paper was with
great industry circulated and dispersed; and he, for his seasonable
intervention, had a considerable pension bestowed upon him, which he
retained to his death.  Towards the end of his life he went with his wife
to France; but after a while, finding his health declining, he returned
alone to England, and died in April, 1765.  He was twice married, and by
his first wife had several children.  One daughter, who married an
Italian of rank named Cilesia, wrote a tragedy called _Almida_, which was
acted at Drury Lane.  His second wife was the daughter of a nobleman’s
steward, who had a considerable fortune, which she took care to retain in
her own hands.  His stature was diminutive, but he was regularly formed;
his appearance, till he grew corpulent, was agreeable, and he suffered it
to want no recommendation that dress could give it.  His conversation was
elegant and easy.  The rest of his character may, without injury to his
memory, sink into silence.  As a writer, he cannot be placed in any high
class.  There is no species of composition in which he was eminent.  His
dramas had their day, a short day, and are forgotten: his blank verse
seems to my ear the echo of Thomson.  His “Life of Bacon” is known, as it
is appended to Bacon’s volumes, but is no longer mentioned.  His works
are such as a writer, bustling in the world, showing himself in public,
and emerging occasionally from time to time into notice, might keep alive
by his personal influence; but which, conveying little information, and
giving no great pleasure, must soon give way, as the succession of things
produces new topics of conversation and other modes of amusement.



AKENSIDE.


MARK AKENSIDE was born on the 9th of November, 1721, at
Newcastle-upon-Tyne.  His father Mark was a butcher, of the Presbyterian
sect; his mother’s name was Mary Lumsden.  He received the first part of
his education at the grammar-school of Newcastle; and was afterwards
instructed by Mr. Wilson, who kept a private academy.  At the age of
eighteen he was sent to Edinburgh that he might qualify himself for the
office of a dissenting minister, and received some assistance from the
fund which the dissenters employ in educating young men of scanty
fortune.  But a wider view of the world opened other scenes, and prompted
other hopes: he determined to study physic, and repaid that contribution,
which being received for a different purpose, he justly thought it
dishonourable to retain.  Whether, when he resolved not to be a
dissenting minister, he ceased to be a dissenter, I know not.  He
certainly retained an unnecessary and outrageous zeal for what he called
and thought liberty; a zeal which sometimes disguises from the world, and
not rarely from the mind which it possesses, an envious desire of
plundering wealth or degrading greatness; and of which the immediate
tendency is innovation and anarchy, an impetuous eagerness to subvert and
confound, with very little care what shall be established.

Akenside was one of those poets who have felt very early the motions of
genius, and one of those students who have very early stored their
memories with sentiments and images.  Many of his performances were
produced in his youth; and his greatest work, “The Pleasures of
Imagination,” appeared in 1744.  I have heard Dodsley, by whom it was
published, relate that when the copy was offered him, the price demanded
for it, which was a hundred and twenty pounds, being such as he was not
inclined to give precipitately, he carried the work to Pope, who, having
looked into it, advised him not to make a niggardly offer; for “this was
no every-day writer.”

In 1741 he went to Leyden in pursuit of medical knowledge; and three
years afterwards (May 16, 1744) became Doctor of Physic, having,
according to the custom of the Dutch Universities, published a thesis or
dissertation.  The subject which he chose was “The Original and Growth of
the Human Foetus;” in which he is said to have departed, with great
judgment, from the opinion then established, and to have delivered that
which has been since confirmed and received.

Akenside was a young man, warm with every notion that by nature or
accident had been connected with the sound of liberty, and, by an
eccentricity which such dispositions do not easily avoid, a lover of
contradiction, and no friend to anything established.  He adopted
Shaftesbury’s foolish assertion of the efficacy of ridicule for the
discovery of truth.  For this he was attacked by Warburton, and defended
by Dyson; Warburton afterwards reprinted his remarks at the end of his
dedication to the Freethinkers.  The result of all the arguments which
have been produced in a long and eager discussion of this idle question
may easily be collected.  If ridicule be applied to any position as the
test of truth it will then become a question whether such ridicule be
just; and this can only be decided by the application of truth, as the
test of ridicule.  Two men fearing, one a real, and the other a fancied
danger, will be for a while equally exposed to the inevitable
consequences of cowardice, contemptuous censure, and ludicrous
representation; and the true state of both cases must be known before it
can be decided whose terror is rational and whose is ridiculous; who is
to be pitied, and who to be despised.  Both are for a while equally
exposed to laughter, but both are not therefore equally contemptible.  In
the revisal of his poem, though he died before he had finished it, he
omitted the lines which had given occasion to Warburton’s objections.  He
published, soon after his return from Leyden (1745), his first collection
of odes; and was impelled by his rage of patriotism to write a very
acrimonious epistle to Pulteney, whom he stigmatises, under the name of
Curio, as the betrayer of his country.  Being now to live by his
profession, he first commenced physician at Northampton, where Dr.
Stonehouse then practised, with such reputation and success, that a
stranger was not likely to gain ground upon him.  Akenside tried the
contest a while; and, having deafened the place with clamours for
liberty, removed to Hampstead, where he resided more than two years, and
then fixed himself in London, the proper place for a man of
accomplishments like his.  At London he was known as a poet, but was
still to make his way as a physician; and would perhaps have been reduced
to great exigencies but that Mr. Dyson, with an ardour of friendship that
has not many examples, allowed him three hundred pounds a year.  Thus
supported, he advanced gradually in medical reputation, but never
attained any great extent of practice or eminence of popularity.  A
physician in a great city seems to be the mere plaything of fortune; his
degree of reputation is, for the most part, totally casual—they that
employ him know not his excellence; they that reject him know not his
deficience.  By any acute observer who had looked on the transactions of
the medical world for half a century a very curious book might be written
on the “Fortune of Physicians.”

Akenside appears not to have been wanting to his own success: he placed
himself in view by all the common methods; he became a Fellow of the
Royal Society; he obtained a degree at Cambridge; and was admitted into
the College of Physicians; he wrote little poetry, but published from
time to time medical essays and observations; he became physician to St.
Thomas’s Hospital; he read the Gulstonian Lectures in Anatomy; but began
to give, for the Croonian Lecture, a history of the revival of learning,
from which he soon desisted; and in conversation he very eagerly forced
himself into notice by an ambitious ostentation of elegance and
literature.  His “Discourse on the Dysentery” (1764) was considered as a
very conspicuous specimen of Latinity, which entitled him to the same
height of place among the scholars as he possessed before among the wits;
and he might perhaps have risen to a greater elevation of character but
that his studies were ended with his life by a putrid fever June 23,
1770, in the forty-ninth year of his age.

Akenside is to be considered as a didactic and lyric poet.  His great
work is the “Pleasures of Imagination,” a performance which, published as
it was at the age of twenty-three, raised expectations that were not
amply satisfied.  It has undoubtedly a just claim to very particular
notice as an example of great felicity of genius, and uncommon aptitude
of acquisitions, of a young mind stored with images, and much exercised
in combining and comparing them.  With the philosophical or religious
tenets of the author I have nothing to do; my business is with his
poetry.  The subject is well chosen, as it includes all images that can
strike or please, and thus comprises every species of poetical delight.
The only difficulty is in the choice of examples and illustrations; and
it is not easy in such exuberance of matter to find the middle point
between penury and satiety.  The parts seem artificially disposed, with
sufficient coherence, so as that they cannot change their places without
injury to the general design.  His images are displayed with such
luxuriance of expression that they are hidden, like Butler’s Moon, by a
“Veil of Light;” they are forms fantastically lost under superfluity of
dress.  _Pars minima est ipsa puella sui_.  The words are multiplied till
the sense is hardly perceived; attention deserts the mind, and settles in
the ear.  The reader wanders through the gay diffusion, sometimes amazed,
and sometimes delighted; but, after many turnings in the flowery
labyrinth, comes out as he went in.  He remarked little, and laid hold on
nothing.  To his versification justice requires that praise should not be
denied.  In the general fabrication of his lines he is perhaps superior
to any other writer of blank verse; his flow is smooth, and his pauses
are musical; but the concatenation of his verses is commonly too long
continued, and the full close does not occur with sufficient frequency.
The sense is carried on through a long intertexture of complicated
clauses, and, as nothing is distinguished, nothing is remembered.

The exemption which blank verse affords from the necessity of closing the
sense with the couplet betrays luxuriant and active minds into such
self-indulgence that they pile image upon image, ornament upon ornament,
and are not easily persuaded to close the sense at all.  Blank verse will
therefore, I fear, be too often found in description exuberant, in
argument loquacious, and in narration tiresome.  His diction is certainly
poetical, as it is not prosaic; and elegant, as it is not vulgar.  He is
to be commended as having fewer artifices of disgust than most of his
brethren of the blank song.  He rarely either recalls old phrases, or
twists his metre into harsh inversions.  The sense, however, of his words
is strained when “he views the Ganges from Alpine heights”—that is, from
mountains like the Alps.  And the pedant surely intrudes (but when was
blank verse without pedantry?) when he tells how “Planets _absolve_ the
stated round of Time.”

It is generally known to the readers of poetry that he intended to revise
and augment this work, but died before he had completed his design.  The
reformed work as he left it, and the additions which he had made, are
very properly retained in the late collection.  He seems to have somewhat
contracted his diffusion; but I know not whether he has gained in
closeness what he has lost in splendour.  In the additional book the
“Tale of Solon” is too long.  One great defect of this poem is very
properly censured by Mr. Walker, unless it may be said in his defence
that what he has omitted was not properly in his plan.  “His picture of
man is grand and beautiful, but unfinished.  The immortality of the soul,
which is the natural consequence of the appetites and powers she is
invested with, is scarcely once hinted throughout the poem.  This
deficiency is amply supplied by the masterly pencil of Dr. Young, who,
like a good philosopher, has invincibly proved the immortality of man
from the grandeur of his conceptions and the meanness and misery of his
state; for this reason a few passages are selected from the ‘Night
Thoughts,’ which, with those from Akenside, seem to form a complete view
of the powers, situation, and end of man.”—“Exercises for Improvement in
Elocution,” p. 66.

His other poems are now to be considered; but a short consideration will
despatch them.  It is not easy to guess why he addicted himself so
diligently to lyric poetry, having neither the ease and airiness of the
lighter, nor the vehemence and elevation of the grander ode.  When he
lays his ill-fated hand upon his harp his former powers seem to desert
him; he has no longer his luxuriance of expression or variety of images.
His thoughts are cold, and his words inelegant.  Yet such was his love of
lyrics that, having written with great vigour and poignancy his “Epistle
to Curio,” he transformed it afterwards into an ode disgraceful only to
its author.

Of his odes nothing favourable can be said; the sentiments commonly want
force, nature, or novelty; the diction is sometimes harsh and uncouth,
the stanzas ill-constructed and unpleasant, and the rhymes dissonant or
unskilfully disposed, too distant from each other, or arranged with too
little regard to established use, and therefore perplexing to the ear,
which in a short composition has not time to grow familiar with an
innovation.  To examine such compositions singly cannot be required; they
have doubtless brighter and darker parts; but, when they are once found
to be generally dull, all further labour may be spared, for to what use
can the work be criticised that will not be read?



GRAY.


THOMAS GRAY, the son of Mr. Philip Gray, a scrivener of London, was born
in Cornhill, November 26, 1716.  His grammatical education he received at
Eton, under the care of Mr. Antrobus, his mother’s brother, then
assistant to Dr. George, and when he left school, in 1734, entered a
pensioner at Peterhouse, in Cambridge.  The transition from the school to
the college is, to most young scholars, the time from which they date
their years of manhood, liberty, and happiness; but Gray seems to have
been very little delighted with academical gratifications; he liked at
Cambridge neither the mode of life nor the fashion of study, and lived
sullenly on to the time when his attendance on lectures was no longer
required.  As he intended to profess the common law, he took no degree.
When he had been at Cambridge about five years, Mr. Horace Walpole, whose
friendship he had gained at Eton, invited him to travel with him as his
companion.  They wandered through France into Italy; and Gray’s “Letters”
contain a very pleasing account of many parts of their journey.  But
unequal friendships are easily dissolved; at Florence they quarrelled and
parted; and Mr. Walpole is now content to have it told that it was by his
fault.  If we look, however, without prejudice on the world, we shall
find that men whose consciousness of their own merit sets them above the
compliances of servility are apt enough in their association with
superiors to watch their own dignity with troublesome and punctilious
jealousy, and in the fervour of independence to exact that attention
which they refuse to pay.  Part they did, whatever was the quarrel; and
the rest of their travels was doubtless more unpleasant to them both.
Gray continued his journey in a manner suitable to his own little
fortune, with only an occasional servant.  He returned to England in
September, 1741, and in about two months afterwards buried his father,
who had, by an injudicious waste of money upon a new house, so much
lessened his fortune that Gray thought himself too poor to study the law.
He therefore retired to Cambridge, where he soon after became Bachelor of
Civil Law, and where, without liking the place or its inhabitants, or
professing to like them, he passed, except a short residence at London,
the rest of his life.  About this time he was deprived of Mr. West, the
son of a chancellor of Ireland, a friend on whom he appears to have set a
high value, and who deserved his esteem by the powers which he shows in
his “Letters” and in the “Ode to May,” which Mr. Mason has preserved, as
well as by the sincerity with which, when Gray sent him part of
_Agrippina_, a tragedy that he had just begun, he gave an opinion which
probably intercepted the progress of the work, and which the judgment of
every reader will confirm.  It was certainly no loss to the English stage
that _Agrippina_ was never finished.  In this year (1742) Gray seems to
have applied himself seriously to poetry; for in this year were produced
the “Ode to Spring,” his “Prospect of Eton,” and his “Ode to Adversity.”
He began likewise a Latin poem, “De Principiis Cogitandi.”

It may be collected from the narrative of Mr. Mason that his first
ambition was to have excelled in Latin poetry; perhaps it were reasonable
to wish that he had prosecuted his design; for though there is at present
some embarrassment in his phrase, and some harshness in his lyric
numbers, his copiousness of language is such as very few possess; and his
lines, even when imperfect, discover a writer whom practice would have
made skilful.  He now lived on at Peterhouse, very little solicitous what
others did or thought, and cultivated his mind and enlarged his views
without any other purpose than of improving and amusing himself, when Mr.
Mason, being elected Fellow of Pembroke Hall, brought him a companion who
was afterwards to be his editor, and whose fondness and fidelity has
kindled in him a zeal of admiration which cannot be reasonably expected
from the neutrality of a stranger and the coldness of a critic.  In this
retirement he wrote (1747) an ode on the “Death of Mr. Walpole’s Cat;”
and the year afterwards attempted a poem of more importance, on
“Government and Education,” of which the fragments which remain have many
excellent lines.  His next production (1750) was his far-famed “Elegy in
the Churchyard,” which, finding its way into a magazine, first, I
believe, made him known to the public.

An invitation from Lady Cobham about this time gave occasion to an odd
composition called “A Long Story,” which adds little to Gray’s character.
Several of his pieces were published (1753) with designs by Mr. Bentley;
and, that they might in some form or other make a book, only one side of
each leaf was printed.  I believe the poems and the plates recommended
each other so well that the whole impression was soon bought.  This year
he lost his mother.  Some time afterwards (1756) some young men of the
college, whose chambers were near his, diverted themselves with
disturbing him by frequent and troublesome noises, and, as is said, by
pranks yet more offensive and contemptuous.  This insolence, having
endured it awhile, he represented to the governors of the society, among
whom perhaps he had no friends; and finding his complaint little
regarded, removed himself to Pembroke Hall.

In 1759 he published “The Progress of Poetry” and “The Bard,” two
compositions at which the readers of poetry were at first content to gaze
in mute amazement.  Some that tried them confessed their inability to
understand them, though Warburton said that they were understood as well
as the works of Milton and Shakespeare, which it is the fashion to
admire.  Garrick wrote a few lines in their praise.  Some hardy champions
undertook to rescue them from neglect; and in a short time many were
content to be shown beauties which they could not see.

Gray’s reputation was now so high that, after the death of Cibber, he had
the honour of refusing the laurel, which was then bestowed on Mr.
Whitehead.  His curiosity, not long after, drew him away from Cambridge
to a lodging near the Museum, where he resided near three years, reading
and transcribing, and, so far as can be discovered, very little affected
by two odes on “Oblivion” and “Obscurity,” in which his lyric
performances were ridiculed with much contempt and much ingenuity.  When
the Professor of Modern History at Cambridge died, he was, as he says,
“cockered and spirited up,” till he asked it of Lord Bute, who sent him a
civil refusal; and the place was given to Mr. Brocket, the tutor of Sir
James Lowther.  His constitution was weak, and, believing that his health
was promoted by exercise and change of place, he undertook (1765) a
journey into Scotland, of which his account, so far as it extends, is
very curious and elegant; for, as his comprehension was ample, his
curiosity extended to all the works of art, all the appearances of
nature, and all the monuments of past events.  He naturally contracted a
friendship with Dr. Beattie, whom he found a poet, a philosopher, and a
good man.  The Mareschal College at Aberdeen offered him a degree of
Doctor of Laws, which, having omitted to take it at Cambridge, he thought
it decent to refuse.  What he had formerly solicited in vain was at last
given him without solicitation.  The Professorship of History became
again vacant, and he received (1768) an offer of it from the Duke of
Grafton.  He accepted, and retained, it to his death; always designing
lectures, but never reading them; uneasy at his neglect of duty, and
appeasing his uneasiness with designs of reformation, and with a
resolution which he believed himself to have made of resigning the office
if he found himself unable to discharge it.  Ill-health made another
journey necessary, and he visited (1769) Westmoreland and Cumberland.  He
that reads his epistolary narration wishes that, to travel, and to tell
his travels, had been more of his employment; but it is by studying at
home that we must obtain the ability of travelling with intelligence and
improvement.  His travels and his studies were now near their end.  The
gout, of which he had sustained many weak attacks, fell upon his stomach,
and, yielding to no medicines, produced strong convulsions, which (July
30, 1771) terminated in death.  His character I am willing to adopt, as
Mr. Mason has done, from a letter written to my friend Mr. Boswell by the
Rev. Mr. Temple, rector of St. Gluvias in Cornwall; and am as willing as
his warmest well-wisher to believe it true:—

    “Perhaps he was the most learned man in Europe.  He was equally
    acquainted with the elegant and profound parts of science, and that
    not superficially, but thoroughly.  He knew every branch of history,
    both natural and civil; had read all the original historians of
    England, France, and Italy; and was a great antiquarian.  Criticism,
    metaphysics, morals, politics, made a principal part of his study;
    voyages and travels of all sorts were his favourite amusements; and
    he had a fine taste in painting, prints, architecture, and gardening.
    With such a fund of knowledge, his conversation must have been
    equally instructing and entertaining; but he was also a good man, a
    man of virtue and humanity.  There is no character without some
    speck, some imperfection; and I think the greatest defect in his was
    an affectation in delicacy, or rather effeminacy, and a visible
    fastidiousness, or contempt and disdain of his inferiors in science.
    He also had, in some degree, that weakness which disgusted Voltaire
    so much in Mr. Congreve: though he seemed to value others chiefly
    according to the progress they had made in knowledge, yet he could
    not bear to be considered merely as a man of letters; and, though
    without birth or fortune or station, his desire was to be looked upon
    as a private independent gentleman, who read for his amusement.
    Perhaps it may be said, What signifies so much knowledge, when it
    produced so little?  Is it worth taking so much pains to leave no
    memorial but a few poems?  But let it be considered that Mr. Gray was
    to others at least innocently employed; to himself certainly
    beneficially.  His time passed agreeably; he was every day making
    some new acquisition in science; his mind was enlarged, his heart
    softened, his virtue strengthened; the world and mankind were shown
    to him without a mask; and he was taught to consider everything as
    trifling and unworthy of the attention of a wise man except the
    pursuit of knowledge and practice of virtue in that state wherein God
    hath placed us.”

To this character Mr. Mason has added a more particular account of Gray’s
skill in zoology.  He has remarked that Gray’s effeminacy was affected
most “before those whom he did not wish to please;” and that he is
unjustly charged with making knowledge his sole reason of preference, as
he paid his esteem to none whom he did not likewise believe to be good.

What has occurred to me from the slight inspection of his letters in
which my undertaking has engaged me is, that his mind had a large grasp;
that his curiosity was unlimited, and his judgment cultivated; that he
was a man likely to love much where he loved at all; but that he was
fastidious and hard to please.  His contempt, however, is often employed,
where I hope it will be approved, upon scepticism and infidelity.  His
short account of Shaftesbury (author of the “Characteristics”) I will
insert:—

    “You say you cannot conceive how Lord Shaftesbury came to be a
    philosopher in vogue; I will tell you: first, he was a lord;
    secondly, he was as vain as any of his readers; thirdly, men are very
    prone to believe what they do not understand; fourthly, they will
    believe anything at all, provided they are under no obligation to
    believe it; fifthly, they love to take a new road, even when that
    road leads nowhere; sixthly, he was reckoned a fine writer, and seems
    always to mean more than he said.  Would you have any more reasons?
    An interval of about forty years has pretty well destroyed the charm.
    A dead lord ranks with commoners; vanity is no longer interested in
    the matter, for a new road has become an old one.”

Mr. Mason has added, from his own knowledge, that though Gray was poor he
was not eager of money, and that out of the little that he had he was
very willing to help the necessitous.  As a writer, he had this
peculiarity—that he did not write his pieces first rudely, and then
correct them, but laboured every line as it arose in the train of
composition; and he had a notion, not very peculiar, that he could not
write but at certain times, or at happy moments—a fantastic foppery to
which my kindness for a man of learning and virtue wishes him to have
been superior.

Gray’s poetry is now to be considered; and I hope not to be looked on as
an enemy to his name if I confess that I contemplate it with less
pleasure than his Life.  His ode “On Spring” has something poetical, both
in the language and the thought; but the language is too luxuriant, and
the thoughts have nothing new.  There has of late arisen a practice of
giving to adjectives derived from substantives the termination of
participles; such as the _cultured_ plain, the _daisied_ bank; but I was
sorry to see, in the lines of a scholar like Gray, the _honied_ Spring.
The morality is natural, but too stale; the conclusion is pretty.

The poem “On the Cat” was doubtless by its author considered as a trifle,
but it is not a happy trifle.  In the first stanza, “the azure flowers
_that_ blow” show resolutely a rhyme is sometimes made when it cannot
easily be found.  Selima, the cat, is called a nymph, with some violence
both to language and sense; but there is no good use made of it when it
is done; for of the two lines

    “What female heart can gold despise?
    What cat’s averse to fish?”

the first relates merely to the nymph, and the second only to the cat.
The sixth stanza contains a melancholy truth, that “a favourite has no
friend;” but the last ends in a pointed sentence of no relation to the
purpose.  If _what glistered_ had been _gold_, the cat would not have
gone into the water; and if she had, would not less have been drowned.

“The Prospect of Eton College” suggests nothing to Gray which every
beholder does not equally think and feel.  His supplication to Father
Thames to tell him who drives the hoop or tosses the ball is useless and
puerile.  Father Thames has no better means of knowing than himself.  His
epithet “buxom health” is not elegant; he seems not to understand the
word.  Gray thought his language more poetical as it was more remote from
common use.  Finding in Dryden “honey redolent of spring,” an expression
that reaches the utmost limits of our language, Gray drove it a little
more beyond common apprehension by making “gales” to be “redolent of joy
and youth.”

Of the “Ode on Adversity,” the hint was at first taken from “O Diva,
gratum quæ regis Antium;” but Gray has excelled his original by the
variety of his sentiments, and by their moral application.  Of this
piece, at once poetical and rational, I will not by slight objections
violate the dignity.

My process has now brought me to the _wonderful_ “Wonder of Wonders,” the
two Sister Odes, by which, though either vulgar ignorance or common sense
at first universally rejected them, many have been since persuaded to
think themselves delighted.  I am one of those that are willing to be
pleased, and therefore would gladly find the meaning of the first stanza
of the “Progress of Poetry.”  Gray seems in his rapture to confound the
images of spreading sound and running water.  A “stream of music” may be
allowed; but where does “music,” however “smooth and strong,” after
having visited the “verdant vales, roll down the steep amain,” so as that
“rocks and nodding groves rebellow to the roar”?  If this be said of
music, it is nonsense; if it be said of water, it is nothing to the
purpose.  The second stanza, exhibiting Mars’ car and Jove’s eagle, is
unworthy of further notice.  Criticism disdains to chase a schoolboy to
his common-places.  To the third it may likewise be objected that it is
drawn from mythology, though such as may be more easily assimilated to
real life.  Idalia’s “velvet green” has something of cant.  An epithet or
metaphor drawn from Nature ennobles Art; an epithet or metaphor drawn
from Art degrades Nature.  Gray is too fond of words arbitrarily
compounded.  “Many-twinkling” was formerly censured as not analogical; we
may say “many-spotted,” but scarcely “many-spotting.”  This stanza,
however, has something pleasing.  Of the second ternary of stanzas, the
first endeavours to tell something, and would have told it, had it not
been crossed by Hyperion; the second describes well enough the universal
prevalence of poetry; but I am afraid that the conclusion will not rise
from the premises.  The caverns of the North and the plains of Chili are
not the residences of “glory and generous shame.”  But that poetry and
virtue go always together is an opinion so pleasing that I can forgive
him who resolves to think it true.  The third stanza sounds big with
“Delphi,” and “Ægean,” and “Ilissus,” and “Meander,” and “hallowed
fountains,” and “solemn sound;” but in all Gray’s odes there is a kind of
cumbrous splendour which we wish away.  His position is at last false.
In the time of Dante and Petrarch, from whom we derive our first school
of poetry, Italy was overrun by “tyrant power” and “coward vice;” nor was
our state much better when we first borrowed the Italian arts.  Of the
third ternary, the first gives a mythological birth of Shakespeare.  What
is said of that mighty genius is true, but it is not said happily; the
real effects of this poetical power are put out of sight by the pomp of
machinery.  Where truth is sufficient to fill the mind, fiction is worse
than useless; the counterfeit debases the genuine.  His account of
Milton’s blindness, if we suppose it caused by study in the formation of
his poem (a supposition surely allowable), is poetically true, and
happily imagined.  But the _car_ of Dryden, with his _two coursers_, has
nothing in it peculiar; it is a car in which any other rider may be
placed.

“The Bard” appears, at the first view, to be, as Algarotti and others
have remarked, an imitation of the prophecy of Nereus.  Algarotti thinks
it superior to its original; and, if preference depends only on the
imagery and animation of the two poems, his judgment is right.  There is
in “The Bard” more force, more thought, and more variety.  But to copy is
less than to invent, and the copy has been unhappily produced at a wrong
time.  The fiction of Horace was to the Romans credible; but its revival
disgusts us with apparent and unconquerable falsehood.  _Incredulus odi_.
To select a singular event, and swell it to a giant’s bulk by fabulous
appendages of spectres and predictions, has little difficulty; for he
that forsakes the probable may always find the marvellous.  And it has
little use; we are affected only as we believe; we are improved only as
we find something to be imitated or declined.  I do not see that “The
Bard” promotes any truth, moral or political.  His stanzas are too long,
especially his epodes; the ode is finished before the ear has learned its
measures, and consequently before it can receive pleasure from their
consonance and recurrence.  Of the first stanza the abrupt beginning has
been celebrated; but technical beauties can give praise only to the
inventor.  It is in the power of any man to rush abruptly upon his
subject that has read the ballad of “Johnny Armstrong,”

                   “Is there ever a man in all Scotland—?”

The initial resemblances or alliterations, “ruin, ruthless,” “helm or
hauberk,” are below the grandeur of a poem that endeavours at sublimity.
In the second stanza the Bard is well described, but in the third we have
the puerilities of obsolete mythology.  When we are told that “Cadwallo
hushed the stormy main,” and that “Modred made huge Plinlimmon bow his
cloud-topped head,” attention recoils from the repetition of a tale that,
even when it was first heard, was heard with scorn.  The _weaving_ of the
_winding-sheet_ he borrowed, as he owns, from the Northern Bards, but
their texture, however, was very properly the work of female powers, as
the act of spinning the thread of life in another mythology.  Theft is
always dangerous; Gray has made weavers of slaughtered bards by a fiction
outrageous and incongruous.  They are then called upon to “Weave the warp
and weave the woof,” perhaps with no great propriety, for it is by
crossing the _woof_ with the _warp_ that men weave the _web_ or piece,
and the first line was dearly bought by the admission of its wretched
correspondent, “Give ample room and verge enough.”  He has, however, no
other line as bad.  The third stanza of the second ternary is commended,
I think, beyond its merit.  The personification is indistinct.  _Thirst_
and _hunger_ are not alike, and their features, to make the imagery
perfect, should have been discriminated.  We are told in the same stanza
how “towers are fed.”  But I will no longer look for particular faults;
yet let it be observed that the ode might have been concluded with an
action of better example, but suicide is always to be had without expense
of thought.

These odes are marked by glittering accumulations of ungraceful
ornaments, they strike rather than please; the images are magnified by
affectation; the language is laboured into harshness.  The mind of the
writer seems to work with unnatural violence.  “Double, double, toil and
trouble.”  He has a kind of strutting dignity, and is tall by walking on
tiptoe.  His art and his struggle are too visible, and there is too
little appearance of ease and nature.  To say that he has no beauties
would be unjust; a man like him, of great learning and great industry,
could not but produce something valuable.  When he pleases least, it can
only be said that a good design was ill directed.  His translations of
Northern and Welsh poetry deserve praise; the imagery is preserved,
perhaps often improved, but the language is unlike the language of other
poets.  In the character of his Elegy I rejoice to concur with the common
reader, for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary
prejudices, after all the refinements of subtlety and the dogmatism of
learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.  The
“Churchyard” abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and
with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.  The four stanzas,
beginning “Yet even these bones,” are to me original; I have never seen
the notions in any other place, yet he that reads them here persuades
himself that he has always felt them.  Had Gray written often thus, it
had been vain to blame and useless to praise him.



LYTTELTON.


GEORGE LYTTELTON, the son of Sir Thomas Lyttelton, of Hagley, in
Worcestershire, was born in 1709.  He was educated at Eton, where he was
so much distinguished that his exercises were recommended as models to
his schoolfellows.  From Eton he went to Christchurch, where he retained
the same reputation of superiority, and displayed his abilities to the
public in a poem on “Blenheim.”  He was a very early writer both in verse
and prose.  His “Progress of Love” and his “Persian Letters” were both
written when he was very young, and, indeed, the character of a young man
is very visible in both.  The verses cant of shepherds and flocks, and
crooks dressed with flowers; and the letters have something of that
indistinct and headstrong ardour for liberty which a man of genius always
catches when he enters the world, and always suffers to cool as he passes
forward.  He stayed not long in Oxford, for in 1728 he began his travels,
and saw France and Italy.  When he returned he obtained a seat in
Parliament, and soon distinguished himself among the most eager opponents
of Sir Robert Walpole, though his father, who was Commissioner of the
Admiralty, always voted with the Court.  For many years the name of
George Lyttelton was seen in every account of every debate in the House
of Commons.  He opposed the standing army; he opposed the excise; he
supported the motion for petitioning the king to remove Walpole.  His
zeal was considered by the courtiers not only as violent but as
acrimonious and malignant, and when Walpole was at last hunted from his
places, every effort was made by his friends, and many friends he had, to
exclude Lyttelton from the secret committee.

The Prince of Wales, being (1737) driven from St. James’s, kept a
separate court, and opened his arms to the opponents of the Ministry.
Mr. Lyttelton became his Secretary, and was supposed to have great
influence in the direction of his conduct.  He persuaded his master,
whose business it was now to be popular, that he would advance his
character by patronage.  Mallet was made Under Secretary, with £200, and
Thomson had a pension of £100 a year.  For Thomson, Lyttelton always
retained his kindness, and was able at last to place him at ease.  Moore
courted his favour by an apologetical poem called the “Trial of Selim,”
for which he was paid with kind words, which, as is common, raised great
hopes, that were at last disappointed.

Lyttelton now stood in the first rank of Opposition, and Pope, who was
incited, it is not easy to say how, to increase the clamour against the
Ministry, commended him among the other patriots.  This drew upon him the
reproaches of Fox, who in the House imputed to him as a crime his
intimacy with a lampooner so unjust and licentious.  Lyttelton supported
his friend; and replied that he thought it an honour to be received into
the familiarity of so great a poet.  While he was thus conspicuous he
married (1741) Miss Lucy Fortescue, of Devonshire, by whom he had a son,
the late Lord Lyttelton, and two daughters, and with whom he appears to
have lived in the highest degree of connubial felicity; but human
pleasures are short; she died in childbed about five years afterwards,
and he solaced his grief by writing a long poem to her memory.  He did
not, however, condemn himself to perpetual solitude and sorrow, for after
a while he was content to seek happiness again by a second marriage with
the daughter of Sir Robert Rich, but the experiment was unsuccessful.  At
length, after a long struggle, Walpole gave way, and honour and profit
were distributed among his conquerors.  Lyttelton was made (1744) one of
the Lords of the Treasury, and from that time was engaged in supporting
the schemes of the Ministry.

Politics did not, however, so much engage him as to withhold his thoughts
from things of more importance.  He had, in the pride of juvenile
confidence, with the help of corrupt conversation, entertained doubts of
the truth of Christianity; but he thought the time now come when it was
no longer fit to doubt or believe by chance, and applied himself
seriously to the great question.  His studies, being honest, ended in
conviction.  He found that religion was true, and what he had learned he
endeavoured to teach (1747) by “Observations on the Conversion of St.
Paul,” a treatise to which infidelity has never been able to fabricate a
specious answer.  This book his father had the happiness of seeing, and
expressed his pleasure in a letter which deserves to be inserted:—

    “I have read your religious treatise with infinite pleasure and
    satisfaction.  The style is fine and clear, the arguments close,
    cogent, and irresistible.  May the King of Kings, whose glorious
    cause you have so well defended, reward your pious labours, and grant
    that I may be found worthy, through the merits of Jesus Christ, to be
    an eye-witness of that happiness which I don’t doubt he will
    bountifully bestow upon you.  In the meantime I shall never cease
    glorifying God for having endowed you with such useful talents, and
    giving me so good a son.

                          “Your affectionate father,

                                                       “THOMAS LYTTELTON.”

A few years afterwards (1751), by the death of his father, he inherited a
baronet’s title, with a large estate, which, though perhaps he did not
augment, he was careful to adorn by a house of great elegance and
expense, and by much attention to the decoration of his park.  As he
continued his activity in Parliament, he was gradually advancing his
claim to profit and preferment; and accordingly was made in time (1754)
Cofferer and Privy Councillor: this place he exchanged next year for the
great office of Chancellor of the Exchequer—an office, however, that
required some qualifications which he soon perceived himself to want.
The year after, his curiosity led him into Wales; of which he has given
an account, perhaps rather with too much affectation of delight, to
Archibald Bower, a man of whom he has conceived an opinion more
favourable than he seems to have deserved, and whom, having once espoused
his interest and fame he was never persuaded to disown.  Bower, whatever
was his moral character, did not want abilities.  Attacked as he was by a
universal outcry, and that outcry, as it seems, the echo of truth, he
kept his ground; at last, when his defences began to fail him, he sallied
out upon his adversaries, and his adversaries retreated.

About this time Lyttelton published his “Dialogues of the Dead,” which
were very eagerly read, though the production rather, as it seems, of
leisure than of study—rather effusions than compositions.  The names of
his persons too often enable the reader to anticipate their conversation;
and when they have met, they too often part without any conclusion.  He
has copied Fenelon more than Fontenelle.  When they were first published
they were kindly commended by the “Critical Reviewers;” and poor
Lyttelton, with humble gratitude, returned, in a note which I have read,
acknowledgments which can never be proper, since they must be paid either
for flattery or for justice.

When, in the latter part of the last reign, the inauspicious commencement
of the war made the dissolution of the Ministry unavoidable, Sir George
Lyttelton, losing with the rest his employment, was recompensed with a
peerage; and rested from political turbulence in the House of Lords.

His last literary production was his “History of Henry the Second,”
elaborated by the searches and deliberations of twenty years, and
published with such anxiety as only vanity can dictate.  The story of
this publication is remarkable.  The whole work was printed twice over, a
great part of it three times, and many sheets four or five times.  The
booksellers paid for the first impression; but the changes and repeated
operations of the press were at the expense of the author, whose
ambitious accuracy is known to have cost him at least a thousand pounds.
He began to print in 1755.  Three volumes appeared in 1764, a second
edition of them in 1767, a third edition in 1768, and the conclusion in
1771.

Andrew Reid, a man not without considerable abilities and not
unacquainted with letters or with life, undertook to persuade Lyttelton,
as he had persuaded himself, that he was master of the secret of
punctuation; and, as fear begets credulity, he was employed, I know not
at what price, to point the pages of “Henry the Second.”  The book was at
last pointed and printed, and sent into the world.  Lyttelton took money
for his copy, of which, when he had paid the pointer, he probably gave
the rest away; for he was very liberal to the indigent.  When time
brought the History to a third edition, Reid was either dead or
discarded; and the superintendence of typography and punctuation was
committed to a man originally a comb-maker, but then known by the style
of Doctor.  Something uncommon was probably expected, and something
uncommon was at last done; for to the Doctor’s edition is appended, what
the world had hardly seen before, a list of errors in nineteen pages.

But to politics and literature there must be an end.  Lord Lyttelton had
never the appearance of a strong or of a healthy man; he had a slender,
uncompacted frame, and a meagre face; he lasted, however, sixty years,
and was then seized with his last illness.  Of his death a very affecting
and instructive account has been given by his physician, which will spare
me the task of his moral character:—

    “On Sunday evening the symptoms of his lordship’s disorder, which for
    a week past had alarmed us, put on a fatal appearance, and his
    lordship believed himself to be a dying man.  From this time he
    suffered from restlessness rather than pain; though his nerves were
    apparently much fluttered, his mental faculties never seemed
    stronger, when he was thoroughly awake.  His lordship’s bilious and
    hepatic complaints seemed alone not equal to the expected mournful
    event; his long want of sleep, whether the consequence of the
    irritation in the bowels, or, which is more probable, of causes of a
    different kind, accounts for his loss of strength, and for his death,
    very sufficiently.  Though his lordship wished his approaching
    dissolution not to be lingering, he waited for it with resignation.
    He said, ‘It is a folly, a keeping me in misery, now to attempt to
    prolong life;’ yet he was easily persuaded, for the satisfaction of
    others, to do or take anything thought proper for him.  On Saturday
    he had been remarkably better, and we were not without some hopes of
    his recovery.

    “On Sunday, about eleven in the forenoon, his lordship sent for me,
    and said he felt a great hurry, and wished to have a little
    conversation with me, in order to divert it.  He then proceeded to
    open the fountain of that heart, from whence goodness had so long
    flowed, as from a copious spring.  ‘Doctor,’ said he, ‘you shall be
    my confessor: when I first set out in the world I had friends who
    endeavoured to shake my belief in the Christian religion.  I saw
    difficulties which staggered me, but I kept my mind open to
    conviction.  The evidences and doctrines of Christianity, studied
    with attention, made me a most firm and persuaded believer of the
    Christian religion.  I have made it the rule of my life, and it is
    the ground of my future hopes.  I have erred and sinned; but have
    repented, and never indulged any vicious habit.  In politics and
    public life I have made public good the rule of my conduct.  I never
    gave counsels which I did not at the time think the best.  I have
    seen that I was sometimes in the wrong, but I did not err designedly.
    I have endeavoured in private life to do all the good in my power,
    and never for a moment could indulge malicious or unjust designs upon
    any person whatsoever.’

“At another time he said, ‘I must leave my soul in the same state it was
in before this illness; I find this a very inconvenient time for
solicitude about anything.’

    “On the evening, when the symptoms of death came on, he said, ‘I
    shall die; but it will not be your fault.’  When Lord and Lady
    Valentia came to see his lordship, he gave them his solemn
    benediction, and said, ‘Be good, be virtuous, my lord; you must come
    to this.’  Thus he continued giving his dying benediction to all
    around him.  On Monday morning a lucid interval gave some small
    hopes, but these vanished in the evening; and he continued dying, but
    with very little uneasiness, till Tuesday morning, August 22, when,
    between seven and eight o’clock, he expired, almost without a groan.”

His lordship was buried at Hagley, and the following inscription is cut
on the side of his lady’s monument:—

           “This unadorned stone was placed here by the particular
            desire and express directions of the Right Honourable
                            GEORGE LORD LYTTELTON,
                     who died August 22, 1773, aged 64.”

Lord Lyttelton’s Poems are the works of a man of literature and judgment,
devoting part of his time to versification.  They have nothing to be
despised, and little to be admired.  Of his “Progress of Love,” it is
sufficient blame to say that it is pastoral.  His blank verse in
“Blenheim” has neither much force nor much elegance.  His little
performances, whether songs or epigrams, are sometimes sprightly, and
sometimes insipid.  His epistolary pieces have a smooth equability, which
cannot much tire, because they are short, but which seldom elevates or
surprises.  But from this censure ought to be excepted his “Advice to
Belinda,” which, though for the most part written when he was very young,
contains much truth and much prudence, very elegantly and vigorously
expressed, and shows a mind attentive to life, and a power of poetry
which cultivation might have raised to excellence.





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