the title of The Universal Passion. When George II. came to the throne, Young, who had failed to enter Parliament for Cirencester, determined, although he was forty-seven years of age, to take holy orders; he was almost immediately appointed chaplain to the King. He is said to have asked Pope how he should conduct his theological studies, and to have been answered according to his folly with a recommendation to master St. Thomas Aquinas. A begging letter to Mrs. Howard, the King's mistress, exists to prove that Young equally needed advice in the arts of obtaining Church preferment; he was importunate, yet he got little. In 1730 he was glad to take Welwyn, a college living; and the next year he married a widow of quality, Lady Elizabeth Leigh. The poetry Young published during these years was beneath contempt, yet he Dear Si I have made a few Corrections, & Additions in His Copy; wh I disin may the Press. Krack, divet & blisid Hope be with you, which is the whole & that ucdied, empt, portion of mortal man. Dvor s mostly young. It was veryakind in you to Foud to Mr Johnson, Autograph Note of Young's was already meditating upon the outlines of his great and enduring work. When close upon the mature age of sixty, with no production behind him which could really encourage him to confidence in his gifts, Young began the composition of the very elaborate poem which placed him in the first rank of contemporary writers. The Complaint, or Night Thoughts, appeared from 1742 to 1744, and greatly impressed the age with its moral sublimity. Young, however, was unable to repeat his success; he published several other works in prose and verse, but none of them rose above his earlier level of fustian and flatness. He considered himself to be cruelly neglected, and applied to the King and the Archbishop of Canterbury for preferment; Secker's reply is a monument of irony. The solitary success which attended his efforts was almost sarcastically inadequate; when he was nearly eighty he was appointed Clerk of the Closet to the Princess Dowager. Young lived on at Welwyn until he had nearly completed his eighty-second year, preserving his intellect to the last; he died on the 5th of April 1765, and was buried at Welwyn. The character of Young presents us with some very curious features. He was the typical eighteenth-century adventurer of letters, truculent and yet obsequious, without a trace of self-respect in the presence of the great, but arrogant and presuming with his own class. Yet Young was not without certain stately virtues; he could be penetrating, dignified, and extremely polite. That he was the victim of affectation, seems proved by the story that he wrote at night by the glimmer of a candle stuck in a human skull. His friendship with Voltaire did credit to the intellect of both of them, and Young's extempore epigram on the appearance of the great Frenchman deserves an immortality of quotation: "You are so witty, profligate and thin, At once we think you Milton, Death and Sin." FROM "NIGHT THOUGHTS I." O ye blest scenes of permanent delight! Could you, so rich in rapture, fear an end, That ghastly thought would drink up all your joy, And quite unparadise the realms of light. Safe are you lodged above these rolling spheres, The baneful influence of whose giddy dance Sheds sad vicissitude on all beneath. Here teems with revolutions every hour; And rarely for the better; or the best, More mortal than the common births of fate. A bold invasion of the rights of heaven! I clasp'd the phantoms, and I found them air. O had I weigh'd it ere my fond embrace! Death! great proprietor of all! 'tis thine To tread out empire, and to quench the stars. The sun himself by thy permission shines; And, one day, thou shalt pluck him from his sphere. Amid such mighty plunder, why exhaust Thy partial quiver on a mark so mean? Why thy peculiar rancour wreak'd on me? Insatiate archer! could not one suffice? Thy shaft flew thrice; and thrice my peace was slain; And thrice, ere thrice yon moon had fill'd her horn. James Hervey (1714-1758) was appointed in 1740 curate of Bideford in North James Hervey From an Engraving by S. Freeman Devon. While he was there, he walked over to the churchyard of Kilkhampton, and on his return began to write his famous Meditations among the Tombs, which were published in 1746-47, and went through twenty-five editions. Hervey was a gentle, pious, and placable man, who died prematurely of a consumption, being at the time. rector of Weston Favell in Northamptonshire. His Theron and Aspasio (1752) was at one time even more famous than the Meditations in evangelical circles. Robert Blair (1699-1746) was the minister of Athelstaneford in Haddingtonshire from 1731 to his death. Very little is known about his life, nor does it possess any further interest for us than that in 1743 he published his strangely powerful poem in blank verse, entitled The Grave. His sovereign's keeper, and the people's scourge, And celebrated masters of the balance, Deep read in stratagems and wiles of courts; Is meditating new unheard-of hardships, This sepulchral rhetoric in Miltonic verse, whether embodied in Young's rolling iambics or compressed into the homelier vigour of Blair's Grave, or tricked out in pseudo-classical turgidity by the disciples of Thomson, was what passed for poetry par excellence one hundred and fifty years ago. The influence of Thomson was strong on Dyer and Armstrong. John Dyer (1698-1758) was the son of a solicitor at Aberglasslyn, Carmarthenshire. He took to water-colour painting as a profession, studying under Jonathan Richardson, and wandering about in South Wales sketching ruins and landscapes. It was on one of these excursions that he wrote his poem of Grongar Hill, published in a miscellany in 1726, which contained studies of Nature which were novel and which were admired even to excess. Dyer went to Italy, and on his return he published a blank verse poem, The Ruins of Rome, 1740. He now entered the Church, and held successive livings in the counties. of Leicester and Lincoln. In 1757 he published a long didactic poem on the care of sheep, entitled The Fleece; this was a failure, and Dyer was told he would be "buried in woollen." He died of consumption, at Coningsby in Hants, where he had lately fitted up a house, on the 24th of July 1758. The best part of Grongar Hill, which is a description of the Vale of Towy as seen from that eminence, is the following, which certainly deserves a place in a record of the advance of a sentiment for Nature in English literature: Old castles on the cliff arise, Proudly towering in the skies! Rushing from the woods, the spires Seem from hence ascending fires! Half his beams Apollo sheds On the yellow mountain-heads! Gilds the fleeces of the flocks, And glitters on the broken rocks. . . Lies a long and level lawn, On which a dark hill, steep and high, His sides are clothed with waving wood. John Dyer |