Keep thy conscience from offence,

And tempestuous passions free,
So, when thou art call'd from hence,
Easy shall thy passage be;

Easy shall thy passage be,

Cheerful thy allotted stay,
Short th' 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 Oct. 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 Shakspeare, 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

And 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 thy 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, uncurst; verse reclaimed, re-enthroned in the true language of

In September, 1764, he added a kind of codicil, wherein he made it his dying entreaty to his housekeeper, to whom he left 1000l. "that all he was dead, which would greatly oblige her his manuscripts might be destroyed as soon as deceased friend."

worldly friendships, to know that Young, either It may teach mankind the uncertainty of 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 tamentary pride, which too often seeks for in his will; and it may serve to repress that tessounding 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 Templegate." 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?"

and a housekeeper for the friends of the Author The same humility which marked a hatter 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 perforined no duty for three or four years, but he retained his intellects to the last.

know not to have been true, of the manner of Much is told in the "Biographia," which I his burial; of the master and children of a charity school, which he founded in his parish, who and of a bell which was not caused to toll as neglected to attend their benefactor's corpse; 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 | Author of the "Night Thoughts" composed his funeral. many sermons, he did not oblige the public with many.

The Author of these lines is not without his Hic | yet the whole is languid; the plan is too much 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 a stone or a turf will find its way, sooner or later, to the deserving.

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 sentiment, and his points the sharpness of resistless truth.

His characters are often selected with discernment, and drawn with nicety; his illustrations were often happy, and his reflections often just. His species of satire is between those of Horace and Juvenal; and he has the gayety 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.

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 In his "Night Thoughts" he has exhibited a bettered by your friendship: and that, if I do very wide display of original poetry, variegated credit to the church, after which I always longed, with deep reflections and striking allusions, a and for which I am now going to give in ex-wilderness of thought, in which the fertility of change 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.

Oxford, Oct. 1782.

H. C.

Or 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,

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 imagina tion, 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 "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 decayed faculties. There is Young in every stanza, such as he often was in the highest vigour.

His tragedies, not making part of the Collec tion, 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 "Re-
venge" approaches much nearer to human prac-
tices and manners, and therefore keeps posses-
sion of the stage; the first design seems sug-
gested by "Othello;" but the reflections, the
incidents, and the diction, are original. The
moral observations are so introduced, and so ex-Let burlesque try to go beyond him.
pressed, 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.

re-assembly of the atoms that compose the bu
man body, at the "Trump of Doom," by the col-
lection 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,"

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," it having dropped into his mind that the orbs, floating in space, might be called the cluster of creation, he thinks on 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

Her merchants princes, and each deck a throne.

He has the trick of joining the turgid and familiar; to buy the aliiance 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 sugges tions 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 en

Aaron Hill's "Plain Dealer," No. 36, July 24, 1724.

* Mallet's "William and Margaret" was printed in

In its original state it was very different from what it is in the last edition of his works.

grafted it into a regular poem. There is in this | how little confidence can be placed in posthumous 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.

Mallet, in a familiar conversation with Gar-broke's works. rick, 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,