great difficulty from a storm by landing at Rye; and the conclufion of the Satire turns the escape into a miracle, in fuch an encomiaftick strain of compliment as poetry too often feeks to pay to royalty. From the fixth of thefe poems we learn,

Midft empire's charms, how Carolina's heart Glow'd with the love of virtue and of art:

fince the grateful poet tells us in the next couplet,

Her favour is diffus'd to that degree,
Excefs of goodness! it has dawn'd on me.

Of the nature of this favour we must now rest contented in ignorance. The fifth Satire, on Women, was not published till 1727; and the fixth not till 1728.

To thefe Poems, when he gathered them into one publication under the title of The Univerfal Paffion, he prefixed a Preface, in which he obferves, that "no man can con"verse much in the world but, at what he "meets with, he muft either be infenfible or

grieve, or be angry or fmile. Now to "fmile at it, and turn it into ridicule,” adds

he,

he, "I think most eligible, as it hurts our"felves leaft, and gives vice and folly the greatest offence.-Laughing at the mifcon"duct of the world, will, in a great mea

fure, ease us of any more difagreeable paf"fion about it. One paffion is more effec"tually driven out by another than by rea

fon, whatever fome teach." So wrote, and so of course thought the lively and witty Satirift at the grave age of almost fifty, who, many years earlier in life, wrote the Laft Day. After all, Swift pronounced of these Satires, that they fhould either have been more angry, or more merry. Is it not fomewhat fingular that Young preferved, without any palliation, this Preface, fo bluntly decifive in favour of laughing at the world, in the fame collection of his works which contains the mournful, angry, gloomy Night Thoughts?

At the conclufion 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 fubject to blindness, which makes her mistake her way to preferments and honours; and "that

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"that the 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 fomething like blindness sometimes in the flattery which he forced her, and her fifter Profe, to utter? He always, indeed, made her entertain a moft dutiful admiration of riches; but furely Young, though nearly related to Poetry, had no connexion with her whom Plato makes the mother of Love. The frequent bounties his gratitude records, and the fortune he left behind him, clearly show that he could not complain of being related to Poverty. By The Univerfal Paffion he acquired no vulgar fortune, more than three thousand pounds. A fum not much less had already been fwallowed up in the SouthSea. For this lofs he took the vengeance of an author. His Mufe 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 publica

tion of his Univerfal Paffion, 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 feems to have been raised from the two answers of Lord Burghley and Sir Philip Sidney in Spenfer's Life.

When Young was writing a tragedy, Grafton is faid to have fent him a human skull, with a candle in it, as a proper lamp *.

After infcribing his Satires, not in the hope of not finding preferments and honours, to the Duke of Dorfet, Mr. Dodington, Mr. Spencer Compton, Lady Elizabeth Germain, and Sir Robert Walpole, he returns to plain panegyric. In 1726 he addreffed a poem tó Sir Robert Walpole, of which the title, The Inftalment, fufficiently explains the intention. If Young was a ready celebrator, he did not

* Spence.

VOL. IV.

Сс

endeavour,

one.

endeavour, or did not choose, to be a lafting The Instalment is among the pieces he did not admit into the number of his excuseable 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 feems to have been continued, poffibly increased, in this. Whatever it was, the poet thought he deferved it; for he was not afhamed to acknowledge what, without his acknowledgement; would now perhaps never have been

known:

My breaft, O Walpole, glows with grateful fire. The ftreams of royal bounty, turn'd by thee, Refresh the dry domains of poefy.

If the purity of modern patriotism term Young a penfioner, it must at least be confeffed 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 fpeech, which

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