illustration to be read continuously with pleasure. There is no plot or progressive interest; each of the nine books is independent of the other. The reader seeks out favourite passages, or contents himself with a single excursion into a wide and variegated field. The worst fault is the inevitable suggestion of insincerity, or at least of overstrained sentiment. But the more the work is studied, the more marvellous seem the fertility of fancy, the pregnancy of wit and wisdom, the felicitous conjunction of sound and sense, of sympathetic tenderness and everlasting truth, clearly discernible through the gloomy recesses of the poet's melancholious imagination:

The glorious fragments of a fire immortal,

With rubbish mixed, and glittering in the dust. This magnificent apostrophe had hardly been equalled since Milton's days:

On Life, Death, and Immortality.
Tired Nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep!
He, like the world, his ready visit pays

Where Fortune smiles; the wretched he forsakes;
Swift on his downy pinion flies from woe,
And lights on lids unsullied with a tear.

From short (as usual) and disturbed repose,
I wake: how happy they who wake no more!
Yet that were vain, if dreams infest the grave.
I wake, emerging from a sea of dreams

Tumultuous; where my wrecked desponding thought
From wave to wave of fancied misery

At random drove, her helm of reason lost.
Though now restored, 'tis only change of pain-
A bitter change!-severer for severe.
The day too short for my distress; and night,
E'en in the zenith of her dark domain,
Is sunshine to the colour of my fate.

Night, sable goddess! from her ebon throne,
In rayless majesty, now stretches forth
Her leaden sceptre o'er a slumbering world.
Silence how dead! and darkness how profound!
Nor eye nor listening ear an object finds;
Creation sleeps. 'Tis as the general pulse
Of life stood still, and Nature made a pause,
An awful pause! prophetic of her end.
And let her prophecy be soon fulfilled;
Fate! drop the curtain; I can lose no more.

Silence and Darkness! solemn sisters! twins From ancient Night, who nurse the tender thought To reason, and on reason build resolve

That column of true majesty in man

Assist me: I will thank you in the grave;

The grave your kingdom: there this frame shall fall

A victim sacred to your dreary shrine.

But what are ye?

Thou, who didst put to flight

Primeval Silence, when the morning stars
Exulting, shouted o'er the rising ball;

O Thou! whose word from solid darkness struck
That spark, the sun, strike wisdom from my soul;
My soul, which flies to thee, her trust, her treasure,
As misers to their gold, while others rest.

Through this opaque of nature and of soul, This double night, transmit one pitying ray,

To lighten and to cheer. Oh lead my mind,
(A mind that fain would wander from its woe)
Lead it through various scenes of life and death,
And from each scene the noblest truths inspire.
Nor less inspire my conduct than my song;
Teach my best reason, reason; my best will
Teach rectitude; and fix my firm resolve
Wisdom to wed, and pay her long arrear:
Nor let the phial of thy vengeance, poured
On this devoted head, be poured in vain.

How poor, how rich, how abject, how august,
How complicate, how wonderful is man!
How passing wonder He who made him such!
Who centred in our make such strange extremes !
From different natures marvellously mixt,
Connexion exquisite of distant worlds!
Distinguished link in being's endless chain!
Midway from nothing to the Deity!
A beam ethereal, sullied and absorpt!
Though sullied and dishonoured, still divine!
Dim miniature of greatness absolute!
An heir of glory! a frail child of dust-
Helpless immortal! insect infinite!

A worm! a god! I tremble at myself,
And in myself am lost! at home a stranger,
Thought wanders up and down, surprised, aghast,
And wondering at her own: how reason reels!
O what a miracle to man is man,
Triumphantly distressed! what joy! what dread!
Alternately transported and alarmed!

What can preserve my life? or what destroy?
An angel's arm can't snatch me from the grave;
Legions of angels can't confine me there.

'Tis past conjecture; all things rise in proof:
While o'er my limbs sleep's soft dominion spread:
What though my soul fantastic measures trod
O'er fairy fields; or mourned along the gloom
Of pathless woods; or down the craggy steep
Hurled headlong, swam with pain the mantled pool;
Or scaled the cliff; or danced on hollow winds,
With antic shapes, wild natives of the brain?
Her ceaseless flight, though devious, speaks her nature
Of subtler essence than the trodden clod. . . .
Even silent night proclaims my soul immortal! .
Why, then, their loss deplore that are not lost? .
This is the desert, this the solitude:
How populous, how vital is the grave!
This is creation's melancholy vault,

The vale funereal, the sad cypress gloom;
The land of apparitions, empty shades!
All, all on earth, is shadow, all beyond
Is substance; the reverse is folly's creed :
How solid all, where change shall be no more!
This is the bud of being, the dim dawn,
The twilight of our day, the vestibule;
Life's theatre as yet is shut, and death,
Strong death alone can heave the massy bar,

This gross impediment of clay remove,

And make us embryos of existence free
From real life; but little more remote
Is he, not yet a candidate for light,
The future embryo, slumbering in his sire.
Embryos we must be till we burst the shell,
Yon ambient azure shell, and spring to life,
The life of gods, O transport! and of man.
Yet man, fool man! here buries all his thoughts;

Inters celestial hopes without one sigh.
Prisoner of earth, and pent beneath the moon,
Here pinions all his wishes; winged by heaven
To fly at infinite; and reach it there
Where seraphs gather immortality,

On life's fair tree, fast by the throne of God.
What golden joys ambrosial clustering glow
In his full beam, and ripen for the just,
Where momentary ages are no more!

Where time, and pain, and chance, and death expire!
And is it in the flight of three score years
To push eternity from human thought,
And smother souls immortal in the dust?
A soul immortal, spending all her fires,
Wasting her strength in strenuous idleness,
Thrown into tumult, raptured or alarmed,
At aught this scene can threaten or indulge,
Resembles ocean into tempest wrought,
To waft a feather, or to drown a fly.

(From The Complaint-Night I.)

On Time.

The bell strikes one. We take no note of time
But from its loss: to give it then a tongue
Is wise in man. As if an angel spoke,
I feel the solemn sound. If heard aright,
It is the knell of my departed hours.

Where are they? With the years beyond the flood.
It is the signal that demands dispatch:

How much is to be done? My hopes and fears
Start up alarmed, and o'er life's narrow verge
Look down on what? A fathomless abyss.
A dread eternity! how surely mine!
And can eternity belong to me,
Poor pensioner on the bounties of an hour?
(From The Complaint-Night I.)

O time! than gold more sacred; more a load
Than lead to fools, and fools reputed wise.
What moment granted man without account?
What years are squandered, wisdom's debt unpaid?
Our wealth in days all due to that discharge.
Haste, haste, he lies in wait, he's at the door ;
Insidious Death! should his strong hand arrest,
No composition sets the prisoner free.
Eternity's inexorable chain

Fast binds, and vengeance claims the full arrear.
Youth is not rich in time; it may be poor;
Part with it as with money, sparing; pay
No moment, but in purchase of its worth;
And what it's worth, ask death-beds; they can tell.
Part with it as with life, reluctant; big
With holy hope of nobler time to come;
Time higher aimed, still nearer the great mark
Of men and angels, virtue more divine.

Ah! how unjust to nature and himself
Is thoughtless, thankless, inconsistent man!
Like children babbling nonsense in their sports,
We censure Nature for a span too short;
That span too short we tax as tedious too;
Torture invention, all expedients tire,
To lash the lingering moments into speed,
And whirl us (happy riddance !) from ourselves.
Time, in advance, behind him hides his wings,
And seems to creep, decrepit with his age;

Behold him when passed by; what then is seen
But his broad pinions swifter than the winds?
And all mankind, in contradiction strong,
Rueful, aghast! cry out on his career.

We waste, not use our time; we breathe, not live;
Time wasted is existence; used, is life:
And bare existence man, to live ordained,
Wrings and oppresses with enormous weight.
And why? since time was given for use, not waste,
Enjoined to fly, with tempest, tide, and stars,
To keep his speed, nor ever wait for man.
Time's use was doomed a pleasure, waste a pain,
That man might feel his error if unseen,
And, feeling, fly to labour for his cure;
Not blundering, split on idleness for ease.

We push time from us, and we wish him back ;
Lavish of lustrums, and yet fond of life;

Life we think long and short; death seek and shun.
Body and soul, like peevish man and wife,
United jar, and yet are loth to part.

Oh the dark days of vanity! while here,
How tasteless! and how terrible when gone!
Gone? they ne'er go; when past, they haunt us still:
The spirit walks of every day deceased,
And smiles an angel, or a fury frowns.
Nor death nor life delight us.
If time past,

And time possest, both pain us, what can please?
That which the Deity to please ordained,
Time used. The man who consecrates his hours
By vigorous effort, and an honest aim,

At once he draws the sting of life and death:
He walks with nature, and her paths are peace.

'Tis greatly wise to talk with our past hours,
And ask them what report they bore to heaven,
And how they might have borne more welcome news.
Their answers form what men experience call;
If wisdom's friend her best, if not, worst foe.

(From The Complaint-Night II.)

In these shorter passages he rings the changes on the same topics:

Look nature through, 'tis revolution all;

All change, no death; day follows night, and night
The dying day; stars rise and set, and rise :
Earth takes the example. See, the Summer gay,
With her green chaplet and ambrosial flowers,
Droops into pallid Autumn: Winter gray,
Horrid with frost and turbulent with storm,
Blows Autumn and his golden fruits away,

Then melts into the Spring: soft Spring, with breath
Favonian, from warm chambers of the south,
Recalls the first. All, to reflourish, fades:
As in a wheel, all sinks to reascend:
Emblems of man, who passes, not expires.

Self-flattered, unexperienced, high in hope,
When young, with sanguine cheer and streamers gay,
We cut our cable, launch into the world,
And fondly dream each wind and star our friend;
All in some darling enterprise embarkt:
But where is he can fathom its extent?
Amid a multitude of artless hands,
Ruin's sure perquisite, her lawful prize!
Some steer aright, but the black blast blows hard,

And puffs them wide of hope: with hearts of proof
Full against wind and tide, some win their way,
And when strong effort has deserved the port,
And tugged it into view, 'tis won! 'tis lost!

Though strong their oar, still stronger is their fate:
They strike! and while they triumph they expire.
In stress of weather most, some sink outright :
O'er them and o'er their names the billows close;
To-morrow knows not they were ever born.
Others a short memorial leave behind,
Like a flag floating when the bark's ingulfed ;
It floats a moment, and is seen no more.
One Cæsar lives; a thousand are forgot.
How few beneath auspicious planets born-
Darlings of Providence! fond fates elect!-
With swelling sails make good the promised port,
With all their wishes freighted! yet even these,
Freighted with all their wishes, soon complain;
Free from misfortune, not from nature free,
They still are men, and when is man secure?
As fatal time, as storm! the rush of years
Beats down their strength, their numberless escapes
In ruin end. And now their proud success
But plants new terrors on the victor's brow :
What pain to quit the world, just made their own,
Their nest so deeply downed, and built so high!
Too low they build, who build beneath the stars.

On Night.

These thoughts, O Night! are thine; From thee they came like lovers' secret sighs, While others slept. So Cynthia, poets feign, In shadows veiled, soft, sliding from her sphere, Her shepherd cheered; of her enamoured less Than I of thee.-And art thou still unsung, Beneath whose brow and by whose aid I sing? Immortal silence! where shall I begin? Where end? or how steal music from the spheres To soothe their goddess?

O majestic night!

Nature's great ancestor! Day's elder born!
And fated to survive the transient sun!
By mortals and immortals seen with awe!
A starry crown thy raven brow adorns,

An azure zone thy waist; clouds, in heaven's loom
Wrought through varieties of shape and shade,
In ample folds of drapery divine,

Thy flowing mantle form, and, heaven throughout,
Voluminously pour thy pompous train :
Thy gloomy grandeurs-Nature's most august,
Inspiring aspect!-claim a grateful verse;
And like a sable curtain starred with gold,
Drawn o'er my labours past, shall close the scene.

On Retirement.

Blest be that hand divine, which gently laid
My heart at rest beneath this humble shed!
The world 's a stately bark, on dangerous seas,
With pleasure seen, but boarded at our peril :
Here, on a single plank, thrown safe ashore,
I hear the tumult of the distant throng,
As that of seas remote, or dying storms;
And meditate on scenes more silent still;
Pursue thy theme, and fight the fear of Death.
Here, like a shepherd gazing from his hut,
Touching his reed, or leaning on his staff,

Eager ambition's fiery chace I see;
I see the circling hunt of noisy men
Burst law's inclosure, leap the mounds of right,
Pursuing and pursued, each other's prey;

As wolves for rapine; as the fox for wiles;
Till Death, that mighty hunter, earths them all.
Why all this toil for triumphs of an hour?
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.

Procrastination.

Be wise to-day; 'tis madness to defer :
Next day the fatal precedent will plead ;
Thus on, till wisdom is pushed out of life.
Procrastination is the thief of time;
Year after year it steals, till all are fled,
And to the mercies of a moment leaves
The vast concerns of an eternal scene.
If not so frequent, would not this be strange?
That 'tis so frequent, this is stranger still.

Of man's miraculous mistakes, this bears
The palm, 'That all men are about to live,'
For ever on the brink of being born:
All pay themselves the compliment to think
They one day shall not drivel, and their pride
On this reversion takes up ready praise;
At least their own their future selves applaud;
How excellent that life they ne'er will lead !
Time lodged in their own hands is Folly's vails;
That lodged in Fate's to wisdom they consign;
The thing they can't but purpose, they postpone.
'Tis not in folly not to scorn a fool,

And scarce in human wisdom to do more.

All promise is poor dilatory man.

And that through every stage. When young, indeed,
In full content we sometimes nobly rest,
Unanxious for ourselves, and only wish,
As duteous sons, our fathers were more wise.
At thirty, man suspects himself a fool;
Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan;
At fifty, chides his infamous delay,
Pushes his prudent purpose to resolve ;
In all the magnanimity of thought
Resolves, and re-resolves; then dies the same.

And why? because he thinks himself immortal.
All men think all men mortal but themselves;
Themselves, when some alarming shock of fate
Strikes through their wounded hearts the sudden dread :
But their hearts wounded, like the wounded air,
Soon close; where passed the shaft no trace is found,
As from the wing no scar the sky retains,
The parted wave no furrow from the keel,
So dies in human hearts the thought of death:
E'en with the tender tear which nature sheds
O'er those we love, we drop it in their grave.

(From The Complaint-Night I.) The Night Thoughts eclipsed Young's other works; but his Love of Fame; in Seven Characteristical Satires, shows real satiric power, often almost equalling Pope's. Parts of Pope's seem indeed to have been suggested by Young's.

From The Love of Fame.'
Not all on books their criticism waste:
The genius of a dish some justly taste,

And eat their way to fame! with anxious thought
The salmon is refused, the turbot bought.
Impatient Art rebukes the sun's delay,
And bids December yield the fruits of May.
Their various cares in one great point combine
The business of their lives, that is, to dine;
Half of their precious day they give the feast,
And to a kind digestion spare the rest.
Apicius here, the taster of the town,
Feeds twice a week, to settle their renown.
These worthies of the palate guard with care
The sacred annals of their bills of fare;
In those choice books their panegyrics read,
And scorn the creatures that for hunger feed;
If man, by feeding well, commences great,
Much more the worm, to whom that man is meat.

Brunetta's wise in actions great and rare,
But scorns on trifles to bestow her care.
Thus every hour Brunetta is to blame,
Because th' occasion is beneath her aim.
Think nought a trifle, though it small appear;
Small sands the mountain, moments make the year,
And trifles, life. Your care to trifles give,
Or you may die before you truly live.

;

Belus with solid glory will be crowned
He buys no phantom, no vain empty sound,
But builds himself a name; and to be great,
Sinks in a quarry an immense estate;
In cost and grandeur Chandos he'll outdo;
And, Burlington, thy taste is not so true;
The pile is finished, every toil is past,
And full perfection is arrived at last ;

When lo! my lord to some small corner runs,
And leaves state-rooms to strangers and to duns.

The man who builds, and wants wherewith to pay,
Provides a home from which to run away.
In Britain, what is many a lordly seat,
But a discharge in full for an estate?

Some for renown on scraps of learning dote,
And think they grow immortal as they quote.
To patchwork learned quotations are allied;
Both strive to make our poverty our pride.

Let high birth triumph! what can be more great?
Nothing-but merit in a low estate.
To Virtue's humblest son let none prefer
Vice, though descended from the Conqueror.
Shall men, like figures, pass for high or base,
Slight or important only by their place?
Titles are marks of honest men, and wise;
The fool or knave that wears a title, lies.
They that on glorious ancestors enlarge,
Produce their debt instead of their discharge.

From the First Epistle to Mr Pope.
With fame in just proportion envy grows;
The man that makes a character makes foes:
Slight peevish insects round a genius rise,
As a bright day awakes the world of flies;
With hearty malice, but with feeble wing,

(To show they live) they flutter and they sting:
But as by depredations wasps proclaim
The fairest fruit, so these the fairest fame.
Shall we not censure all the motley train,
Whether with ale irriguous or champagne?

Whether they tread the vale of prose, or climb
And whet their appetites on cliffs of rhyme;
The college sloven or embroidered spark,
The purple prelate or the parish clerk,
The quiet quidnunc or demanding prig,
The plaintiff Tory or defendant Whig ;
Rich, poor, male, female, young, old, gay or sad,
Whether extremely witty or quite mad;
Profoundly dull or shallowly polite,

Men that read well, or men that only write;
Whether peers, porters, tailors, tune the reeds,
And measuring words to measuring shapes succeeds;
For bankrupts write, when ruined shops are shut,
As maggots crawl from out a perished nut.
His hammer this, and that his trowel quits,
And wanting sense for tradesmen, serve for wits.
By thriving men, subsists each other trade;
Of every broken craft a writer's made.
Thus his material, paper, takes its birth
From tattered rags of all the stuff on earth.

Burns, who knew most of Young by heart, no doubt took from the sixth satire the material for the climax of his 'Address to the Deil :'

But fare-you-weel, auld 'Nickie-ben!'
O wad ye tak a thought an' men'!
Ye aiblins might-I dinna ken-
Still hae a stake:

I'm wae to think upo' yon den,
Ev'n for your sake!

The idea that perhaps the devil might yet find salvation is often set to the credit of the ploughUnreasonably; man-poet's unheard-of generosity.

for though Burns may not have known that Origen's doctrine of the Apocatastasis or Final Restitution expressly included the devil and his angels, or that the benevolent scheme of St Macarius (who actually persuaded God to pardon the devil) fell through only because Satan would not stoop to beg forgiveness, he could not have been ignorant of Young's 'devil's fair apologist' and her comment on Tillotson's heresy. After having chastised, not too tenderly, the foibles and vices of many types of women, and raised the question of 'she-atheists,' Young goes on:

Atheists are few: most nymphs a Godhead own; And nothing but his attributes dethrone. From atheists far, they steadfastly believe God is, and is Almighty- -to forgive. His other excellence they 'll not dispute; But mercy, sure, is his chief attribute. Shall pleasures of a short duration chain A lady's soul in everlasting pain? Will the great Author us poor worms destroy, For now and then a sip of transient joy? No, he's for ever in a smiling mood;

He's like themselves; or how could he be good?

And they blaspheme, who blacker schemes suppose.→ Devoutly thus Jehovah they depose,

The pure! the just! and set up in his stead

A deity that's perfectly well-bred.

'Dear T-1-n! be sure the best of men; Nor thought he more, than thought great Origen.

Though once upon a time he misbehaved;

Poor Satan! doubtless, he 'll at length be saved.
Let priests do something for their one in ten;
It is their trade; so far they 're honest men.
Let them cant on, since they have got the knack,
And dress their notions, like themselves, in black;
Fright us with terrors of a world unknown,
From joys of this, to keep them all their own.
Of earth's fair fruits, indeed, they claim a fee;
But then they leave our untithed virtue free.
Virtue's a pretty thing to make a show:
Did ever mortal write like Rochefoucault?'
Thus pleads the devil's fair apologist,
And, pleading, safely enters on his list.

Burns's Address to the Deil,' it should be noted, is essentially comic or serio-comic, though, like this ironical excursus of Young's, it may contain some slight element of serious thought.

Young expounded in prose his views 'On Lyric Poetry,' and illustrated them in an ode on 'Ocean,' which has a more artificial air than his blank verse, and is full of bathos to boot. These are a few of the stanzas (nearly seventy in all!), the last of which contains an adumbration of Thomson's guardian angels chorusing 'Rule Britannia :'

The Life of Young in Johnson's Lives of the Poets is by Herbert Croft (written 1782). Mitford and Doran, in the memoirs prefixed to their editions (1852 and 1854) of the works, added a few facts; and so also Leslie Stephen's article in the last volume of the Dic tionary of National Biography (1900). George Eliot's Worldliness and Other-worldliness,' reprinted in her Essays (1884), contains a severe attack on Young's character. For Young in France, see Texte's Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan in Literature (trans. 1899).

George Berkeley (1685-1753), the good bishop to whom Pope assigned 'every virtue under heaven,' was born at Dysert Castle near Kilkenny. Like Swift, he passed from Kilkenny school to Trinity College, Dublin, where, student and Fellow, he remained thirteen years. His Commonplace Book of 1705-6 (published in 1871) reveals the influence of Locke's psychology on a subtle and original mind. Berkeley's Essay towards a new Theory of Vision (1709) showed that the act of

seeing, which seems so immediate, is really a reasoning interpretation of signs and hints, and argued that the process involves the assisting agency of God. The argument was extended in 1710 by a Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, further illustrating his 'new principle' that the world which we see and touch is not an abstract independent substance, of which our sensations are an effect; the very world presented to our senses depends for its actuality on being perceived. In 1711, having taken orders, he published a Discourse of Passive Obedience, a defence of the Christian duty of not resisting the supreme civil power; and in 1713 he visited London, and wrote some papers for Steele's Guardian. The same year he published his Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, the