Johnson's Lives of the Poets Volume Ii Part 10

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 ill.u.s.trate 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, pa.s.s 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 s.h.i.+fting 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 Ess.e.x, if it had become vacant. The "First Night" concludes with this pa.s.sage:--

"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 cla.s.s 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 friends.h.i.+p I mentioned in my last; a friends.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sages, 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 princ.i.p.ally known. He ent.i.tled 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 pa.s.s 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 grat.i.tude, 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 ash.o.r.e, And whistle cut-throats, with those swords that sc.r.a.ped Their barren rocks for wretched sustenance, To cut his pa.s.sage 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, ent.i.tled "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, n.o.ble, 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 publis.h.i.+ng 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 inc.u.mbent 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 inc.u.mbent 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 lords.h.i.+p'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 sh.o.r.e.

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 pa.s.sions free, So, when thou art called from hence, Easy shall thy pa.s.sage be;

Easy shall thy pa.s.sage be, Cheerful thy allotted stay, Short the account 'twixt G.o.d 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