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.

In his Night Thoughts' he has exhibited a very wide display of original poetry, variegated with deep reflections and striking allusions, a wilderness of thought, in which the fertility of 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 imagination, 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 plantations, 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 collection, I had forgotten till Mr. Steevens 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 Revenge' approaches much nearer to human practices and manners, and therefore keeps possession of the stage: the first design seems suggested by 'Othello;' but the reflections, the incidents, and the diction, are original. The moral observations are so introduced, and so expressed, 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.

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,' having it dropped into his mind, that the orbs, floating in space, might be called the cluster of creation, he thinks of 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 re-assembly of the atoms that compose the human body at the Trump of Doom,' by the collection 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,'

Her merchants Princes, and each deck a Throne.

Let burlesque try to go beyond him.

He has the trick of joining the turgid and familiar: to buy the alliance 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 suggestions 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.

ENCOMIUMS.

UPON

DR. YOUNG'S POEM ON THE LAST DAY,'

Now let the atheist tremble; thou alone

Canst bid his conscious heart the Godhead own. Whom shalt thou not reform? O thou hast seen How God descends to judge the souls of men. Thou heardst the sentence how the guilty mourn, Driven out from God, and never to return.

Yet more, behold ten thousand thunders fall, And sudden vengeance wrap the flaming ball. When Nature sunk, when every bolt was hurl'd, Thou saw'st the boundless ruins of the world. When guilty Sodom felt the burning rain, And sulphur fell on the devoted plain, The Patriarch thus, the fiery tempest past, With pious horror view'd the desert waste; The restless smoke still waved its curls around, For ever rising from the glowing ground.

But tell me, oh! what heavenly pleasure, tell, To think so greatly, and describe so well! How wast thou pleased the wondrous theme to try, And find the thought of man could rise so high! Beyond this world the labour to pursue,

And open all eternity to view!

But thou art best delighted to rehearse Heaven's holy dictates in exalted verse. O thou hast power the harden'd heart to warm, To grieve, to raise, to terrify, to charm; To fix the soul on God; to teach the mind To know the dignity of humankind; By stricter rules well-govern'd life to scan, And practise o'er the angel in the man.

Madg. Col. Oxon.

T. WARTON, SEN.

TO A LADY,

WITH THE LAST DAY.'

HERE sacred truths, in lofty numbers told,
The prospect of a future state unfold;
The realms of night to mortal view display,
And the glad regions of eternal day.
This daring Author scorns, by vulgar ways
Of guilty wit, to merit worthless praise.
Full of her glorious theme, his towering Muse,
With generous zeal, a nobler fame pursues:
Religion's cause her ravish'd heart inspires,
And with a thousand bright ideas fires;
Transports her quick, impatient, piercing eye,
O'er the straight limits of mortality

To boundless orbs, and bids her fearless soar
Where only Milton gain'd renown before;
Where various scenes alternately excite
Amazement, pity, terror, and delight.

Thus did the Muses sing in early times, Ere skill'd to flatter vice, and varnish crimes;