English Literature An Illustrated Record in Eight Volumes.Volume III-Part II ...

Edward Young After the Portrait bv Joseph Highmore

choly of the age found its most striking exposition. It was hardly completed before a prose rival and imitation, the Meditations among the Tombs of Hervey, deepened its effect and surpassed it in popularity, though never

approaching it in real literary ability. These two books, so pompous, unctuous, and hollow—the one illuminated by passages of highly artistic execution, the other mere barren bombast—occupied the fancies of men for well-nigh one hundred years, surviving the great revival, and successfully competing with Wordsuorth and Keats.

Edward Young (1683-1765) was the son of the rector of Upham in Hampshire, where he was born in June 1683; the father ultimately became Dean of Salisbury. Extremely little has been preserved about the youth and even the early middle life of this poet. He was educated at Winchester School, and went to Oxford in 1702. He seems to have shown no promise of distinction ; at college he was " a foolish youth,

the sport of peers and poets." He was elected, however, a law fellow of All Souls' in

1708, and continued to reside at the University. When past the age of thirty he began

to publish, but his

earliest essays showed

little talent. His peculiar forcible gloom

is displayed for the

first time in T/ie Last

Day, a really fine

thing, part of which

was printed in the

Guardian in 1713.

Young seems to have

looked to Queen

Anne, who was his

godmother, for patronage, and at her death

he disappears. It has

been conjectured that

he went to Ireland.

In 1719 he put on the

stage his tragedy of

£ u sins, and in 1721

The Revenue ; the latter enjoyed a substantial success, and Young, now forty years ol

age, became a personage at last. At this time, and for some years to come, he was

enjoying the patronage of the Duke of Wharton. From 1725 to 1728 Young was

engaged in publishing, in six instalments, his satires, which were afterwards united under

Edward Young's House at Welwyn

the title of Tlie Universal Passion. When George II. came to the throne, Young, who had failed to enter Parliament for Cirencester, determined, although he was forty-seven years of age, to take holy orders ; he was almost immediately appointed chaplain to the King. He is said to have asked Pope how he should conduct his theological studies, and to have been answered according to his folly with a recommendation to master St. Thomas Aquinas. A begging letter to Mrs. Howard, the King's mistress, exists to prove that Young equally needed advice in the arts of obtaining Church preferment; he was importunate, yet he got little. In 1730 he was glad to take Welwyn, a college living; and the next year he married a widow of quality, Lady Klizabeth Leigh. The poetry Young published during these years was beneath contempt, yet he

Autograph Note of Young's

was already meditating upon the outlines of his great and enduring work. When close upon the mature age of sixty, with no production behind him which could really encourage him to confidence in his gifts, Young began the composition of the very elaborate poem which placed him in the first rank of contemporary writers. The Complaint, or Night Thoughts, appeared from 1742 to 1744, and greatly impressed the age with its moral sublimity. Young, however, was unable to repeat his success ; he published several other works in prose and verse, but none of them rose above his earlier level of fustian and flatness He considered himself to be cruelly neglected, and applied to the King and the Archbishop of Canterbury for preferment ; Secker's reply is a monument of irony. The solitary success which attended his efforts was almost sarcastically inadequate ; when he was nearly eighty he was appointed Clerk of the Closet to the Princess Dowager. Young lived on at Welwyn until he had nearly completed his eighty-second year, preserving his intellect to the last ; he died on the 5th of April i 765, and was buried at Welwyn. The character of Young presents us with some

very curious features. He was the typical eighteenth-century adventurer of letters, truculent and yet obsequious, without a trace of self-respect in the presence of the great, but arrogant and presuming with his own class. Yet Young was not without certain stately virtues; he could be penetrating, dignified, and extremely polite. That he was the victim of affectation, seems proved by the story that he wrote at night by

The

COMPLAINT:

O R,

Night-Thoughts

O N

LIFE, DEATH, & IMMORTALITY.

Stint latryme rtrum, & mcKttm incrtalia langU'it Vi 1C

LONDON:

Prinitd for R. Dodilc', at Tvli/s Head ID Pull-Mali *J43. [Price, One Selling ]

Title-page of First Edition of "Night Thoughts"

the glimmer of a candle stuck in a human skull. His friendship with Voltaire did credit to the intellect of both of them, and Young's extempore epigram on the appearance of the great Frenchman deserves an immortality of quotation :—

" You are so witty, profligate and thin, At once we think you Milton, Death and Sin."

From " Night Thoughts I."

O ye blest scenes of permanent delight !

Full above measure ! lasting, beyond bound !

A perpetuity of bliss is bliss.

Could you, so rich in rapture, fear an end,

That ghastly thought would drink up all your joy,

And quite unparadise the realms of light.

Safe are you lodged above these rolling spheres,

The baneful influence of whose giddy dance

Sheds sad vicissitude on all beneath.

Here teems with revolutions every hour ;

And rarely for the better ; or the best,

More mortal than the common births of fate.

Each moment has its sickle, emulous

Of time's enormous scythe, whose ample sweep

Strikes empires from the root; each moment plays

His little weapon in the narrower sphere

Of sweet domestic comfort, and cuts down

The fairest bloom of sublunary bliss.

Bliss ! sublunary bliss !—proud words and vain ! Implicit treason to divine decree !

Title-page by William Blake to "Night Thoughts"

A bold invasion of the rights of heaven !

I clasp'd the phantoms, and I found them air.

O had I weigh'd it ere my fond embrace !

What darts of agony had miss'd my heart !

Death ! great proprietor of all ! 'tis thine

To tread out empire, and to quench the stars.

The sun himself by thy pernvssion shines ;

And, one day, thou shalt pluck him from his sphere.

Amid such mighty plunder, why exhaust

Thy partial quiver on a mark so mean ?

Why thy peculiar rancour wreak'd on me?

Insatiate archer ! could not one suffice ?

Thy shaft flew thrice ; and thrice my peace was slain ;

And thrice, ere thrice yon moon had fill'd her horn.

James Hervey (1714-1758) was appointed in 1740 curate of Bideford in North

Devon. While he was there, he walked over to the churchyard of Kilkhampton, and on his return began to write his famous Meditations among the Tombs, which were published in 1746-47, and went through twenty-five editions. Hervey was a gentle, pious, and placable man, who died prematurely of a consumption, being at the time rector of Weston Favell in Northamptonshire. His Theron and Aspasio (1752) was at one time even more famous than the Meditations in evangelical circles.

Robert Blair (1699-1746) was the minister of Athelstaneford in Had, dingtonshire from 1731 to his death. Very little is known about his life, James Hervey nQr ^oes ;t poSsess anv further interest

From an Engraving bv S. Freeman c . , .. , ,

for us than that in 1743 he published his strangely powerful poem in blank verse, entitled The Grave.