The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes, Volume 08

It is related by Mr. Spence, in his manuscript anecdotes, on the authority of Mr. Rawlinson, that Young, upon the publication of his Universal Passion, 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 seems to have been raised from the two answers of lord Burghley and sir Philip Sidney in Spenser’s Life.

After inscribing his satires, not perhaps without the hopes of preferment and honours, to such names as the duke of Dorset, Mr. Dodington, Mr. Spencer Compton, lady Elizabeth Germaine, and sir Robert Walpole, he returns to plain panegyrick. In 1726, he addressed a poem to sir Robert Walpole, of which the title sufficiently explains the intention. If Young must be acknowledged a ready celebrator, he did not endeavour, or did not choose, to be a lasting one. The Instalment is among the pieces he did not admit into the number of his excusable 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 seems to have been continued, possibly increased, in this. Whatever it might have been, the poet thought he deserved it; for he was not ashamed to acknowledge what, without his acknowledgment, would now, perhaps, never have been known:

My breast, O Walpole, glows with grateful fire.The streams of royal bounty, turn’d by thee,Refresh the dry domains of poesy.

If the purity of modern patriotism will term Young a pensioner, it must, at least, be confessed 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 speech, which recommended the increase and the encouragement of the seamen; that they might be “invited, rather than compelled by force and violence, to enter into the service of their country;” a plan which humanity must lament that policy has not even yet been able, or willing, to carry into execution. Prefixed to the original publication were an Ode to the King, Pater Patriæ, and an Essay on Lyrick Poetry. It is but justice to confess, that he preserved neither of them; and that, the ode itself, which in the first edition, and in the last, consists of seventy-three stanzas, in the author’s own edition is reduced to forty-nine. Among the omitted passages is a Wish, that concluded the poem, which few would have suspected Young of forming; and of which few, after having formed it, would confess something like their shame by suppression.

It stood originally so high in the author’s opinion, that he entitled the poem, Ocean, an Ode. Concluding with a Wish. This wish consists of thirteen stanzas. The first runs thus:

O may I stealAlong the valeOf humble life, secure from foes!My friend sincere,My judgment clear,And gentle business my repose!

The three last stanzas are not more remarkable for just rhymes; but, altogether, they will make rather a curious page in the life of Young:

Prophetic schemes,And golden dreams,May I, unsanguine, cast away!Have what I have,And live, not leave,Enamour’d of the present day!My hours my own!My faults unknown!My chief revenue in content!Then leave one beamOf honest fame!And scorn the labour’d monument!Unhurt my urnTill that great TURNWhen mighty nature’s self shall die;Time cease to glide,With human pride,Sunk in the ocean of eternity!

It is whimsical that he, who was soon to bid adieu to rhyme, should fix upon a measure in which rhyme abounds even to satiety. Of this he said, in his Essay on Lyrick Poetry, prefixed to the poem: “For the more harmony likewise I chose the frequent return of rhyme, which laid me under great difficulties. But difficulties overcome, give grace and pleasure. Nor can I account for the pleasure of rhyme in general, (of which the moderns are too fond,) but from this truth.” Yet the moderns surely deserve not much censure for their fondness of what, by his own confession, affords pleasure, and abounds in harmony.

The next paragraph in his essay did not occur to him when he talked of “that great turn” in the stanza just quoted. “But then the writer must take care that the difficulty is overcome. That is, he must make rhyme consist with as perfect sense and expression, as could be expected if he was perfectly free from that shackle.”

Another part of this essay will convict the following stanza of, what every reader will discover in it, “involuntary burlesque:”

“The northern blastThe shatter’d mast,The syrt, the whirlpool, and the rock.The breaking spout,The stars gone out,The boiling strait, the monster’s shock.”

But would the English poets fill quite so many volumes, if all their productions were to be tried, like this, by an elaborate essay on each particular species of poetry of which they exhibit specimens?

If Young be not a lyrick poet, he is, at least, a critick in that sort of poetry; and, if his lyrick poetry can be proved bad, it was first proved so by his own criticism. This surely is candid.

Milbourne was styled, by Pope, “the fairest of criticks,” only because he exhibited his own version of Virgil to be compared with Dryden’s, which he condemned, and with which every reader had it not otherwise in his power to compare it. Young was surely not the most unfair of poets for prefixing to a lyrick composition an essay on lyrick poetry, so just and impartial as to condemn himself.

We shall soon come to a work, before which we find, indeed, no critical essay, but which disdains to shrink from the touchstone of the severest critick; and which certainly, as I remember to have heard you say, if it contain some of the worst, contains also some of the best things in the language.

Soon after the appearance of Ocean, when he was almost fifty, Young entered into orders. In April, 1728191 not long after he had put on the gown, he was appointed chaplain to George the second.

The tragedy of the Brothers, which was already in rehearsal, he immediately withdrew from the stage. The managers resigned it, with some reluctance, to the delicacy of the new clergyman. The epilogue to the Brothers, the only appendage to any of his three plays which he added himself, is, I believe, the only one of the kind. He calls it an historical epilogue. Finding that “Guilt’s dreadful close his narrow scene denied,” he, in a manner, continues the tragedy in the epilogue, and relates how Rome revenged the shade of Demetrius, and punished Perseus “for this night’s deed.”

Of Young’s taking orders something is told by the biographer of Pope, which places the easiness and simplicity of the poet in a singular light. When he determined on the church, he did not address himself to Sherlock, to Atterbury, or to Hare, for the best instructions in theology; but to Pope, who, in a youthful frolick, advised the diligent perusal of Thomas Aquinas. With this treasure Young retired from interruption to an obscure place in the suburbs. His poetical guide to godliness hearing nothing of him during half a year, and apprehending he might have carried the jest too far, sought after him, and found him just in time to prevent what Ruffhead calls “an irretrievable derangement.”

That attachment to his favourite study, which made him think a poet the surest guide to his new profession, left him little doubt whether poetry was the surest path to its honours and preferments. Not long, indeed, after he took orders, he published, in prose, 1728, a true Estimate of Human Life, dedicated, notwithstanding the Latin quotations with which it abounds, to the queen; and a sermon preached before the house of commons, 1729, on the martyrdom of king Charles, entitled, an Apology for Princes, or the Reverence due to Government. But the Second Discourse, the counterpart of his Estimate, without which it cannot be called a true Estimate, though, in 1728, it was announced as “soon to be published,” never appeared; and his old friends the muses were not forgotten. In 1730 he relapsed to poetry, and sent into the world, Imperium Pelagi, a naval lyrick, written in imitation of Pindar’s Spirit, occasioned by his majesty’s return from Hanover, September, 1729, and the succeeding peace. It is inscribed to the duke of Chandos. In the preface we are told, that the ode is the most spirited kind of poetry, and that the Pindarick is the most spirited kind of ode. “This I speak,” he adds, “with sufficient candour, at my own very great peril. But truth has an eternal title to our confession, though we are sure to suffer by it.” Behold, again, the fairest of poets. Young’s Imperium Pelagi was ridiculed in Fielding’s Tom Thumb; but let us not forget that it was one of his pieces which the author of the Night Thoughts deliberately refused to own.

Not long after this Pindarick attempt, he published two epistles to Pope, concerning the Authors of the Age, 1730. Of these poems, one occasion seems to have been an apprehension lest, from the liveliness of his satires, he should not be deemed sufficiently serious for promotion in the church.

In July, 1730, he was presented, by his college, to the rectory of Welwyn, in Hertfordshire. In May, 1731, he married lady Elizabeth Lee, daughter of the earl of Lichfield, and widow of colonel Lee. His connexion with this lady arose from his father’s acquaintance, already mentioned, with lady Anne Wharton, who was coheiress of sir Henry Lee, of Ditchley, in Oxfordshire. Poetry had lately been taught by Addison to aspire to the arms of nobility, though not with extraordinary happiness.

We may naturally conclude, that Young now gave himself up, in some measure, to the comforts of his new connexion, and to the expectations of that preferment, which he thought due to his poetical talents, or, at least, to the manner in which they had so frequently been exerted.

The next production of his muse was the Sea-piece, in two odes.

Young enjoys the credit of what is called an Extempore Epigram on Voltaire; who, when he was in England, ridiculed, in the company of the jealous English poet, Milton’s allegory of Sin and Death:

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

From the following passage, in the poetical dedication of his Sea-piece to Voltaire, it seems, that this extemporaneous reproof, if it must be extemporaneous (for what few will now affirm Voltaire to have deserved any reproof,) was something longer than a distich, and something more gentle than the distich just quoted:

No stranger, sir, though born in foreign climes.On Dorset downs, when Milton’s pageWith Sin and Death provok’d thy rage,Thy rage provok’d, who sooth’d with gentle rhymes?

By Dorset downs, he probably meant Mr. Dodington’s seat. In Pitt’s poems is an Epistle to Dr. Edward Young, at Eastbury, in Dorsetshire, on the Review at Sarum, 1722.

While with your Dodington retir’d you sit,Charm’d with his flowing Burgundy and wit, &c.

Thomson in his Autumn, addressing Mr. Dodington calls his seat the seat of the muses,

Where, in the secret bow’r and winding walk,For virtuous Young and thee they twine the bay.

The praises Thompson bestows but a few lines before on Philips, the second

Who nobly durst, in rhyme-unfetter’d verse,With British freedom sing the British song,

added to Thomson’s example and success, might, perhaps, induce Young, as we shall see presently, to write his great work without rhyme.

In 1734 he published the Foreign Address, or the best Argument for Peace, occasioned by the British Fleet and the Posture of Affairs. Written in the character of a sailor. It is not to be found in the author’s four volumes.

He now appears to have given up all hopes of overtaking Pindar, and, perhaps, at last resolved to turn his ambition to some original species of poetry. This poem concludes with a formal farewell to Ode, which few of Young’s readers will regret:

My shell, which Clio gave, which kings applaud,Which Europe’s bleeding genius call’d abroad,Adieu!

In a species of poetry altogether his own, he next tried his skill, and succeeded.

Of his wife, he was deprived in 1741. Lady Elizabeth had lost, after her marriage with Young, an amiable daughter, by her former husband, just after she was married to Mr. Temple, son of lord Palmerston. Mr. Temple did not long remain after his wife, though he was married a second time to a daughter of sir John Barnard, whose son is the present peer. Mr. and Mrs. Temple have generally been considered as Philander and Narcissa. From the great friendship which constantly subsisted between Mr. Temple and Young, as well as from other circumstances, it is probable that the poet had both him and Mrs. Temple in view for these characters; though, at the same time, some passages respecting Philander do not appear to suit either Mr. Temple or any other person with whom Young was known to be connected or acquainted, while all the circumstances relating to Narcissa have been constantly found applicable to Young’s daughter-in-law.

At what short intervals the poet tells us he was wounded by the deaths of the three persons particularly lamented, none that has read the Night Thoughts (and who has not read them?) needs to be informed.

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.

Yet how is it possible that Mr. and Mrs. Temple and lady Elizabeth Young could be these three victims, over whom Young has hitherto been pitied for having to pour the Midnight Sorrows of his religious poetry; Mrs. Temple died in 1736; Mr. Temple four years afterwards, in 1740; and the poet’s wife seven months after Mr. Temple, in 1741. How could the insatiate archer thrice slay his peace, in these three persons, “ere thrice the moon had fill’d her horn?”

But, in the short preface to the Complaint, he seriously tells us, “that the occasion of this poem was real, not fictitious; and that the facts mentioned did naturally pour these moral reflections on the thought of the writer.” It is probable, therefore, that in these three contradictory lines, the poet complains more than the father-in-law, the friend, or the widower.

Whatever names belong to these facts, or, if the names be those generally supposed, whatever heightening a poet’s sorrow may have given the facts; to the sorrow Young felt from them, religion and morality are indebted for the Night Thoughts. There is a pleasure sure in sadness which mourners only know!

Of these poems, the two or three first have been perused, perhaps more eagerly and more frequently than the rest. When he got as far as the fourth or fifth, his original motive for taking up the pen was answered; his grief was naturally either diminished or exhausted. We still find the same pious poet; but we hear less of Philander and Narcissa, and less of the mourner whom he loved to pity.

Mrs. Temple died of a consumption at Lyons, in her way to Nice, the year after her marriage; that is, when poetry relates the fact, “in her bridal hour.” It is more than poetically true, that Young accompanied her to the Continent:

I flew, I snatch’d her from the rigid north, And bore her nearer to the sun.

But in vain. Her funeral was attended with the difficulties painted in such animated colours in Night the Third. After her death, the remainder of the party passed the ensuing winter at Nice.

The poet seems, perhaps, in these compositions, to dwell with more melancholy on the death of Philander and Narcissa, than of his wife. But it is only for this reason. He who runs and reads may remember, that in the Night Thoughts Philander and Narcissa are often mentioned and often lamented. To recollect lamentations over the author’s wife, the memory must have been charged with distinct passages. This lady brought him one child, Frederick, now living, to whom the prince of Wales was godfather.

That domestick grief is, in the first instance, to be thanked for these ornaments to our language, it is impossible to deny. Nor would it be common hardiness to contend, that worldly discontent had no hand in these joint productions of poetry and piety. Yet am I by no means sure that, at any rate, we should not have had something of the same colour from Young’s pencil, notwithstanding the liveliness of his satires. In so long a life, causes for discontent and occasions for grief must have occurred. It is not clear to me that his muse was not sitting upon the watch for the first which happened. Night thoughts were not uncommon to her, even when first she visited the poet, and at a time when he himself was remarkable neither for gravity nor gloominess. In his Last Day, almost his earliest poem, he calls her the Melancholy Maid,

Whom dismal scenes delight,Frequent at tombs and in the realms of night.

In the prayer which concludes the second book of the same poem, he says—

Oh! permit the gloom of solemn nightTo sacred thought may forcibly invite.Oh! how divine to tread the milky way,To the bright palace of eternal day!

When Young was writing a tragedy, Grafton is said by Spence to have sent him a human skull, with a candle in it, as a lamp; and the poet is reported to have used it.

What he calls the true Estimate of Human Life, which has already been mentioned, exhibits only the wrong side of the tapestry; and, being asked why he did not show the right, he is said to have replied that he could not. By others it has been told me that this was finished; but that, before there existed any copy, it was torn in pieces by a lady’s monkey.

Still, is it altogether fair to dress up the poet for the man, and to bring the gloominess of the Night Thoughts to prove the gloominess of Young, and to show that his genius, like the genius of Swift, was, in some measure, the sullen inspiration of discontent.

From them who answer in the affirmative it should not be concealed, that, though “Invisibilia non decipiunt” appeared upon a deception in Young’s grounds, and “Ambulantes in horto audiêrunt vocem Dei” on a building in his garden, his parish was indebted to the good humour of the author of the Night Thoughts for an assembly and a bowling-green.

Whether you think with me, I know not; but the famous “De mortuis nil nisi bonum” always appeared to me to savour more of female weakness than of manly reason. He that has too much feeling to speak ill of the dead, who, if they cannot defend themselves, are, at least, ignorant of his abuse, will not hesitate, by the most wanton calumny, to destroy the quiet, the reputation, the fortune, of the living. Yet censure is not heard beneath the tomb, any more than praise. “De mortuis nil nisi verum—De vivis nil nisi bonum,” would approach much nearer to good sense. After all, the few handfuls of remaining dust which once composed the body of the author of the Night Thoughts feel not much concern whether Young pass now for a man of sorrow, or for a “fellow of infinite jest.” To this favour must come the whole family of Yorick. His immortal part, wherever that now dwells, is still less solicitous on this head.

But to a son of worth and sensibility it is of some little consequence whether contemporaries believe, and posterity be taught to believe, that his debauched and reprobate life cast a Stygian gloom over the evening of his father’s days, saved him the trouble of feigning a character completely detestable, and succeeded, at last, in bringing his “grey hairs with sorrow to the grave.”

The humanity of the world, little satisfied with inventing perhaps a melancholy disposition for the father, proceeds next to invent an argument in support of their invention, and chooses that Lorenzo should be Young’s own son. The Biographia and every account of Young pretty roundly assert this to be the fact; of the absolute impossibility of which the Biographia itself, in particular dates, contains undeniable evidence. Readers I know there are of a strange turn of mind, who will hereafter peruse the Night Thoughts with less satisfaction; who will wish they had still been deceived; who will quarrel with me for discovering that no such character as their Lorenzo ever yet disgraced human nature, or broke a father’s heart. Yet would these admirers of the sublime and terrible be offended, should you set them down for cruel and for savage.

Of this report, inhuman to the surviving son, if it be true, in proportion as the character of Lorenzo is diabolical, where are we to find the proof? Perhaps it is clear from the poems.

From the first line to the last of the Night Thoughts no one expression can be discovered which betrays any thing like the father. In the Second Night I find an expression which betrays something else; that Lorenzo was his friend; one, it is possible, of his former companions; one of the duke of Wharton’s set. The poet styles him “gay friend;” an appellation not very natural from a pious incensed father to such a being as he paints Lorenzo, and that being his son.

But let us see how he has sketched this dreadful portrait, from the sight of some of whose features the artist himself must have turned away with horrour. A subject more shocking, if his only child really sat to him, than the crucifixion of Michael Angelo; upon the horrid story told of which, Young composed a short poem of fourteen lines in the early part of his life, which he did not think deserved to be republished.

In the First Night, the address to the poet’s supposed son is,

Lorenzo, fortune makes her court to thee.

In the Fifth Night;

And burns Lorenzo still for the sublimeOf life? to hang his airy nest on high?

Is this a picture of the son of the rector of Welwyn?

Eighth Night;

In foreign realms (for thou hast travell’d far;)which even now does not apply to his son.

In Night Five;

So wept Lorenzo fair Clarissa’s fate;Who gave that angel-boy on whom he dotes;And dy’d to give him, orphan’d in his birth!

At the beginning of the Fifth Night we find;

Lorenzo! to recriminate is just;I grant the man is vain who writes for praise.

But, to cut short all inquiry; if any one of these passages, if any passage in the poems, be applicable, my friend shall pass for Lorenzo. The son of the author of the Night Thoughts was not old enough, when they were written, to recriminate, or to be a father. The Night Thoughts were begun immediately after the mournful event of 1741. The first Nights appear, in the books of the company of Stationers, as the property of Robert Dodsley, in 1742. The preface to Night Seven is dated July 7th, 1744. The marriage, in consequence of which the supposed Lorenzo was born, happened in May, 1731. Young’s child was not born till June, 1733. In 1741 this Lorenzo, this finished infidel, this father to whose education vice had for some years put the last hand, was only eight years old.

An anecdote of this cruel sort, so open to contradiction, so impossible to be true, who could propagate? Thus easily are blasted the reputations of the living and of the dead.

Who, then, was Lorenzo? exclaim the readers I have mentioned. If we cannot be sure that he was his son, which would have been finely terrible, was he not his nephew, his cousin?

These are questions which I do not pretend to answer. For the sake of human nature, I could wish Lorenzo to have been only the creation of the poet’s fancy: like the Quintus of Anti-Lucretius, “quo nomine,” says Polignac, “quemvis Atheum intellige.” That this was the case, many expressions in the Night Thoughts would seem to prove, did not a passage in Night Eight appear to show that he had something in his eye for the groundwork, at least, of the painting. 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 illustrate 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 the 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.