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

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, pass for a Lorenzo, than see himself vindicated, at the expense of his father’s memory, from follies which, if it may be thought blamable 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 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 shifting 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,

HenceforthThy patron he, whose diadem has droptYon 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 Essex, if it had become vacant.

The First Night concludes with this passage:

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 prest his theme, pursu’d the trackWhich opens out of darkness into day!Oh! had he mounted on his wing of fire,Soar’d, where I sink, and sung immortal man—How had it blest mankind, and rescu’d 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 class 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 the 2nd, seems obscure; but there can be little doubt that the friendship 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 friendship I mentioned in my last; a friendship 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 couldst 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 passages, 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 effectOf loit’ring here, of death defrauded long;Of old so gracious (and let that suffice)My very master knows me not.I’ve been so long remember’d, 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 knowOne, though in Britain born, with courtiers bred,Who thought e’en gold might come a day too late;Nor on his subtle deathbed plann’d his schemeFor 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 sat 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 principally known. He entitled 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 every thing 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 pass 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 gratitude, 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 every thing which bore the least resemblance to ambition, he dipped again in politicks. In 1745 he wrote Reflections on the publick Situation of the Kingdom, addressed to the duke of Newcastle; indignant, as it appears, to behold

A pope-bred princeling crawl ashore,And whistle cut-throats, with those swords that scrap’dTheir barren rocks for wretched sustenance,To cut his passage 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 Macaulay, 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, entitled, 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 deathbed of the “gay, young, noble, 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 publishing 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 incumbent cloud, into that flow of thought and brightness of expression, which subjects so polite require;” yet is it 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 septemPulverulenta 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 cruise, 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 Sampson 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 incumbent 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 epick 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 deathbed 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 lordship’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, flatt’ry’s praise,With unmov’d indiff’rence view;Learn to tread life’s dang’rous maze,With unerring virtue’s clew.Void of strong desire and fear,Life’s wide ocean trust no more;Strive thy little bark to steerWith the tide, but near the shore.Thus prepar’d, thy shorten’d sailShall, whene’er the winds increase,Seizing each propitious gale.Waft thee to the port of peace.Keep thy conscience from offence,And tempestuous passions free;So, when thou art call’d from hence,Easy shall thy passage be;Easy shall thy passage be,Cheerful thy allotted stay,Short th’ account ’twixt God 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 stateFull perfection shall begin.“

The poem was accompanied by a letter.

“La Trappe, the 27th of Oct. 1761.

“Dear Sir,—You seemed to like the ode I sent you for your amusement: I now send it you as a present. If you please to accept of it, and are willing that our friendship should be known when we are gone, you will be pleased to leave this among those of your own papers that may possibly see the light by a posthumous publication. God send us health while we stay, and an easy journey!

“My dear Dr. Young,“yours, most cordially,“Melcombe.”

In 1762, a short time before his death, Young published Resignation. Notwithstanding the manner in which it was really forced from him by the world, criticism has treated it with no common severity. If it shall be thought not to deserve the highest praise, on the other side of fourscore, by whom, except by Newton and by Waller, has praise been merited?

To Mrs. Montagu, the famous champion of Shakespeare, I am indebted for the history of Resignation. Observing that Mrs. Boscawen, in the midst of her grief for the loss of the admiral, derived consolation from the perusal of the Night Thoughts, Mrs. Montagu proposed a visit to the author. From conversing with Young, Mrs. Boscawen derived still further consolation; and to that visit she and the world were indebted for this poem. It compliments Mrs. Montagu in the following lines:

Yet write I must. A lady sues:How shameful her request!My brain in labour with dull rhyme,Hers teeming with the best!

And again;

A friend you have, and I the same,Whose prudent, soft addressWill bring to life those healing thoughtsWhich dy’d in your distress.That friend, the spirit of thy themeExtracting for your ease,Will leave to me the dreg, in thoughtsToo common; such as these.

By the same lady I am enabled to say, in her own words, that Young’s unbounded genius appeared to greater advantage in the companion than even in the author; that the christian was in him a character still more inspired, more enraptured, more sublime, than the poet; and that, in his ordinary conversation,

Letting down the golden chain from high,He drew his audience upward to the sky.

Notwithstanding Young had said, in his Conjectures on original Composition, that “blank verse is verse unfallen, uncurst; verse reclaimed, reinthroned in the true language of the gods,” notwithstanding he administered consolation to his own grief in this immortal language, Mrs. Boscawen was comforted in rhyme.

While the poet and the Christian were applying this comfort, Young had himself occasion for comfort, in consequence of the sudden death of Richardson, who was printing the former part of the poem. Of Richardson’s death he says,

When heav’n would kindly set us free,And earth’s enchantment end;It takes the most effectual means,And robs us of a friend.

To Resignation was prefixed an apology for its appearance; to which more credit is due than to the generality of such apologies, from Young’s unusual anxiety that no more productions of his old age should disgrace his former fame. In his will, dated February, 1760, he desires of his executors, “in a particular manner,” that all his manuscript books and writings whatever might be burned, except his book of accounts.

In September, 1764, he added a kind of codicil, wherein he made it his dying intreaty to his house-keeper, to whom he left 100l. “that all his manuscripts might be destroyed, as soon as he was dead, which would greatly oblige her deceased friend.”

It may teach mankind the uncertainty of worldly friendships, to know that Young, either by surviving those he loved, or by outliving their affections, could only recollect the names of two friends, his house-keeper and a hatter, to mention in his will; and it may serve to repress that testamentary pride, which too often seeks for sounding names and titles, to be informed, that the author of the Night Thoughts did not blush to leave a legacy to “his friend Henry Stevens, a hatter at the Temple-gate.” Of these two remaining friends, one went before Young. But, at eighty-four, “where,” as he asks in the Centaur, “is that world into which we were born?”

The same humility which marked a hatter and a house-keeper for the friends of the author of the Night Thoughts had before bestowed the same title on his footman, in an epitaph in his Church-yard upon James Barker, dated 1749; which I am glad to find in the late collection of his works.

Young and his house-keeper were ridiculed, with more ill-nature than wit, in a kind of novel published by Kidgell, in 1755, called the Card, under the names of Dr. Elwes and Mrs. Fusby.

In April, 1765, at an age to which few attain, a period was put to the life of Young.

He had performed no duty for three or four years, but he retained his intellects to the last.

Much is told in the Biographia, which I know not to have been true, of the manner of his burial; of the master and children of a charity-school, which he founded in his parish, who neglected to attend their benefactor’s corpse; and of a bell which was not caused to toll so often as upon those occasions bells usually toll. Had that humanity, which is here lavished upon things of little consequence either to the living or to the dead, been shown in its proper place to the living, I should have had less to say about Lorenzo. They who lament that these misfortunes happened to Young, forget the praise he bestows upon Socrates, in the preface to Night Seven, for resenting his friend’s request about his funeral.

During some part of his life Young was abroad, but I have not been able to learn any particulars.

In his seventh Satire he says,

When, after battle, I the field have SEENSpread o’er with ghastly shapes which once were men.

It is known also, that from this, or from some other field, he once wandered into the enemy’s camp, with a classick in his hand, which he was reading intently; and had some difficulty to prove that he was only an absent poet, and not a spy.

The curious reader of Young’s life will naturally inquire to what it was owing, that though he lived almost forty years after he took orders, which included one whole reign, uncommonly long, and part of another, he was never thought worthy of the least preferment. The author of the Night Thoughts ended his days upon a living which came to him from his college, without any favour, and to which he probably had an eye when he determined on the church. To satisfy curiosity of this kind is, at this distance of time, far from easy. The parties themselves know not often, at the instant, why they are neglected, or why they are preferred. The neglect of Young is by some ascribed to his having attached himself to the prince of Wales, and to his having preached an offensive sermon at St. James’s. It has been told me, that he had two hundred a year in the late reign, by the patronage of Walpole; and that, whenever any one reminded the king of Young, the only answer was, “he has a pension.” All the light thrown on this inquiry, by the following letter from Seeker, only serves to show at what a late period of life the author of the Night Thoughts solicited preferment.

“Deanery of St. Paul’s, July 8, 1758.

“Good Dr. Young,—I have long wondered, that more suitable notice of your great merit hath not been taken by persons in power. But how to remedy the omission I see not. No encouragement hath ever been given me to mention things of this nature to his majesty. And therefore, in all likelihood, the only consequence of doing it would be weakening the little influence which else I may possibly have on some other occasions. Your fortune and your reputation set you above the need of advancement; and your sentiments, above that concern for it, on your own account, which, on that of the publick, is sincerely felt by

“Your loving brother,“Tho. Cant.”

At last, at the age of fourscore, he was appointed, in 1761, clerk of the closet to the princess dowager.

One obstacle must have stood not a little in the way of that preferment, after which his whole life seems to have panted. Though he took orders, he never entirely shook off politicks. He was always the lion of his master Milton, “pawing to get free his hinder parts.” By this conduct, if he gained some friends, he made many enemies.

Again: Young was a poet; and again, with reverence be it spoken, poets by profession, do not always make the best clergymen. If the author of the Night Thoughts composed many sermons, he did not oblige the publick with many.

Besides, in the latter part of life, Young was fond of holding himself out for a man retired from the world. But he seemed to have forgotten that the same verse which contains “oblitus meorum,” contains also “obliviscendus et illis.” The brittle chain of worldly friendship and patronage is broken as effectually, when one goes beyond the length of it, as when the other does. To the vessel which is sailing from the shore, it only appears that the shore also recedes; in life it is truly thus. He who retires from the world will find himself, in reality, deserted as fast, if not faster, by the world. The publick is not to be treated as the coxcomb treats his mistress; to be threatened with desertion, in order to increase fondness.

Young seems to have been taken at his word. Notwithstanding his frequent complaints of being neglected, no hand was reached out to pull him from that retirement of which he declared himself enamoured. Alexander assigned no palace for the residence of Diogenes, who boasted his surly satisfaction with his tub.

Of the domestick manners and petty habits of the author of the Night Thoughts, I hoped to have given you an account from the best authority: but who shall dare to say, to-morrow I will be wise or virtuous, or to-morrow I will do a particular thing? Upon inquiring for his house-keeper, I learned that she was buried two days before I reached the town of her abode.

In a letter from Tscharner, a noble foreigner, to count Haller, Tscharner says, he has lately spent four days with Young at Welwyn, where the author tastes all the ease and pleasure mankind can desire. “Every thing about him shows the man, each individual being placed by rule. All is neat without art. He is very pleasant in conversation, and extremely polite.”

This, and more, may possibly be true; but Tscharner’s was a first visit, a visit of curiosity and admiration, and a visit which the author expected.

Of Edward Young, an anecdote which wanders among readers is not true, that he was Fielding’s Parson Adams. The original of that famous painting was William Young, who was a clergyman. He supported an uncomfortable existence by translating for the booksellers from Greek; and, if he did not seem to be his own friend, was, at least, no man’s enemy. Yet the facility with which this report has gained belief in the world argues, were it not sufficiently known, that the author of the Night Thoughts bore some resemblance to Adams.

The attention which Young bestowed upon the perusal of books, is not unworthy imitation. When any passage pleased him, he appears to have folded down the leaf. On these passages he bestowed a second reading. But the labours of man are too frequently vain. Before he returned to much of what he had once approved, he died. Many of his books, which I have seen, are by those notes of approbation so swelled beyond their real bulk, that they will hardly shut.