He seems never to have
studied prosody, nor to have had any direction but from his own ear.
studied prosody, nor to have had any direction but from his own ear.
Samuel Johnson
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 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 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 steer
With the tide, but near the shore.
Thus prepar'd, thy shorten'd 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 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 state
Full 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 address
Will bring to life those healing thoughts
Which dy'd in your distress.
That friend, the spirit of thy theme
Extracting for your ease,
Will leave to me the dreg, in thoughts
Too 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 100_l_. "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 SEEN
Spread 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.
What though we wade in wealth, or soar in fame!
Earth's highest station ends in, _Here he lies! _
And _dust to dust_ concludes her noblest song!
The author of these lines is not without his _hic jacet. _
By the good sense of his son, it contains none of that praise which no
marble can make the bad or the foolish merit; which, without the
direction of a stone or a turf, will find its way, sooner or later, to
the deserving.
M. S.
Optimi parentis
EDVARDI YOUNG, LL. D.
hujus ecclesiae rect.
Et Elizabethae
faem. praenob.
Conjugis ejus amantissimae,
pio et gratissimo animo
hoc marmor posuit
F. Y.
Filius superstes.
Is it not strange that the author of the Night Thoughts has inscribed no
monument to the memory of his lamented wife? Yet, what marble will
endure as long as the poems?
Such, my good friend, is the account which I have been able to collect
of the great Young. That it may be long before any thing like what I
have just transcribed be necessary for you, is the sincere wish of,
Dear sir,
Your greatly obliged friend,
HERBERT CROFT, Jun.
Lincoln's Inn, Sept. 1780.
P. S. This account of Young was seen by you in manuscript, you know, sir;
and, though I could not prevail on you to make any alteration, you
insisted on striking out one passage, because it said, that, if I did
not wish you to live long, for your sake, I did for the sake of myself
and of the world. But this postscript you will not see before the
printing of it; and I will say here, in spite of you, how I feel myself
honoured and bettered by your friendship: and that, if I do credit to
the church, after which I always longed, and for which I am now going to
give in exchange the bar, though not at so late a period of life as
Young took orders, it will be owing, in no small measure, to my having
had the happiness of calling the author of the Rambler my friend[191].
H. C.
Oxford, Oct. 1782.
Of Young's poems it is difficult to give any general character; for he
has no uniformity of manner: one of his pieces has no great resemblance
to another. He began to write early, and continued long; and at
different times had different modes of poetical excellence in view. His
numbers are sometimes smooth, and sometimes rugged; his style is
sometimes concatenated, and sometimes abrupt; sometimes diffusive, and
sometimes concise. His plan seems to have started in his mind at the
present moment; and his thoughts appear the effect of chance, sometimes
adverse, and sometimes lucky, with very little operation of judgment.
He was not one of those writers whom experience improves, and who,
observing their own faults, become gradually correct. His poem on the
Last Day, his first great performance, has an equability and propriety,
which he afterwards either never endeavoured or never attained. Many
paragraphs are noble, and few are mean, yet the whole is languid: the
plan is too much extended, and a succession of images divides and
weakens the general conception; but the great reason why the reader is
disappointed is, that the thought of the Last Day makes every man more
than poetical, by spreading over his mind a general obscurity of sacred
horrour, that oppresses distinction, and disdains expression.
His story of Jane Grey was never popular. It is written with elegance
enough; but Jane is too heroick to be pitied.
The Universal Passion is, indeed, a very great performance. It is said
to be a series of epigrams; but, if it be, it is what the author
intended; his endeavour was at the production of striking distichs and
pointed sentences; and his distichs have the weight of solid sentiment,
and his points the sharpness of resistless truth.
His characters are often selected with discernment, and drawn with
nicety; his illustrations are often happy, and his reflections often
just. His species of satire is between those of Horace and Juvenal; and
he has the gaiety of Horace without his laxity of numbers, and the
morality of Juvenal, with greater variation of images. He plays, indeed,
only on the surface of life; he never penetrates the recesses of the
mind, and, therefore, the whole power of his poetry is exhausted by a
single perusal; his conceits please only when they surprise.
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 lyrick 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
decaying faculties. There is Young in every stanza, such as he often was
in his 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, terrour, 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 go 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 publick.
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[192] which I have heard
repeated at the approbation by a lady, of whose praise he would have
been justly proud, and which is very ingenious, very subtile, 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 reassembly 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.
-----
[Footnote 185: See Gent. Mag. vol. lxx. p. 225. N. ]
[Footnote 186: As my great friend is now become the subject of
biography, it should be told, that every time I called upon Johnson
during the time I was employed in collecting materials for this life and
putting it together, he never suffered me to depart without some such
farewell as this: "Don't forget that rascal Tindal, sir. Be sure to hang
up the atheist. " Alluding to this anecdote, which Johnson had mentioned
to me. ]
[Footnote 187: Dr. Johnson, in many cases, thought and directed
differently, particularly in Young's works. J. N. ]
[Footnote 188: Not in the Tatler, but in the Guardian, May 9, 1713. ]
[Footnote 189: See a letter from the duke of Wharton to Swift, dated
1717, in Swift's works, in which he mentions Young being then in
Ireland. J. B. N. ]
[Footnote 190: Davies, in his life of Garrick, says 1720, and that it
was produced thirty-three years after. ]
[Footnote 191: Mr. Boswell discovered in this heavy piece of biography a
successful imitation of Johnson's style. An eminent literary character
exclaimed, "No, no, it is not a good imitation of Johnson; it has all
his pomp without his force; it has all the nodosities of the oak without
its strength. " Endeavouring to express himself still more in Johnsonian
phrase, he added, "It has all the contortions of the Sybil, without the
inspiration. " See Boswell, iv. According to Malone, this eminent person
was Burke, and the observation is assigned to him, without hesitation,
in Prin's Life. It has sometimes been attributed to G. Stevens. ED. ]
[Footnote 192: See Mrs. Piozzi's Anecdotes, 162. ]
MALLET.
Of David Mallet, having no written memorial, I am able to give no other
account than such as is supplied by the unauthorised loquacity of common
fame, and a very slight personal knowledge.
He was, by his original, one of the Macgregors, a clan that became,
about sixty years ago, under the conduct of Robin Roy, so formidable and
so infamous for violence and robbery, that the name was annulled by a
legal abolition; and when they were all to denominate themselves anew,
the father, I suppose, of this author, called himself Malloch.
David Malloch was, by the penury of his parents, compelled to be janitor
of the high school at Edinburgh; a mean office, of which he did not
afterwards delight to hear. But he surmounted the disadvantages of his
birth and fortune; for, when the duke of Montrose applied to the college
of Edinburgh for a tutor to educate his sons, Malloch was recommended;
and I never heard that he dishonoured his credentials.
When his pupils were sent to see the world, they were entrusted to his
care; and, having conducted them round the common circle of modish
travels, he returned with them to London, where, by the influence of the
family in which he resided, he naturally gained admission to many
persons of the highest rank, and the highest character; to wits, nobles,
and statesmen.
Of his works, I know not whether I can trace the series. His first
production was William and Margaret[193] of which, though it contains
nothing very striking or difficult, he has been envied the reputation;
and plagiarism has been boldly charged, but never proved.
Not long afterwards he published the Excursion, 1728; a desultory and
capricious view of such scenes of nature as his fancy led him, or his
knowledge enabled him, to describe. It is not devoid of poetical spirit.
Many of the images are striking, and many of the paragraphs are elegant.
The cast of diction seems to be copied from Thomson, whose Seasons were
then in their full blossom of reputation. He has Thomson's beauties and
his faults.
His poem on Verbal Criticism, 1733, was written to pay court to Pope, on
a subject which he either did not understand, or willingly
misrepresented; and is little more than an improvement, or rather
expansion, of a fragment which Pope printed in a Miscellany long before
he engrafted it into a regular poem. There is in this piece more
pertness than wit, and more confidence than knowledge. The versification
is tolerable, nor can criticism allow it a higher praise.
His first tragedy was Eurydice, acted at Drury-lane in 1731; of which I
know not the reception nor the merit, but have heard it mentioned as a
mean performance. He was not then too high to accept a prologue and
epilogue from Aaron Hill, neither of which can be much commended.
Having cleared his tongue from his native pronunciation so as to be no
longer distinguished as a Scot, he seems inclined to disencumber himself
from all adherences of his original, and took upon him to change his
name from Scotch _Malloch_ to English Mallet, without any imaginable
reason of preference which the eye or ear can discover. What other
proofs he gave of disrespect to his native country, I know not; but it
was remarked of him, that he was the only Scot, whom Scotchmen did not
command.
About this time Pope, whom he visited familiarly, published his Essay on
Man, but concealed the author; and, when Mallet entered one day, Pope
asked him slightly, what there was new. Mallet told him, that the newest
piece was something called an Essay on Man, which he had inspected idly,
and seeing the utter inability of the author, who had neither skill in
writing nor knowledge of the subject, had tossed it away. Pope, to
punish his self-conceit, told him the secret[194]
A new edition of the works of Bacon being prepared, 1750, for the press,
Mallet was employed to prefix a life, which he has written with
elegance, perhaps with some affectation; but with so much more knowledge
of history than of science, that, when he afterwards undertook the life
of Marlborough, Warburton remarked, that he might, perhaps, forget that
Marlborough was a general, as he had forgotten that Bacon was a
philosopher.
When the prince of Wales was driven from the palace, and, setting
himself at the head of the opposition, kept a separate court, he
endeavoured to increase his popularity by the patronage of literature,
and made Mallet his under-secretary, with a salary of two hundred pounds
a year: Thomson, likewise, had a pension; and they were associated in
the composition of the Mask of Alfred, which, in its original state, was
played at Cliefden in 1740; it was afterwards almost wholly changed by
Mallet, and brought upon the stage at Drury-lane in 1751, but with no
great success.
Mallet, in a familiar conversation with Garrick, discoursing of the
diligence which he was then exerting upon the life of Marlborough, let
him know, that in the series of great men quickly to be exhibited, he
should _find a niche_ for the hero of the theatre. Garrick professed to
wonder by what artifice he could be introduced: but Mallet let him know,
that, by a dexterous anticipation, he should fix him in a conspicuous
place. "Mr. Mallet," says Garrick, in his gratitude of exultation, "have
you left off to write for the stage? " Mallet then confessed that he had
a drama in his hands. Garrick promised to act it; and Alfred was
produced.
The long retardation of the life of the duke of Marlborough shows, with
strong conviction, how little confidence can be placed in posthumous
renown. When he died, it was soon determined that his story should be
delivered to posterity; and the papers, supposed to contain the
necessary information, were delivered to lord Molesworth, who had been
his favourite in Flanders. When Molesworth died the same papers were
transferred, with the same design, to sir Richard Steele, who, in some
of his exigencies, put them in pawn. They then remained with the old
dutchess who, in her will, assigned the task to Glover and Mallet, with
a reward of a thousand pounds, and a prohibition to insert any verses.
Glover rejected, I suppose, with disdain, the legacy, and devolved the
whole work upon Mallet; who had from the late duke of Marlborough a
pension to promote his industry, and who talked of the discoveries which
he had made; but left not, when he died, any historical labours behind
him.
While he was in the prince's service he published Mustapha, with a
prologue by Thomson, not mean, but far inferiour to that which he had
received from Mallet, for Agamemnon. The epilogue, said to be written by
a friend, was composed in haste by Mallet, in the place of one promised,
which was never given. This tragedy was dedicated to the prince his
master. It was acted at Drury-lane, in 1739, and was well received, but
was never revived.
In 1740, he produced, as has been already mentioned, the Mask of Alfred,
in conjunction with Thomson.
For some time afterwards he lay at rest. After a long interval, his next
work was Amyntor and Theodora, 1747, a long story in blank verse; in
which it cannot be denied that there is copiousness and elegance of
language, vigour of sentiment, and imagery well adapted to take
possession of the fancy. But it is blank verse. This he sold to Vaillant
for one hundred and twenty pounds. The first sale was not great, and it
is now lost in forgetfulness.
Mallet, by address or accident, perhaps by his dependance on the prince,
found his way to Bolingbroke; a man whose pride and petulance made his
kindness difficult to gain, or keep, and whom Mallet was content to
court by an act, which, I hope, was unwillingly performed. When it was
found that Pope had clandestinely printed an unauthorised number of the
pamphlet called the Patriot King, Bolingbroke, in a fit of useless fury,
resolved to blast his memory, and employed Mallet, 1749, as the
executioner of his vengeance. Mallet had not virtue, or had not spirit,
to refuse the office; and was rewarded, not long after, with the legacy
of lord Bolingbroke's works.
Many of the political pieces had been written during the opposition to
Walpole, and given to Franklin, as he supposed, in perpetuity. These,
among the rest, were claimed by the will. The question was referred to
arbitrators; but when they decided against Mallet, he refused to yield
to the award; and, by the help of Millar the bookseller, published all
that he could find, but with success very much below his expectation.
In 1755, his Mask of Britannia was acted at Drury-lane; and his tragedy
of Elvira in 1763; in which year he was appointed keeper of the book of
entries for ships in the port of London.
In the beginning of the last war, when the nation was exasperated by ill
success, he was employed to turn the publick vengeance upon Byng, and
wrote a letter of accusation under the character of a Plain Man. The
paper was, with great industry, circulated and dispersed; and he, for
his seasonable intervention, had a considerable pension bestowed upon
him, which he retained to his death.
Towards the end of his life he went with his wife to France; but after
awhile, finding his health declining, he returned alone to England, and
died in April, 1765.
He was twice married, and by his first wife had several children. One
daughter, who married an Italian of rank, named Cilesia, wrote a tragedy
called Almida, which was acted at Drury-lane. His second wife was the
daughter of a nobleman's steward, who had a considerable fortune, which
she took care to retain in her own hands.
His stature was diminutive, but he was regularly formed; his
appearance, till he grew corpulent, was agreeable, and he suffered it to
want no recommendation that dress could give it. His conversation was
elegant and easy. The rest of his character may, without injury to his
memory, sink into silence.
As a writer he cannot be placed in any high class. There is no species
of composition in which he was eminent. His dramas had their day, a
short day, and are forgotten: his blank verse seems, to my ear, the echo
of Thomson. His Life of Bacon is known, as it is appended to Bacon's
volumes, but is no longer mentioned. His works are such as a writer,
bustling in the world, showing himself in publick, and emerging
occasionally, from time to time, into notice, might keep alive by his
personal influence; but which, conveying little information, and giving
no great pleasure, must soon give way, as the succession of things
produces new topicks of conversation and other modes of amusement.
-----
[Footnote 193: Mallet's William and Margaret was printed in Aaron Hill's
Plain Dealer, No. 36, July 24,1724 In its original state it was very
different from what it is in the last edition of his works. Dr. J. ]
[Footnote 194: See note on this passage of Pope's life in the present
edition. ]
AKENSIDE.
Mark Akenside was born on the 9th of November, 1721, at
Newcastle-upon-Tyne. His father, Mark, was a butcher, of the
Presbyterian sect; his mother's name was Mary Lumsden. He received the
first part of his education at the grammar-school of Newcastle; and was
afterwards instructed by Mr. Wilson, who kept a private academy.
At the age of eighteen he was sent to Edinburgh, that he might qualify
himself for the office of a dissenting minister, and received some
assistance from the fund which the dissenters employ in educating young
men of scanty fortune. But a wider view of the world opened other
scenes, and prompted other hopes; he determined to study physick, and
repaid that contribution, which, being received for a different purpose,
he justly thought it dishonourable to retain.
Whether, when he resolved not to be a dissenting minister, he ceased to
be a dissenter, I know not. He certainly retained an unnecessary and
outrageous zeal for what he called, and thought, liberty; a zeal which
sometimes disguises from the world, and not rarely from the mind which
it possesses, an envious desire of plundering wealth or degrading
greatness; and of which the immediate tendency is innovation and
anarchy, an impetuous eagerness to subvert and confound, with very
little care what shall be established.
Akenside was one of those poets who have felt very early the motions of
genius, and one of those students who have very early stored their
memories with sentiments and images. Many of his performances were
produced in his youth; and his greatest work, the Pleasures of
Imagination, appeared in 1744. I have heard Dodsley, by whom it was
published, relate, that when the copy was offered him, the price
demanded for it, which was a hundred and twenty pounds, being such as he
was not inclined to give precipitately, he carried the work to Pope,
who, having looked into it, advised him not to make a niggardly offer;
for "this was no every-day writer. "
In 1741 he went to Leyden, in pursuit of medical knowledge; and three
years afterwards, May 16, 1744, became doctor of physick, having,
according to the custom of the Dutch universities, published a thesis or
dissertation. The subject which he chose was the Original and Growth of
the Human Foetus; in which he is said to have departed, with great
judgment, from the opinion then established, and to have delivered that
which has been since confirmed and received.
Akenside was a young man, warm with every notion that by nature or
accident had been connected with the sound of liberty, and, by an
eccentricity which such dispositions do not easily avoid, a lover of
contradiction, and no friend to any thing established. He adopted
Shaftesbury's foolish assertion of the efficacy of ridicule for the
discovery of truth. For this he was attacked by Warburton, and defended
by Dyson: Warburton afterwards reprinted his remarks at the end of his
dedication to the Freethinkers.
The result of all the arguments, which have been produced in a long and
eager discussion of this idle question, may easily be collected. If
ridicule be applied to any position, as the test of truth, it will then
become a question whether such ridicule be just; and this can only be
decided by the application of truth, as the test of ridicule. Two men,
fearing, one a real and the other a fancied danger, will be for awhile
equally exposed to the inevitable consequences of cowardice,
contemptuous censure, and ludicrous representation; and the true state
of both cases must be known, before it can be decided whose terrour is
rational, and whose is ridiculous; who is to be pitied, and who to be
despised. Both are for awhile equally exposed to laughter, but both are
not, therefore, equally contemptible.
In the revisal of his poem, though he died before he had finished it,
he omitted the lines which had given occasion to Warburton's objections.
He published, soon after his return from Levden, 1745, his first
collection of odes; and was impelled, by his rage of patriotism, to
write a very acrimonious epistle to Pulteney, whom he stigmatizes, under
the name of Curio, as the betrayer of his country.
Being now to live by his profession, he first commenced physician at
Northampton, where Dr. Stonehouse then practised with such reputation
and success, that a stranger was not likely to gain ground upon him.
Akenside tried the contest awhile; and, having deafened the place with
clamours for liberty, removed to Hampstead, where he resided more than
two years, and then fixed himself in London, the proper place for a man
of accomplishments like his.
At London he was known as a poet, but was still to make his way as a
physician; and would, perhaps, have been reduced to great exigencies,
but that Mr. Dyson, with an ardour of friendship that has not many
examples, allowed him three hundred pounds a year. Thus supported, he
advanced gradually in medical reputation, but never attained any great
extent of practice, or eminence of popularity. A physician in a great
city seems to be the mere plaything of fortune; his degree of reputation
is, for the most part, totally casual; they that employ him know not his
excellence; they that reject him know not his deficience. By any acute
observer, who had looked on the transactions of the medical world for
half a century, a very curious book might be written on the Fortune of
Physicians[195]
Akenside appears not to have been wanting to his own success: he placed
himself in view by all the common methods; he became a fellow of the
Royal Society; he obtained a degree at Cambridge; and was admitted into
the College of Physicians; he wrote little poetry, but published, from
time to time, medical essays and observations; he became physician to
St. Thomas's hospital; he read the Gulstonian lectures in anatomy; but
began to give, for the Crounian lecture, a history of the revival of
learning, from which he soon desisted; and, in conversation, he very
eagerly forced himself into notice by an ambitious ostentation of
elegance and literature.
His Discourse on the Dysentery, 1764, was considered as a very
conspicuous specimen of Latinity, which entitled him to the same height
of place among the scholars as he possessed before among the wits; and
he might, perhaps, have risen to a greater elevation of character, but
that his studies were ended with his life, by a putrid fever, June 23,
1770, in the forty-ninth year of his age[196].
Akenside is to be considered, as a didactick and lyrick poet. His great
work is the Pleasures of Imagination; a performance which, published as
it was, at the age of twenty-three, raised expectations that were not
very amply satisfied. It has undoubtedly a just claim to very particular
notice, as an example of great felicity of genius, and uncommon
amplitude of acquisitions, of a young mind stored with images, and much
exercised in combining and comparing them.
With the philosophical or religious tenets of the author, I have nothing
to do; my business is with his poetry. The subject is well chosen, as it
includes all images that can strike or please, and thus comprises every
species of poetical delight. The only difficulty is in the choice of
examples and illustrations; and it is not easy, in such exuberance of
matter, to find the middle point between penury and satiety. The parts
seem artificially disposed, with sufficient coherence, so as that they
cannot change their places without injury to the general design.
His images are displayed with such luxuriance of expression, that they
are hidden, like Butler's Moon, by a "veil of light;" they are forms
fantastically lost under superfluity of dress. "Pars minima est ipsa
puella sui. " The words are multiplied till the sense is hardly
perceived; attention deserts the mind, and settles in the ear. The
reader wanders through the gay diffusion, sometimes amazed, and
sometimes delighted; but, after many turnings in the flowery labyrinth,
comes out as he went in. He remarked little, and laid hold on nothing.
To his versification, justice requires that praise should not be denied.
In the general fabrication of his lines he is, perhaps, superiour to any
other writer of blank verse: his flow is smooth, and his pauses are
musical; but the concatenation of his verses is commonly too long
continued, and the full close does not recur with sufficient frequency.
The sense is carried on through a long inter-texture of complicated
clauses, and, as nothing is distinguished, nothing is remembered.
The exemption which blank verse affords from the necessity of closing
the sense with the couplet, betrays luxuriant and active minds into such
self-indulgence, that they pile image upon image, ornament upon
ornament, and are not easily persuaded to close the sense at all. Blank
verse will, therefore, I fear, be too often found in description
exuberant, in argument loquacious, and in narration tiresome.
His diction is certainly poetical as it is not prosaick, and elegant as
it is not vulgar. He is to be commended as having fewer artifices of
disgust than most of his brethren of the blank song. He rarely either
recalls old phrases, or twists his metre into harsh inversions. The
sense, however, of his words is strained, when "he views the Ganges from
Alpine heights;" that is, from mountains like the Alps: and the pedant
surely intrudes, (but when was blank verse without pedantry? ) when he
tells how "planets _absolve_ the stated round of time. "
It is generally known to the readers of poetry that he intended to
revise and augment this work, but died before he had completed his
design. The reformed work as he left it, and the additions which he had
made, are very properly retained in the late collection. He seems to
have somewhat contracted his diffusion; but I know not whether he has
gained in closeness what he has lost in splendour. In the additional
book, the Tale of Solon is too long.
One great defect of his poem is very properly censured by Mr. Walker,
unless it may be said, in his defence, that what he has omitted was not
properly in his plan. "His picture of man is grand and beautiful, but
unfinished. The immortality of the soul, which is the natural
consequence of the appetites and powers she is invested with, is
scarcely once hinted throughout the poem. This deficiency is amply
supplied by the masterly pencil of Dr. Young; who, like a good
philosopher, has invincibly proved the immortality of man, from the
grandeur of his conceptions, and the meanness and misery of his state;
for this reason, a few passages are selected from the Night Thoughts,
which, with those from Akenside, seem to form a complete view of the
powers, situation, and end of man. " Exercises for Improvement in
Elocution, p. 66.
His other poems are now to be considered; but a short consideration will
despatch them. It is not easy to guess why he addicted himself so
diligently to lyrick poetry, having neither the ease and airiness of the
lighter, nor the vehemence and elevation of the grander ode. When he
lays his ill-fated hand upon his harp, his former powers seem to desert
him; he has no longer his luxuriance of expression, nor variety of
images. His thoughts are cold, and his words inelegant. Yet such was his
love of lyricks, that, having written, with great vigour and poignancy,
his Epistle to Curio, he transformed it afterwards into an ode
disgraceful only to its author.
Of his odes nothing favourable can be said; the sentiments commonly want
force, nature, or novelty; the diction is sometimes harsh and uncouth,
the stanzas ill-constructed and unpleasant, and the rhymes dissonant, or
unskilfully disposed, too distant from each other, or arranged with too
little regard to established use, and, therefore, perplexing to the ear,
which, in a short composition, has not time to grow familiar with an
innovation.
To examine such compositions singly cannot be required; they have,
doubtless, brighter and darker parts; but, when they are once found to
be generally dull, all further labour may be spared: for to what use can
the work be criticised that will not be read?
-----
[Footnote 195: Johnson entertained a very high idea of the varied
learning and science necessarily connected with the character of an
accomplished physician, and often affirmed of the physicians of this
island, that "they did more good to mankind without a prospect of
reward, than any profession of men whatever. " His friendship for Dr.
Bathurst, and the most eminent men in the medical line of his day, is
well known. See an epistle to Dr. Percival, developing the wide field of
knowledge over which a physician should expatiate, prefixed to
Observations on the Literature of the Primitive Christian Writers. ED. ]
[Footnote 196: A most curious and original character of Akenside is
given by George Hardinge, in vol. viii. of Nichols's Literary Anecdotes.
ED. ]
GRAY.
Thomas Gray, the son of Mr. Philip Gray, a scrivener of London, was born
in Cornhill, November 26, 1716. His grammatical education he received at
Eton, under the care of Mr. Antrobus, his mother's brother, then
assistant to Dr. George; and when he left school, in 1734, entered a
pensioner at Peterhouse, in Cambridge.
The transition from the school to the college is, to most young
scholars, the time from which they date their years of manhood, liberty,
and happiness; but Gray seems to have been very little delighted with
academical gratifications; he liked at Cambridge neither the mode of
life nor the fashion of study, and lived sullenly on to the time when
his attendance on lectures was no longer required. As he intended to
profess the common law, he, took no degree.
When he had been at Cambridge about five years, Mr. Horace Walpole,
whose friendship he had gained at Eton, invited him to travel with him
as his companion. They wandered through France into Italy; and Gray's
letters contain a very pleasing account of many parts of their journey.
But unequal friendships are easily dissolved: at Florence they
quarrelled and parted; and Mr. Walpole is now content to have it told
that it was by his fault.
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 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 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 steer
With the tide, but near the shore.
Thus prepar'd, thy shorten'd 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 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 state
Full 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 address
Will bring to life those healing thoughts
Which dy'd in your distress.
That friend, the spirit of thy theme
Extracting for your ease,
Will leave to me the dreg, in thoughts
Too 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 100_l_. "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 SEEN
Spread 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.
What though we wade in wealth, or soar in fame!
Earth's highest station ends in, _Here he lies! _
And _dust to dust_ concludes her noblest song!
The author of these lines is not without his _hic jacet. _
By the good sense of his son, it contains none of that praise which no
marble can make the bad or the foolish merit; which, without the
direction of a stone or a turf, will find its way, sooner or later, to
the deserving.
M. S.
Optimi parentis
EDVARDI YOUNG, LL. D.
hujus ecclesiae rect.
Et Elizabethae
faem. praenob.
Conjugis ejus amantissimae,
pio et gratissimo animo
hoc marmor posuit
F. Y.
Filius superstes.
Is it not strange that the author of the Night Thoughts has inscribed no
monument to the memory of his lamented wife? Yet, what marble will
endure as long as the poems?
Such, my good friend, is the account which I have been able to collect
of the great Young. That it may be long before any thing like what I
have just transcribed be necessary for you, is the sincere wish of,
Dear sir,
Your greatly obliged friend,
HERBERT CROFT, Jun.
Lincoln's Inn, Sept. 1780.
P. S. This account of Young was seen by you in manuscript, you know, sir;
and, though I could not prevail on you to make any alteration, you
insisted on striking out one passage, because it said, that, if I did
not wish you to live long, for your sake, I did for the sake of myself
and of the world. But this postscript you will not see before the
printing of it; and I will say here, in spite of you, how I feel myself
honoured and bettered by your friendship: and that, if I do credit to
the church, after which I always longed, and for which I am now going to
give in exchange the bar, though not at so late a period of life as
Young took orders, it will be owing, in no small measure, to my having
had the happiness of calling the author of the Rambler my friend[191].
H. C.
Oxford, Oct. 1782.
Of Young's poems it is difficult to give any general character; for he
has no uniformity of manner: one of his pieces has no great resemblance
to another. He began to write early, and continued long; and at
different times had different modes of poetical excellence in view. His
numbers are sometimes smooth, and sometimes rugged; his style is
sometimes concatenated, and sometimes abrupt; sometimes diffusive, and
sometimes concise. His plan seems to have started in his mind at the
present moment; and his thoughts appear the effect of chance, sometimes
adverse, and sometimes lucky, with very little operation of judgment.
He was not one of those writers whom experience improves, and who,
observing their own faults, become gradually correct. His poem on the
Last Day, his first great performance, has an equability and propriety,
which he afterwards either never endeavoured or never attained. Many
paragraphs are noble, and few are mean, yet the whole is languid: the
plan is too much extended, and a succession of images divides and
weakens the general conception; but the great reason why the reader is
disappointed is, that the thought of the Last Day makes every man more
than poetical, by spreading over his mind a general obscurity of sacred
horrour, that oppresses distinction, and disdains expression.
His story of Jane Grey was never popular. It is written with elegance
enough; but Jane is too heroick to be pitied.
The Universal Passion is, indeed, a very great performance. It is said
to be a series of epigrams; but, if it be, it is what the author
intended; his endeavour was at the production of striking distichs and
pointed sentences; and his distichs have the weight of solid sentiment,
and his points the sharpness of resistless truth.
His characters are often selected with discernment, and drawn with
nicety; his illustrations are often happy, and his reflections often
just. His species of satire is between those of Horace and Juvenal; and
he has the gaiety of Horace without his laxity of numbers, and the
morality of Juvenal, with greater variation of images. He plays, indeed,
only on the surface of life; he never penetrates the recesses of the
mind, and, therefore, the whole power of his poetry is exhausted by a
single perusal; his conceits please only when they surprise.
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 lyrick 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
decaying faculties. There is Young in every stanza, such as he often was
in his 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, terrour, 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 go 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 publick.
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[192] which I have heard
repeated at the approbation by a lady, of whose praise he would have
been justly proud, and which is very ingenious, very subtile, 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 reassembly 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.
-----
[Footnote 185: See Gent. Mag. vol. lxx. p. 225. N. ]
[Footnote 186: As my great friend is now become the subject of
biography, it should be told, that every time I called upon Johnson
during the time I was employed in collecting materials for this life and
putting it together, he never suffered me to depart without some such
farewell as this: "Don't forget that rascal Tindal, sir. Be sure to hang
up the atheist. " Alluding to this anecdote, which Johnson had mentioned
to me. ]
[Footnote 187: Dr. Johnson, in many cases, thought and directed
differently, particularly in Young's works. J. N. ]
[Footnote 188: Not in the Tatler, but in the Guardian, May 9, 1713. ]
[Footnote 189: See a letter from the duke of Wharton to Swift, dated
1717, in Swift's works, in which he mentions Young being then in
Ireland. J. B. N. ]
[Footnote 190: Davies, in his life of Garrick, says 1720, and that it
was produced thirty-three years after. ]
[Footnote 191: Mr. Boswell discovered in this heavy piece of biography a
successful imitation of Johnson's style. An eminent literary character
exclaimed, "No, no, it is not a good imitation of Johnson; it has all
his pomp without his force; it has all the nodosities of the oak without
its strength. " Endeavouring to express himself still more in Johnsonian
phrase, he added, "It has all the contortions of the Sybil, without the
inspiration. " See Boswell, iv. According to Malone, this eminent person
was Burke, and the observation is assigned to him, without hesitation,
in Prin's Life. It has sometimes been attributed to G. Stevens. ED. ]
[Footnote 192: See Mrs. Piozzi's Anecdotes, 162. ]
MALLET.
Of David Mallet, having no written memorial, I am able to give no other
account than such as is supplied by the unauthorised loquacity of common
fame, and a very slight personal knowledge.
He was, by his original, one of the Macgregors, a clan that became,
about sixty years ago, under the conduct of Robin Roy, so formidable and
so infamous for violence and robbery, that the name was annulled by a
legal abolition; and when they were all to denominate themselves anew,
the father, I suppose, of this author, called himself Malloch.
David Malloch was, by the penury of his parents, compelled to be janitor
of the high school at Edinburgh; a mean office, of which he did not
afterwards delight to hear. But he surmounted the disadvantages of his
birth and fortune; for, when the duke of Montrose applied to the college
of Edinburgh for a tutor to educate his sons, Malloch was recommended;
and I never heard that he dishonoured his credentials.
When his pupils were sent to see the world, they were entrusted to his
care; and, having conducted them round the common circle of modish
travels, he returned with them to London, where, by the influence of the
family in which he resided, he naturally gained admission to many
persons of the highest rank, and the highest character; to wits, nobles,
and statesmen.
Of his works, I know not whether I can trace the series. His first
production was William and Margaret[193] of which, though it contains
nothing very striking or difficult, he has been envied the reputation;
and plagiarism has been boldly charged, but never proved.
Not long afterwards he published the Excursion, 1728; a desultory and
capricious view of such scenes of nature as his fancy led him, or his
knowledge enabled him, to describe. It is not devoid of poetical spirit.
Many of the images are striking, and many of the paragraphs are elegant.
The cast of diction seems to be copied from Thomson, whose Seasons were
then in their full blossom of reputation. He has Thomson's beauties and
his faults.
His poem on Verbal Criticism, 1733, was written to pay court to Pope, on
a subject which he either did not understand, or willingly
misrepresented; and is little more than an improvement, or rather
expansion, of a fragment which Pope printed in a Miscellany long before
he engrafted it into a regular poem. There is in this piece more
pertness than wit, and more confidence than knowledge. The versification
is tolerable, nor can criticism allow it a higher praise.
His first tragedy was Eurydice, acted at Drury-lane in 1731; of which I
know not the reception nor the merit, but have heard it mentioned as a
mean performance. He was not then too high to accept a prologue and
epilogue from Aaron Hill, neither of which can be much commended.
Having cleared his tongue from his native pronunciation so as to be no
longer distinguished as a Scot, he seems inclined to disencumber himself
from all adherences of his original, and took upon him to change his
name from Scotch _Malloch_ to English Mallet, without any imaginable
reason of preference which the eye or ear can discover. What other
proofs he gave of disrespect to his native country, I know not; but it
was remarked of him, that he was the only Scot, whom Scotchmen did not
command.
About this time Pope, whom he visited familiarly, published his Essay on
Man, but concealed the author; and, when Mallet entered one day, Pope
asked him slightly, what there was new. Mallet told him, that the newest
piece was something called an Essay on Man, which he had inspected idly,
and seeing the utter inability of the author, who had neither skill in
writing nor knowledge of the subject, had tossed it away. Pope, to
punish his self-conceit, told him the secret[194]
A new edition of the works of Bacon being prepared, 1750, for the press,
Mallet was employed to prefix a life, which he has written with
elegance, perhaps with some affectation; but with so much more knowledge
of history than of science, that, when he afterwards undertook the life
of Marlborough, Warburton remarked, that he might, perhaps, forget that
Marlborough was a general, as he had forgotten that Bacon was a
philosopher.
When the prince of Wales was driven from the palace, and, setting
himself at the head of the opposition, kept a separate court, he
endeavoured to increase his popularity by the patronage of literature,
and made Mallet his under-secretary, with a salary of two hundred pounds
a year: Thomson, likewise, had a pension; and they were associated in
the composition of the Mask of Alfred, which, in its original state, was
played at Cliefden in 1740; it was afterwards almost wholly changed by
Mallet, and brought upon the stage at Drury-lane in 1751, but with no
great success.
Mallet, in a familiar conversation with Garrick, discoursing of the
diligence which he was then exerting upon the life of Marlborough, let
him know, that in the series of great men quickly to be exhibited, he
should _find a niche_ for the hero of the theatre. Garrick professed to
wonder by what artifice he could be introduced: but Mallet let him know,
that, by a dexterous anticipation, he should fix him in a conspicuous
place. "Mr. Mallet," says Garrick, in his gratitude of exultation, "have
you left off to write for the stage? " Mallet then confessed that he had
a drama in his hands. Garrick promised to act it; and Alfred was
produced.
The long retardation of the life of the duke of Marlborough shows, with
strong conviction, how little confidence can be placed in posthumous
renown. When he died, it was soon determined that his story should be
delivered to posterity; and the papers, supposed to contain the
necessary information, were delivered to lord Molesworth, who had been
his favourite in Flanders. When Molesworth died the same papers were
transferred, with the same design, to sir Richard Steele, who, in some
of his exigencies, put them in pawn. They then remained with the old
dutchess who, in her will, assigned the task to Glover and Mallet, with
a reward of a thousand pounds, and a prohibition to insert any verses.
Glover rejected, I suppose, with disdain, the legacy, and devolved the
whole work upon Mallet; who had from the late duke of Marlborough a
pension to promote his industry, and who talked of the discoveries which
he had made; but left not, when he died, any historical labours behind
him.
While he was in the prince's service he published Mustapha, with a
prologue by Thomson, not mean, but far inferiour to that which he had
received from Mallet, for Agamemnon. The epilogue, said to be written by
a friend, was composed in haste by Mallet, in the place of one promised,
which was never given. This tragedy was dedicated to the prince his
master. It was acted at Drury-lane, in 1739, and was well received, but
was never revived.
In 1740, he produced, as has been already mentioned, the Mask of Alfred,
in conjunction with Thomson.
For some time afterwards he lay at rest. After a long interval, his next
work was Amyntor and Theodora, 1747, a long story in blank verse; in
which it cannot be denied that there is copiousness and elegance of
language, vigour of sentiment, and imagery well adapted to take
possession of the fancy. But it is blank verse. This he sold to Vaillant
for one hundred and twenty pounds. The first sale was not great, and it
is now lost in forgetfulness.
Mallet, by address or accident, perhaps by his dependance on the prince,
found his way to Bolingbroke; a man whose pride and petulance made his
kindness difficult to gain, or keep, and whom Mallet was content to
court by an act, which, I hope, was unwillingly performed. When it was
found that Pope had clandestinely printed an unauthorised number of the
pamphlet called the Patriot King, Bolingbroke, in a fit of useless fury,
resolved to blast his memory, and employed Mallet, 1749, as the
executioner of his vengeance. Mallet had not virtue, or had not spirit,
to refuse the office; and was rewarded, not long after, with the legacy
of lord Bolingbroke's works.
Many of the political pieces had been written during the opposition to
Walpole, and given to Franklin, as he supposed, in perpetuity. These,
among the rest, were claimed by the will. The question was referred to
arbitrators; but when they decided against Mallet, he refused to yield
to the award; and, by the help of Millar the bookseller, published all
that he could find, but with success very much below his expectation.
In 1755, his Mask of Britannia was acted at Drury-lane; and his tragedy
of Elvira in 1763; in which year he was appointed keeper of the book of
entries for ships in the port of London.
In the beginning of the last war, when the nation was exasperated by ill
success, he was employed to turn the publick vengeance upon Byng, and
wrote a letter of accusation under the character of a Plain Man. The
paper was, with great industry, circulated and dispersed; and he, for
his seasonable intervention, had a considerable pension bestowed upon
him, which he retained to his death.
Towards the end of his life he went with his wife to France; but after
awhile, finding his health declining, he returned alone to England, and
died in April, 1765.
He was twice married, and by his first wife had several children. One
daughter, who married an Italian of rank, named Cilesia, wrote a tragedy
called Almida, which was acted at Drury-lane. His second wife was the
daughter of a nobleman's steward, who had a considerable fortune, which
she took care to retain in her own hands.
His stature was diminutive, but he was regularly formed; his
appearance, till he grew corpulent, was agreeable, and he suffered it to
want no recommendation that dress could give it. His conversation was
elegant and easy. The rest of his character may, without injury to his
memory, sink into silence.
As a writer he cannot be placed in any high class. There is no species
of composition in which he was eminent. His dramas had their day, a
short day, and are forgotten: his blank verse seems, to my ear, the echo
of Thomson. His Life of Bacon is known, as it is appended to Bacon's
volumes, but is no longer mentioned. His works are such as a writer,
bustling in the world, showing himself in publick, and emerging
occasionally, from time to time, into notice, might keep alive by his
personal influence; but which, conveying little information, and giving
no great pleasure, must soon give way, as the succession of things
produces new topicks of conversation and other modes of amusement.
-----
[Footnote 193: Mallet's William and Margaret was printed in Aaron Hill's
Plain Dealer, No. 36, July 24,1724 In its original state it was very
different from what it is in the last edition of his works. Dr. J. ]
[Footnote 194: See note on this passage of Pope's life in the present
edition. ]
AKENSIDE.
Mark Akenside was born on the 9th of November, 1721, at
Newcastle-upon-Tyne. His father, Mark, was a butcher, of the
Presbyterian sect; his mother's name was Mary Lumsden. He received the
first part of his education at the grammar-school of Newcastle; and was
afterwards instructed by Mr. Wilson, who kept a private academy.
At the age of eighteen he was sent to Edinburgh, that he might qualify
himself for the office of a dissenting minister, and received some
assistance from the fund which the dissenters employ in educating young
men of scanty fortune. But a wider view of the world opened other
scenes, and prompted other hopes; he determined to study physick, and
repaid that contribution, which, being received for a different purpose,
he justly thought it dishonourable to retain.
Whether, when he resolved not to be a dissenting minister, he ceased to
be a dissenter, I know not. He certainly retained an unnecessary and
outrageous zeal for what he called, and thought, liberty; a zeal which
sometimes disguises from the world, and not rarely from the mind which
it possesses, an envious desire of plundering wealth or degrading
greatness; and of which the immediate tendency is innovation and
anarchy, an impetuous eagerness to subvert and confound, with very
little care what shall be established.
Akenside was one of those poets who have felt very early the motions of
genius, and one of those students who have very early stored their
memories with sentiments and images. Many of his performances were
produced in his youth; and his greatest work, the Pleasures of
Imagination, appeared in 1744. I have heard Dodsley, by whom it was
published, relate, that when the copy was offered him, the price
demanded for it, which was a hundred and twenty pounds, being such as he
was not inclined to give precipitately, he carried the work to Pope,
who, having looked into it, advised him not to make a niggardly offer;
for "this was no every-day writer. "
In 1741 he went to Leyden, in pursuit of medical knowledge; and three
years afterwards, May 16, 1744, became doctor of physick, having,
according to the custom of the Dutch universities, published a thesis or
dissertation. The subject which he chose was the Original and Growth of
the Human Foetus; in which he is said to have departed, with great
judgment, from the opinion then established, and to have delivered that
which has been since confirmed and received.
Akenside was a young man, warm with every notion that by nature or
accident had been connected with the sound of liberty, and, by an
eccentricity which such dispositions do not easily avoid, a lover of
contradiction, and no friend to any thing established. He adopted
Shaftesbury's foolish assertion of the efficacy of ridicule for the
discovery of truth. For this he was attacked by Warburton, and defended
by Dyson: Warburton afterwards reprinted his remarks at the end of his
dedication to the Freethinkers.
The result of all the arguments, which have been produced in a long and
eager discussion of this idle question, may easily be collected. If
ridicule be applied to any position, as the test of truth, it will then
become a question whether such ridicule be just; and this can only be
decided by the application of truth, as the test of ridicule. Two men,
fearing, one a real and the other a fancied danger, will be for awhile
equally exposed to the inevitable consequences of cowardice,
contemptuous censure, and ludicrous representation; and the true state
of both cases must be known, before it can be decided whose terrour is
rational, and whose is ridiculous; who is to be pitied, and who to be
despised. Both are for awhile equally exposed to laughter, but both are
not, therefore, equally contemptible.
In the revisal of his poem, though he died before he had finished it,
he omitted the lines which had given occasion to Warburton's objections.
He published, soon after his return from Levden, 1745, his first
collection of odes; and was impelled, by his rage of patriotism, to
write a very acrimonious epistle to Pulteney, whom he stigmatizes, under
the name of Curio, as the betrayer of his country.
Being now to live by his profession, he first commenced physician at
Northampton, where Dr. Stonehouse then practised with such reputation
and success, that a stranger was not likely to gain ground upon him.
Akenside tried the contest awhile; and, having deafened the place with
clamours for liberty, removed to Hampstead, where he resided more than
two years, and then fixed himself in London, the proper place for a man
of accomplishments like his.
At London he was known as a poet, but was still to make his way as a
physician; and would, perhaps, have been reduced to great exigencies,
but that Mr. Dyson, with an ardour of friendship that has not many
examples, allowed him three hundred pounds a year. Thus supported, he
advanced gradually in medical reputation, but never attained any great
extent of practice, or eminence of popularity. A physician in a great
city seems to be the mere plaything of fortune; his degree of reputation
is, for the most part, totally casual; they that employ him know not his
excellence; they that reject him know not his deficience. By any acute
observer, who had looked on the transactions of the medical world for
half a century, a very curious book might be written on the Fortune of
Physicians[195]
Akenside appears not to have been wanting to his own success: he placed
himself in view by all the common methods; he became a fellow of the
Royal Society; he obtained a degree at Cambridge; and was admitted into
the College of Physicians; he wrote little poetry, but published, from
time to time, medical essays and observations; he became physician to
St. Thomas's hospital; he read the Gulstonian lectures in anatomy; but
began to give, for the Crounian lecture, a history of the revival of
learning, from which he soon desisted; and, in conversation, he very
eagerly forced himself into notice by an ambitious ostentation of
elegance and literature.
His Discourse on the Dysentery, 1764, was considered as a very
conspicuous specimen of Latinity, which entitled him to the same height
of place among the scholars as he possessed before among the wits; and
he might, perhaps, have risen to a greater elevation of character, but
that his studies were ended with his life, by a putrid fever, June 23,
1770, in the forty-ninth year of his age[196].
Akenside is to be considered, as a didactick and lyrick poet. His great
work is the Pleasures of Imagination; a performance which, published as
it was, at the age of twenty-three, raised expectations that were not
very amply satisfied. It has undoubtedly a just claim to very particular
notice, as an example of great felicity of genius, and uncommon
amplitude of acquisitions, of a young mind stored with images, and much
exercised in combining and comparing them.
With the philosophical or religious tenets of the author, I have nothing
to do; my business is with his poetry. The subject is well chosen, as it
includes all images that can strike or please, and thus comprises every
species of poetical delight. The only difficulty is in the choice of
examples and illustrations; and it is not easy, in such exuberance of
matter, to find the middle point between penury and satiety. The parts
seem artificially disposed, with sufficient coherence, so as that they
cannot change their places without injury to the general design.
His images are displayed with such luxuriance of expression, that they
are hidden, like Butler's Moon, by a "veil of light;" they are forms
fantastically lost under superfluity of dress. "Pars minima est ipsa
puella sui. " The words are multiplied till the sense is hardly
perceived; attention deserts the mind, and settles in the ear. The
reader wanders through the gay diffusion, sometimes amazed, and
sometimes delighted; but, after many turnings in the flowery labyrinth,
comes out as he went in. He remarked little, and laid hold on nothing.
To his versification, justice requires that praise should not be denied.
In the general fabrication of his lines he is, perhaps, superiour to any
other writer of blank verse: his flow is smooth, and his pauses are
musical; but the concatenation of his verses is commonly too long
continued, and the full close does not recur with sufficient frequency.
The sense is carried on through a long inter-texture of complicated
clauses, and, as nothing is distinguished, nothing is remembered.
The exemption which blank verse affords from the necessity of closing
the sense with the couplet, betrays luxuriant and active minds into such
self-indulgence, that they pile image upon image, ornament upon
ornament, and are not easily persuaded to close the sense at all. Blank
verse will, therefore, I fear, be too often found in description
exuberant, in argument loquacious, and in narration tiresome.
His diction is certainly poetical as it is not prosaick, and elegant as
it is not vulgar. He is to be commended as having fewer artifices of
disgust than most of his brethren of the blank song. He rarely either
recalls old phrases, or twists his metre into harsh inversions. The
sense, however, of his words is strained, when "he views the Ganges from
Alpine heights;" that is, from mountains like the Alps: and the pedant
surely intrudes, (but when was blank verse without pedantry? ) when he
tells how "planets _absolve_ the stated round of time. "
It is generally known to the readers of poetry that he intended to
revise and augment this work, but died before he had completed his
design. The reformed work as he left it, and the additions which he had
made, are very properly retained in the late collection. He seems to
have somewhat contracted his diffusion; but I know not whether he has
gained in closeness what he has lost in splendour. In the additional
book, the Tale of Solon is too long.
One great defect of his poem is very properly censured by Mr. Walker,
unless it may be said, in his defence, that what he has omitted was not
properly in his plan. "His picture of man is grand and beautiful, but
unfinished. The immortality of the soul, which is the natural
consequence of the appetites and powers she is invested with, is
scarcely once hinted throughout the poem. This deficiency is amply
supplied by the masterly pencil of Dr. Young; who, like a good
philosopher, has invincibly proved the immortality of man, from the
grandeur of his conceptions, and the meanness and misery of his state;
for this reason, a few passages are selected from the Night Thoughts,
which, with those from Akenside, seem to form a complete view of the
powers, situation, and end of man. " Exercises for Improvement in
Elocution, p. 66.
His other poems are now to be considered; but a short consideration will
despatch them. It is not easy to guess why he addicted himself so
diligently to lyrick poetry, having neither the ease and airiness of the
lighter, nor the vehemence and elevation of the grander ode. When he
lays his ill-fated hand upon his harp, his former powers seem to desert
him; he has no longer his luxuriance of expression, nor variety of
images. His thoughts are cold, and his words inelegant. Yet such was his
love of lyricks, that, having written, with great vigour and poignancy,
his Epistle to Curio, he transformed it afterwards into an ode
disgraceful only to its author.
Of his odes nothing favourable can be said; the sentiments commonly want
force, nature, or novelty; the diction is sometimes harsh and uncouth,
the stanzas ill-constructed and unpleasant, and the rhymes dissonant, or
unskilfully disposed, too distant from each other, or arranged with too
little regard to established use, and, therefore, perplexing to the ear,
which, in a short composition, has not time to grow familiar with an
innovation.
To examine such compositions singly cannot be required; they have,
doubtless, brighter and darker parts; but, when they are once found to
be generally dull, all further labour may be spared: for to what use can
the work be criticised that will not be read?
-----
[Footnote 195: Johnson entertained a very high idea of the varied
learning and science necessarily connected with the character of an
accomplished physician, and often affirmed of the physicians of this
island, that "they did more good to mankind without a prospect of
reward, than any profession of men whatever. " His friendship for Dr.
Bathurst, and the most eminent men in the medical line of his day, is
well known. See an epistle to Dr. Percival, developing the wide field of
knowledge over which a physician should expatiate, prefixed to
Observations on the Literature of the Primitive Christian Writers. ED. ]
[Footnote 196: A most curious and original character of Akenside is
given by George Hardinge, in vol. viii. of Nichols's Literary Anecdotes.
ED. ]
GRAY.
Thomas Gray, the son of Mr. Philip Gray, a scrivener of London, was born
in Cornhill, November 26, 1716. His grammatical education he received at
Eton, under the care of Mr. Antrobus, his mother's brother, then
assistant to Dr. George; and when he left school, in 1734, entered a
pensioner at Peterhouse, in Cambridge.
The transition from the school to the college is, to most young
scholars, the time from which they date their years of manhood, liberty,
and happiness; but Gray seems to have been very little delighted with
academical gratifications; he liked at Cambridge neither the mode of
life nor the fashion of study, and lived sullenly on to the time when
his attendance on lectures was no longer required. As he intended to
profess the common law, he, took no degree.
When he had been at Cambridge about five years, Mr. Horace Walpole,
whose friendship he had gained at Eton, invited him to travel with him
as his companion. They wandered through France into Italy; and Gray's
letters contain a very pleasing account of many parts of their journey.
But unequal friendships are easily dissolved: at Florence they
quarrelled and parted; and Mr. Walpole is now content to have it told
that it was by his fault.
