various delightful speculations and anecdotes about his residence and labours there, to Bulwer’s Student. He was a powerful preacher. His sermons seem to have been striking in thought, rich in image, intensely practical in tendency, and were delivered with great animation and effect. It is told, that on one occasion, while preaching at St James’s before the Court and His Majesty, on some subject of transcendent importance, and not being able to command the attention or awaken the feelings of his audience, he at length threw himself back into the pulpit, and burst into tears. That was itself a sermon! The figure of this weeping Titan, who could have rent rocks and severed mountains, but who had failed in breaking the hearts of any of his courtly hearers, is one of the most affecting in the annals of pulpit oratory. Alas! what preacher who has ever aimed at Young’s object, has not been at times tempted to assume Young’s attitude, and to shed Young’s bitter and burning tears? “Who hath believed our report, and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?”

In 1731, Young, at the mature age of fifty, married the Lady Elizabeth Lee, daughter of the Earl of Lichfield, and widow of Colonel Lee. This marriage sprung out of his father’s acquaintance with Lady Ann Wharton, who was co-heiress of Sir Henry Lee of Ditchley in Oxfordshire, and seems to have been very happy. He next published another of those stupid odes by which he seemed predestined to disgrace his genius, entitled “A Sea Piece.” It was as though Milton had tried to write Anacreontics. A few years afterwards appeared “The Foreign Address, or the Best Argument for Peace,” occasioned by the posture of affairs in which the British fleet was then placed, and written in the character of a sailor. It is a mere tissue of sounding verbiage—or, as Hamlet hath it, “Words, words, words.” About this time Young met with Voltaire, who, according to the story, was ridiculing Milton’s allegory of “Death and Sin,” when our hero struck in with the extempore epigram:—

We cannot see very much wit in this epigram, even in that best shape which we have now given it; but it was not inappropriate to the lean denier, who sought to empty everything of the important element—its God; to leave the universe, like himself, a grinning skeleton, and to smile in ghastly sympathy over the completed ruin. We fancy we see the two gifted men, the one the representative of the scepticism of France, the other, of the belief of England, meeting and conversing together. Voltaire is not much in advance of thirty; Young is fifty, and more. Voltaire’s face is worn with premature thought and inordinate laughter; Young’s, though older, bears a warmer and more sanguine flush. Voltaire has the insincerest of smiles playing constantly over his face like the light of an aurora borealis; Young’s countenance is grave, settled, open, and serene, as the radiance of an autumn sunset. In Voltaire’s eye you see the future “Candide” laughing down in its depths, while on Young’s brow lies the dim and magnificent promise of the “Night Thoughts.” After meeting, talking, bowing, wondering, and recoiling, they part for ever; Voltaire sighing through smiles as he thinks of the “misled giant of Religion;” and Young smiling through sighs as he thinks of the “wondrous and well-nigh human ape of Infidelity.”

By his wife Young had one son, Frederick. He does not seem to have been a particularly well-behaved youth; indeed, his father for some time before his death refused to see him, although he ultimately sent him his forgiveness, and made him his heir. But no son of illustrious father has ever had harder measure dealt him. It has been generally supposed that he was the Lorenzo of the “Night Thoughts,” a poem published when Frederick was only eight years of age, and when he could scarcely have even thought of committing those crimes of scepticism and reckless self-gratification with which Young charges his imaginary or half-real hero.

The Poet’s life, during the first ten years of his rectorship at Welwyn, flowed on in an even tenor. He was regular in his conduct, happy in his family, diligent in his pastoral duties, and easy in his fortune. His preaching was popular and useful. His studies were principally connected with his own profession, and yielded him a growing satisfaction. An anonymous writer in the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1782, who seems to have been intimate with him, thus describes him:—“The dignity of a great and good mind appeared in all his actions, and in all his words. He conversed on religious subjects with the cheerfulness of virtue; his piety was undebased by gloom or enthusiasm; he was regular in the performance of all its duties, both in public and in private. In his domestic character he was amiable as he was venerable in the Christian. His politeness was such as I never saw equalled: it was invariable to his superiors in rank; to his equals and to his inferiors it differed only in degrees of elegance. I never heard him speak with roughness to the meanest servant. In conversation upon lively subjects he had a brilliancy of wit which was peculiar to himself; I know not how to describe it but by saying that it was both heightened and softened by the amiable qualities of his soul. I have seen him ill and in pain, yet the serenity of his mind remained unruffled. I never heard a peevish expression fall from his lips.” Few of his brilliancies are preserved, since, unfortunately, he had no Boswell attached to his heels. But one or two of the sayings that have floated down to us are singularly characteristic. On one very stormy night Young went out to his garden, and remained some time. When he returned, one expressed wonder why he had stayed so long in such an evening. “Oh,” he replied, “it is a very fine night; the Lord is abroad.” He was very fond of a garden, and inscribed on the wall of his summer-house the words, Ambulantes in horto audiebant vocem Dei (Walking in the garden, they heard the voice of God). He had also erected a dial with the inscription, Eheu fugaces! which, he said with a smile to Mr Langton, “was sadly verified, for by the next morning my dial had been carried off.” Though sometimes melancholy, he was disposed to encourage mirth in others, and established an assembly and bowling-green in his parish.

And had this been all—had Young continued to pursue such an even, equable course—he had been by this time well-nigh forgotten; for we do not think that either his satires or plays would of themselves have preserved his name. But it was decreed that grief should co-operate with disappointment in unfolding the full riches of his mind. Antæus was strongest when he touched the ground. Job was never so eloquent till he was prostrated on his dunghill. And, in order to be able to write the “Night Thoughts,” Young must be plunged in the deepest gloom of affliction—“Thrice flew the shaft, and thrice his peace was slain.” In 1736, a daughter of his wife, by a former husband, died. This was Mrs Temple—the Narcissa of his great poem. Her disease was a lingering one. Young accompanied her to Lyons, where she died, and where her remains were brutally denied sepulture, as the dust of a Protestant. Her husband, Mr Temple, or Philander, died four years later; and in 1741, Young’s wife, or Lucia, also expired. He now felt himself alone, and blasted in his solitude. But his grief did not sink into sullen inactivity. He made it oracular, and distilled his tears into song. The “Night Thoughts” were immediately commenced, and published between 1742 and 1744. This marvellous poem was all composed either at night,