*

saint, and if his conduct had not been the most regular in the world before this, they found in him such lively tokens of repentance, and so thorough a conversion of manners, that they imputed the change to a peculiar and immediate act of Providence, and valued the blessing accordingly." The worthy fathers, if they indulged in any such hopeful hallucinations, soon found out their mistake. When he left them he was all the worse for his retirement, but not a whit the more unhappy. His friendly apologist says of him at this period: "His heart was as cheerful and gay as it had ever been in his most prosperous fortune, so that I may say with truth, that he was the merriest undone man in Europe. The poverty of his circumstances proved a fund of inexhaustible humor; an empty bottle was the subject of many a dry joke, and the want of a dinner seemed to whet more his wit than his stomach."

The anecdotes of his life in France furnish ample materials for farce. On one occasion, at St. Germain's, he borrowed the coach of a nobleman on business of the first importance, and induced the owner to ride with him in the night to Paris. He secured with the utmost haste "the music" of the opera, and packed the half-dozen performers off with him in a coach and four on his return, which he accomplished by five in the morning, just in time for a serenade to some young ladies, the end of the affair being, that his noble Irish friend was compelled to lend him twenty-five Louis d'ors to pay the players for the night's adventures. He seems to have understood perfectly the humor of Irish gentlemen; for he diddled another, who invited him to celebrate a fête in costume, out of a splendid credit on his tailor. One of his companions who followed him up in this portion of his career describes himself as one whisked up behind a witch upon a broomstick," and regrets that this shining light of the House of Lords, who had held listening senates in applause, should have descended so low as to weary out his pot companions," for you know," adds this observant and philosophical friend," he is but a bad orator in his cups, and of late he has been but seldom sober."

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*Memoirs of the Life of his Grace, Philip, late Duke of Wharton, by an Impartial Hand. 1731.

The Duke had a literary penchant, his early education and that boyish acquaintance with Horace not having entirely deserted him. He used to admire the Beggar's Opera, and gave his graceless chums rich names from that ready storehouse. He once set about a translation of Telemaque, and worked so hard at it the first day, that he would without doubt have finished it if he had not forgotten it the next morning. His last work was penning a few scenes of a tragedy on Mary Queen of Scots. But he was interrupted by a graver occupation; his own life tragi-comedy was now closing prematurely. Utterly worn out and exhausted, he was picked up by some charitable Bernardine fathers in a village in Spain, and carried to their convent, where his spirits revived for the moment under their kindness, and he was enabled, it is said, to die penitently. Thus, at the age of thirtytwo, in the year 1731, the noble British duke was buried among the poor monks of an humble Spanish convent.

There are two ways of forming an estimate of a man. One, which is much affected in the criticism of the present day, is to accept the circumstances of life as the great motives and palliatives of conduct; the other, of a more rigorous school of morals, is to test the essential manhood by its control and formation of circumstances. Wharton would fare badly under either treatment. His education and position gave every inducement to virtue. The evil was in himself; for he had to take extraordinary pains to invert the relations into which he was thrown. One hundredth part of the labor expended on his crooked Spanish and French courses would have made his a great and honored name in the history of his country. His temperament must have been singularly unhappy. His life is a constant lesson of the danger of activity of mind when unrestrained by sound principle. A good portrait by Jervis is prefixed to the edition of his writings. It shows an open, sensuous expression of countenance, but with that softness which the acute painter of human nature, Hogarth, has depicted in the face of the Rake in the celebrated Progress.

Young's intimacy with this man makes an important phase in his character. In 1722, Young dedicated his tragedy of

Revenge "to his Grace the Duke of Wharton," in such terms of fulsome panegyric as he often employed, which procured for him an impalement in a couplet of Swift, and which have awakened the manly indignation of every one of his biographers. At the time of this dedication the Duke was in his twenty-third year, having sown a very large crop of those wild oats which he was always scattering about Europe, and in the eyes of all virtuous and sensible men. The nature of the harvest was sufficiently apparent. If there was a man in England capable of understanding him and his position, it was Young. He turns his knowledge to account by celebrating the great glory to which he had attained by his grace and eloquence in Parliament. He tells him that now, "at an age which in some well-constituted states would exclude him their grand council, having finished a reputation," (could Young have been ironical and heaped insult to his friend upon injury to the public ?) " in that of Great Britain," if he goes on "in proportion to his first degree of glory," he need not thank posterity for ranking him among the greatest men the nation has produced, and (" unkindest cut of all") even 66 though his great father be in the number of them." Then he is pictured to us as a model of disinterested public virtue, saving the ship of state while others are endeavoring to wreck her and swim ashore on the ruins; and then we see him at home, the most ingenious, sweet, and laborious scholar, quite a model of amiable scholastic virtue. But that is not all. He has been so generous to Young himself, "my present fortune is his bounty, and my future his care," that Young even with his richly endowed vocabulary despairs of expressing his obligations in words, and "begs leave to refer him to the whole future course of his life for his sense of them." Alas for the constancy of human resolutions! When Young published the edition of his works in 1762, he saw fit to omit the dedication entirely, though he was not over-fastidious in preserving some other things. He was compelled to admit to the world in that dedication that his Grace had enemies, but he adds, with the naïveté of a thorough-bred courtier: " Nor am I sorry for it. All shining accomplishments will be for ever either loved or envied," and so forth, in the best English and

worst obsequiousness. The year before, Young had received from Wharton six hundred pounds, in compensation for not entering the Church and availing himself of two livings in the gift of his college, but on the contrary preferring relations of sycophancy to his Grace. He had previously been with him in Ireland, and been endowed with an annuity; he afterwards received another of a hundred pounds; and when he published his "Universal Passion," Wharton is said to have given him two thousand pounds for it.

When this bounty and the best years of his life were gone, and he had made the most of the world, Young turned state's evidence against its follies, published his Satires, and warned the public of the vices of Lorenzo.

The antecedents of the poet, to adopt the fashionable phrase of the day, did not altogether justify this life about town of Young's first forty years. His father, the Dean of Sarum, was a most estimable divine. He was chaplain to the royal pair; published two volumes of sermons which Sterne, who always stole what was worth stealing from books, pilfered for his own discourses; and at his death was honored by a handsome eulogy in his cathedral church from the lips of Bishop Burnet. The father's character procured for Young a choice of fellowships at Oxford. He shortly threw himself upon his own resources as a political hanger-on and man of letters, preferring the company of Wharton, as we have seen, to the Church. He seems to have carried a conscience about with him, however, and some reminiscences of his father's pulpit; for we find him at college disputing with such rank infidels as Tindal, on the side of Christianity, and afterwards throwing in among his plays such serious mixtures as "The Last Day" (a premonitory symptom of the Night Thoughts published thirty years later), and a poem on Lady Jane Grey, with at least a devout title, "The Force of Religion." The latter was written in 1713, when Young was thirty-two. In 1719 he issued his "Paraphrase on Part of the Book of Job," a production of sinewy strength, though one of his recent critics, Dr. Doran, taking advantage of the preliminary note, thinks that it "betrays the author's growing intercourse with the playhouse and theatrical people. He speaks

in the very spirit of a stage-manager when he alludes to having added a mountain, a comet, and the sun, besides a peacock and a lion, to the properties already employed in the Scriptural drama. Nay, we recognize the very manner of a modern manager, when the author, magnificently scorning to ask the indulgence of the audience for his omissions, additions, and transpositions, complacently addresses himself to the judicious, and confidently asks from them the sanction of their applause." But whatever may be said of theatrical effect, there are many proofs of Young's instinct of sublimity in this poem. The entire description of Behemoth is in the author's strongest "concatenated style," and Collins has borrowed one of the finest incidents of his Eclogues, the printed feet of the lion in the desert, from a still finer line in this Paraphrase. Busiris, the bombastic Busiris, Young's first tragedy, was acted in 1719; and Revenge, in the same year. The Satires, reeking with the wickedness of the world, came along six years afterwards, when the author was forty-four. An Installation Ode procured him, in 1726, a pension of two hundred pounds from George I. When he had finished the Satires and disposed of the world, he took orders in the Church. One of his first honors in this quarter was his chaplaincy to George II., in the exercise of the duties of which, in St. James's Palace, he was on one occasion so seriously affected by finding his whole audience asleep, that he burst into tears in the pulpit. Not long after this, he secured from his college the living of Welwyn in Hertfordshire, where he passed the remainder of his life in a retirement, which, we fear, was quite compulsory, but with a dignity and solemnity, which, as expressed in the Night Thoughts, will always fascinate the attention of the world. We are sorry to find that it was about the period of his entrance upon clerical life, or perhaps later, which would make the matter worse, that Young addressed a very humble letter, begging for court favor, to Mrs. Howard, the royal mistress.

At Welwyn, Young married and assumed those domestic relations, the breaking up of which was to give poignancy to so many passages of the Night Thoughts, and to supply "Lucia, Narcissa fair, Philander." The passage descriptive NO. 165.

VOL. LXXIX.

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