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But, discarding any inferences from such uncertain evidence, the outline of Young’s character is too distinctly traceable in the well-attested facts of his life, and yet more in the self-betrayal that runs through all his works, for us to fear that our general estimate of him may be false. For, while no poet seems less easy and spontaneous than Young, no poet discloses himself more completely.
Seeing that we are about to be severe on Young’s failings and failures, we ought, if a reviewer’s space were elastic, to dwell also on his merits—on the startling vigor of his imagery—on the occasional grandeur of his thought—on the piquant force of that grave satire into which his meditations continually run.
The Vicar, it is said, sometimes acted as chairman, but this, as Mr. Hollingsworth remarks, is doubtful. Mr. Young’s claim to fame rests on something greater than his sermon, or his position in the Assembly of Divines at Westminster, or his mastership of Jesus College. He was, as we have said, Milton’s schoolmaster.
It would be extremely ill-bred in us to suppose that our readers are not acquainted with the facts of Young’s life; they are among the things that “every one knows;” but we have observed that, with regard to these universally known matters, the majority of readers like to be treated after the plan suggested by Monsieur Jourdain.
She seems inspir’d, and can herself inspire. After all, when we have gone through Young’s seven Satires, we seem to have made but an indifferent meal. They are a sort of fricassee, with some little solid meat in them, and yet the flavor is not always piquant.
We can often detect a man’s deficiencies in what he admires more clearly than in what he contemns—in the sentiments he presents as laudable rather than in those he decries. And in Young’s notion of what is lofty he casts a shadow by which we can measure him without further trouble. For example, in arguing for human immortality, he says: “First, what is true ambition?
The supposition that the much-lectured “Lorenzo” of the “Night Thoughts” was Young’s own son is hardly rendered more absurd by the fact that the poem was written when that son was a boy, than by the obvious artificiality of the characters Young introduces as targets for his arguments and rebukes.
The estrangement from his son, which must have embittered the later years of his life, appears to have begun not many years after the mother’s death. On the marriage of her second daughter, who had previously presided over Young’s household, a Mrs. Opinions about ladies are apt to differ. “Mrs.
But it is seldom in Young’s rhymed poems that the effect of a felicitous thought or image is not counteracted by our sense of the constraint he suffered from the necessities of rhyme—that “Gothic demon,” as he afterward called it, “which, modern poetry tasting, became mortal.” In relation to his own power, no one will question the truth of this dictum, that “blank verse is verse unfallen, uncurst; verse reclaimed, reinthroned in the true language of the gods; who never thundered nor suffered their Homer to thunder in rhyme.” His want of mastery in rhyme is especially a drawback on the effects of his Satires; for epigrams and witticisms are peculiarly susceptible to the intrusion of a superfluous word, or to an inversion which implies constraint.
For our own part, we set out from precisely the opposite conviction—namely, that the religious and moral spirit of Young’s poetry is low and false, and we think it of some importance to show that the “Night Thoughts” are the reflex of the mind in which the higher human sympathies were inactive. This judgment is entirely opposed to our youthful predilections and enthusiasm.
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