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, terror, 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 so 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. 66 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," which I have heard repeated with approbation by a Lady,' of whose praise he would have been justly proud, and which is very ingenious, very subtle, 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 on a cluster of grapes, and says, that they all hang on the great Vine, drinking the nectareous juice of immortal Life. 66 His conceits are sometimes yet less valuable; in the Last Day," he hopes to illustrate the re-assembly of the atoms that compose the human body at the Trump of 1 Mrs. Thrale. 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; for 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. |