THE POET YOUNG.* WrrEN the last day dawns—a day which

he had sung with so much ingenuity—we suspect that Dr. Young will be found to have been neither George Eliot's odious "cross between a sycophant and a psalmist," nor quite the benevolent divine of the present volume.

George Eliot's criticism of Young as a poet is obviously unjust. She expecte of him the Ruskinian qualities which she admired, and of these qualities the whole tenor of his age and his genius were the negation. He was, in fact, a typical product of the Augustan age, and the circumstance that she wrote her essay in 1858 makes it a foregone con- clusion that she would underestimate his virtues and exaggerate his faults. In her estimate of the man she was very naturally led astray by Croft's scanty and prejudiced biography, in the absence of other material. But since she wrote, and since the account of Young was written for the Dictionary of National Biography, a great deal of new material has come to light, and if the public was to have a just idea of Young a new biography was essential.

If Young was unfortunate in his first biographer, Mr. Shelley has redressed the balance by being sedulously indulgent to him. He has made out the best possible case for the subject of his book. He has shown us a man who took Orders from entirely worldly motives, and whose chief patron was the Duke of Wharton, yet who ended his life as a very creditable parish priest, and who was, through his works, a constant influence for piety in an age of "infidelity." But nothing can make Young appear a very heroic figure. As a layman be trotted diligently after every possible patron.

• The Life and Letters of Rthrard Young. By Henry C. Shelley. Illustrated. London : Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons. Ella 6d. net.]

As a divine he never ceased to thunder upon every door which might lead him to preferment. He endeavoured to " besiege Court favour " by approaching Lady Suffolk, whom the whole world then believed to be the King's mistress. Even in an age of "recommendations," he must have been conscious that this was no very reputable way to Church pre- ferment, even though that preferment may have been his due. Yet, on the other hand, his character was by no means wholly despicable. Once he was ordained, his private life seems always to have been perfectly in keeping with his calling. He appears to have been tenderly attached to his wife, and his sermons and devotional poems give evidence of his being a sincere, if rhetorical, Christian.

Mr. Shelley's excellent book is not only a biography, it is also a fairly compendious anthology of Dr. Young's less- known poems, a fact which adds greatly to its interest. Perhaps few poets have lent themselves better to quotation than Dr. Young, his excellences lying less in the general conception of his poems than in neat antithetical epigrams, or in short passages of sonorous rhetoric. Therefore in Mr. Shelley's selections Dr. Young shows to great advantage— perhaps to greater advantage than in a collected edition. Some of the extracts from "The Love of Fame" are delightful; for example, the following :—

" Critics on verse as squibs on triumphs wait„ Proclaim the glory, and augment the state: Hot, envious, noisy, proud, the scribbling fry, Burn, hiss, and bounce, waste paper, stink, and die."

So, too, the following account of the motives which inspire "the black militia of the pen" (compare Mr. Jorrocks's great passage in the second of his lectures beginning "'Ow warious are the motives . . ."):—

" What glorious motives urge our authors on,

Thus to undo and thus to be undone P One loses his estate and down he sits, To show (in vain) he has not lost his wits: Another marries, and his dear proves keen; He writes as a hypnotic for the spleen: Some write confined by physic; some by debt: Some for 'tis Sunday ; some because 'tis wet; Through private pique to do the public right, And love their King and country out of spite." (Lice is instanced.) "He rubs his awful front and takes his ream,

With no provision made but for his theme; Perhaps a title has his fancy emit,

Or a quaint motto which he thinks has wit : He writes, in inspiration puts his trust,

Tho' wrong his thoughts, the gods will make them just;

• Thus having reasoned with consummate skill, In immortality he dips his quill:

And, since blank paper is denied the press, He mingles the whole alphabet by guess In various sets which various words compose, Of which he hopes, mankind the meaning knows. So sounds spontaneous from the Sibyl broke, Dark to herself the wonders that she spoke; The priests found out the meaning if they could. And nations stared at what none understood."

There are a dozen passages which we should like to recall to the reader if space allowed, some from other satires, some from his delightfully witty letters to the Duchess of Portland, and some from the plays. These last are energetic examples of the sort of drama which, as Mr. Shelley points out, was so delightfully parodied by Carey in the lines beginning-

" A blow I Shall Bombardinian take a blow !

Blush ! Blush thou sun! Start back thou rapid ocean ! "-

a type of drama which, after all, often contains fine examples of rhetorical verse.

No one could read the present volume without becoming convinced that Young was a poet, even if a perusal of the celebrated Night Thoughts had left him as cold as it generally leaves the present writer. Young, like Campbell, lacked the power of criticizing his own work, and nothing but the inexorable hand of an editor can make his real excellences shine out of the diffuse tangle in which they were too often shrouded.