From the following passage in the poetical dedication of his “Sea-piece” to Voltaire it seems that this extemporaneous reproof, if it must be extemporaneous (for what few will now affirm Voltaire to have deserved any reproof), was something longer than a distich, and something more gentle than the distich just quoted.
“No stranger, sir, though born in foreign climes.
On Dorset Downs, when Milton’s page,
With Sin and Death provoked thy rage,
Thy rage provoked who soothed with gentle rhymes?”
By “Dorset Downs” he probably meant Mr. Dodington’s seat. In Pitt’s Poems is “An Epistle to Dr. Edward Young, at Eastbury, in Dorsetshire, on the Review at Sarum, 1722.”
“While with your Dodington retired you sit,
Charmed with his flowing Burgundy and wit,” etc.
Thomson, in his Autumn, addressing Mr. Dodington calls his seat the seat of the Muses,
“Where, in the secret bower and winding walk,
For virtuous Young and thee they twine the bay.”
The praises Thomson bestows but a few lines before on Philips, the second
“Who nobly durst, in rhyme-unfettered verse,
With British freedom sing the British song,”
added to Thomson’s example and success, might perhaps induce Young, as we shall see presently, to write his great work without rhyme.
In 1734 he published “The Foreign Address, or the best Argument for Peace, occasioned by the British Fleet and the Posture of Affairs. Written in the Character of a Sailor.” It is not to be found in the author’s four volumes. He now appears to have given up all hopes of overtaking Pindar, and perhaps at last resolved to turn his ambition to some original species of poetry. This poem concludes with a formal farewell to Ode, which few of Young’s readers will regret: