Of his adventures in the Exeter family I am unable to give any account. The attempt to get into parliament was at Cirencester, where Young stood a contested election. His grace discovered in him talents for oratory, as well as for poetry. Nor was this judgment wrong. Young, after he took orders, became a very popular preacher, and was much followed for the grace and animation of his delivery. By his oratorical talents he was once in his life, according to the Biographia, deserted. As he was preaching in his turn at St. James’s he plainly perceived it was out of his power to command the attention of his audience. This so affected the feelings of the preacher, that he sat back in the pulpit, and burst into tears. But we must pursue his poetical life.
In 1719 he lamented the death of Addison, in a letter addressed to their common friend Tickell. For the secret history of the following lines, if they contain any, it is now vain to seek:
In joy once join’d, in sorrow, now, for years—
Partner in grief, and brother of my tears,
Tickell, accept this verse, thy mournful due.
From your account of Tickell it appears that he and Young used to “communicate to each other whatever verses they wrote even to the least things.”
In 1719 appeared a Paraphrase on part of the book of Job. Parker, to whom it is dedicated, had not long, by means of the seals, been qualified for a patron. Of this work the author’s opinion may be known from his letter to Curll: “You seem, in the collection you propose, to have omitted what I think may claim the first place in it; I mean ‘a translation from part of Job,’ printed by Mr. Tonson.” The dedication, which was only suffered to appear in Mr. Tonson’s edition, while it speaks with satisfaction of his present retirement, seems to make an unusual struggle to escape from retirement. But every one who sings in the dark does not sing from joy. It is addressed, in no common strain of flattery, to a chancellor, of whom he clearly appears to have had no kind of knowledge.
Of his satires it would not have been possible to fix the dates, without the assistance of first editions, which, as you had occasion to observe in your account of Dryden, are with difficulty found. We must then have referred to the poems, to discover when they were written. For these internal notes of time we should not have referred in vain. The first satire laments, that “Guilt’s chief foe in Addison is fled.” The second, addressing himself, asks:
Is thy ambition sweating for a rhyme,
Thou unambitious fool, at this late time?
A fool at forty is a fool indeed.
The Satires were originally published separately, in folio, under the title of the Universal Passion. These passages fix the appearance of the first to about 1725, the time at which it came out. As Young seldom suffered his pen to dry, after he had once dipped it in poetry, we may conclude that he began his satires soon after he had written the Paraphrase on Job. The last satire was certainly finished in the beginning of the year 1726. In December, 1725, the king, in his passage from Helvoetsluys, escaped, with great difficulty, from a storm by landing at Rye; and the conclusion of the Satire turns the escape into a miracle, in such an encomiastick strain of compliment, as poetry too often seeks to pay to royalty.
From the sixth of these poems we learn,
Midst empire’s charms, how Carolina’s heart
Glow’d with the love of virtue and of art: