The next paragraph in his essay did not occur to him when he talked of “that great turn” in the stanza just quoted. “But then the writer must take care that the difficulty is overcome. That is, he must make rhyme consist with as perfect sense and expression, as could be expected if he was perfectly free from that shackle.”
Another part of this essay will convict the following stanza of, what every reader will discover in it, “involuntary burlesque:”
“The northern blast
The shatter’d mast,
The syrt, the whirlpool, and the rock.
The breaking spout,
The stars gone out,
The boiling strait, the monster’s shock.”
But would the English poets fill quite so many volumes, if all their productions were to be tried, like this, by an elaborate essay on each particular species of poetry of which they exhibit specimens?
If Young be not a lyrick poet, he is, at least, a critick in that sort of poetry; and, if his lyrick poetry can be proved bad, it was first proved so by his own criticism. This surely is candid.
Milbourne was styled, by Pope, “the fairest of criticks,” only because he exhibited his own version of Virgil to be compared with Dryden’s, which he condemned, and with which every reader had it not otherwise in his power to compare it. Young was surely not the most unfair of poets for prefixing to a lyrick composition an essay on lyrick poetry, so just and impartial as to condemn himself.
We shall soon come to a work, before which we find, indeed, no critical essay, but which disdains to shrink from the touchstone of the severest critick; and which certainly, as I remember to have heard you say, if it contain some of the worst, contains also some of the best things in the language.
Soon after the appearance of Ocean, when he was almost fifty, Young entered into orders. In April, 1728[191] not long after he had put on the gown, he was appointed chaplain to George the second.
The tragedy of the Brothers, which was already in rehearsal, he immediately withdrew from the stage. The managers resigned it, with some reluctance, to the delicacy of the new clergyman. The epilogue to the Brothers, the only appendage to any of his three plays which he added himself, is, I believe, the only one of the kind. He calls it an historical epilogue. Finding that “Guilt’s dreadful close his narrow scene denied,” he, in a manner, continues the tragedy in the epilogue, and relates how Rome revenged the shade of Demetrius, and punished Perseus “for this night’s deed.”
Of Young’s taking orders something is told by the biographer of Pope, which places the easiness and simplicity of the poet in a singular light. When he determined on the church, he did not address himself to Sherlock, to Atterbury, or to Hare, for the best instructions in theology; but to Pope, who, in a youthful frolick, advised the diligent perusal of Thomas Aquinas. With this treasure Young retired from interruption to an obscure place in the suburbs. His poetical guide to godliness hearing nothing of him during half a year, and apprehending he might have carried the jest too far, sought after him, and found him just in time to prevent what Ruffhead calls “an irretrievable derangement.”