That attachment to his favourite study, which made him think a poet the surest guide to his new profession, left him little doubt whether poetry was the surest path to its honours and preferments. Not long, indeed, after he took orders, he published, in prose, 1728, a true Estimate of Human Life, dedicated, notwithstanding the Latin quotations with which it abounds, to the queen; and a sermon preached before the house of commons, 1729, on the martyrdom of king Charles, entitled, an Apology for Princes, or the Reverence due to Government. But the Second Discourse, the counterpart of his Estimate, without which it cannot be called a true Estimate, though, in 1728, it was announced as “soon to be published,” never appeared; and his old friends the muses were not forgotten. In 1730 he relapsed to poetry, and sent into the world, Imperium Pelagi, a naval lyrick, written in imitation of Pindar’s Spirit, occasioned by his majesty’s return from Hanover, September, 1729, and the succeeding peace. It is inscribed to the duke of Chandos. In the preface we are told, that the ode is the most spirited kind of poetry, and that the Pindarick is the most spirited kind of ode. “This I speak,” he adds, “with sufficient candour, at my own very great peril. But truth has an eternal title to our confession, though we are sure to suffer by it.” Behold, again, the fairest of poets. Young’s Imperium Pelagi was ridiculed in Fielding’s Tom Thumb; but let us not forget that it was one of his pieces which the author of the Night Thoughts deliberately refused to own.
Not long after this Pindarick attempt, he published two epistles to Pope, concerning the Authors of the Age, 1730. Of these poems, one occasion seems to have been an apprehension lest, from the liveliness of his satires, he should not be deemed sufficiently serious for promotion in the church.
In July, 1730, he was presented, by his college, to the rectory of Welwyn, in Hertfordshire. In May, 1731, he married lady Elizabeth Lee, daughter of the earl of Lichfield, and widow of colonel Lee. His connexion with this lady arose from his father’s acquaintance, already mentioned, with lady Anne Wharton, who was coheiress of sir Henry Lee, of Ditchley, in Oxfordshire. Poetry had lately been taught by Addison to aspire to the arms of nobility, though not with extraordinary happiness.
We may naturally conclude, that Young now gave himself up, in some measure, to the comforts of his new connexion, and to the expectations of that preferment, which he thought due to his poetical talents, or, at least, to the manner in which they had so frequently been exerted.
The next production of his muse was the Sea-piece, in two odes.
Young enjoys the credit of what is called an Extempore Epigram on Voltaire; who, when he was in England, ridiculed, in the company of the jealous English poet, Milton’s allegory of Sin and Death:
You are so witty, profligate, and thin,
At once we think thee Milton, Death, and Sin.
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 provok’d thy rage,
Thy rage provok’d, who sooth’d 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.