The lively letter in prose, on Original Composition, addressed to Richardson, the author of Clarissa, appeared in 1759. “Though he despairs of breaking through the frozen obstructions of age and care’s incumbent cloud, into that flow of thought and brightness of expression, which subjects so polite require;” yet is it more like the production of untamed, unbridled youth, than of jaded fourscore. Some sevenfold volumes put him in mind of Ovid’s sevenfold channels of the Nile at the conflagration:
——ostia septem
Pulverulenta vocant, septem sine flumine valles.
Such leaden labours are like Lycurgus’s iron money, which was so much less in value than in bulk, that it required barns for strong boxes, and a yoke of oxen to draw five hundred pounds.
If there is a famine of invention in the land, we must travel, he says, like Joseph’s brethren, far for food; we must visit the remote and rich ancients. But an inventive genius may safely stay at home: that, like the widow’s cruise, is divinely replenished from within, and affords us a miraculous delight. He asks why it should seem altogether impossible, that heaven’s latest editions of the human mind may be the most correct and fair? And Jonson, he tells us, was very learned, as Sampson was very strong, to his own hurt. Blind to the nature of tragedy, he pulled down all antiquity on his head, and buried himself under it.
Is this “care’s incumbent cloud,” or “the frozen obstructions of age?”
In this letter Pope is severely censured for his “fall from Homer’s numbers, free as air, lofty and harmonious as the spheres, into childish shackles and tinkling sounds; for putting Achilles into petticoats a second time:” but we are told that the dying swan talked over an epick plan with Young a few weeks before his decease.
Young’s chief inducement to write this letter was, as he confesses, that he might erect a monumental marble to the memory of an old friend. He, who employed his pious pen, for almost the last time, in thus doing justice to the exemplary deathbed of Addison, might, probably, at the close of his own life, afford no unuseful lesson for the deaths of others.
In the postscript, he writes to Richardson, that he will see in his next how far Addison is an original. But no other letter appears.
The few lines which stand in the last edition, as “sent by lord Melcombe to Dr. Young, not long before his lordship’s death,” were, indeed, so sent, but were only an introduction to what was there meant by “the muse’s latest spark.” The poem is necessary, whatever may be its merit, since the preface to it is already printed. Lord Melcombe called his Tusculum, La Trappe.
“Love thy country, wish it well,
Not with too intense a care;
’Tis enough that, when it fell,
Thou its ruin didst not share.
Envy’s censure, flatt’ry’s praise,
With unmov’d indiff’rence view;
Learn to tread life’s dang’rous maze,
With unerring virtue’s clew.
Void of strong desire and fear,
Life’s wide ocean trust no more;
Strive thy little bark to steer
With the tide, but near the shore.
Thus prepar’d, thy shorten’d sail
Shall, whene’er the winds increase,
Seizing each propitious gale.
Waft thee to the port of peace.
Keep thy conscience from offence,
And tempestuous passions free;
So, when thou art call’d from hence,
Easy shall thy passage be;
Easy shall thy passage be,
Cheerful thy allotted stay,
Short th’ account ’twixt God and thee:
Hope shall meet thee on the way: