A friend you have, and I the same,
Whose prudent, soft address
Will bring to life those healing thoughts
Which dy’d in your distress.
That friend, the spirit of thy theme
Extracting for your ease,
Will leave to me the dreg, in thoughts
Too common; such as these.
By the same lady I am enabled to say, in her own words, that Young’s unbounded genius appeared to greater advantage in the companion than even in the author; that the christian was in him a character still more inspired, more enraptured, more sublime, than the poet; and that, in his ordinary conversation,
Letting down the golden chain from high,
He drew his audience upward to the sky.
Notwithstanding Young had said, in his Conjectures on original Composition, that “blank verse is verse unfallen, uncurst; verse reclaimed, reinthroned in the true language of the gods,” notwithstanding he administered consolation to his own grief in this immortal language, Mrs. Boscawen was comforted in rhyme.
While the poet and the Christian were applying this comfort, Young had himself occasion for comfort, in consequence of the sudden death of Richardson, who was printing the former part of the poem. Of Richardson’s death he says,
When heav’n would kindly set us free,
And earth’s enchantment end;
It takes the most effectual means,
And robs us of a friend.
To Resignation was prefixed an apology for its appearance; to which more credit is due than to the generality of such apologies, from Young’s unusual anxiety that no more productions of his old age should disgrace his former fame. In his will, dated February, 1760, he desires of his executors, “in a particular manner,” that all his manuscript books and writings whatever might be burned, except his book of accounts.
In September, 1764, he added a kind of codicil, wherein he made it his dying intreaty to his house-keeper, to whom he left 100l. “that all his manuscripts might be destroyed, as soon as he was dead, which would greatly oblige her deceased friend.”
It may teach mankind the uncertainty of worldly friendships, to know that Young, either by surviving those he loved, or by outliving their affections, could only recollect the names of two friends, his house-keeper and a hatter, to mention in his will; and it may serve to repress that testamentary pride, which too often seeks for sounding names and titles, to be informed, that the author of the Night Thoughts did not blush to leave a legacy to “his friend Henry Stevens, a hatter at the Temple-gate.” Of these two remaining friends, one went before Young. But, at eighty-four, “where,” as he asks in the Centaur, “is that world into which we were born?”