Young was something of an improvisatore, and almost the prettiest thing that I remember is a little sketch of a garden-scene during his courtship. One of the ladies referred to was Elizabeth, daughter of Lee, Earl of Litchfield; she afterwards became his wife.
"Sometime before his marriage, the poet walking in his garden at Welwyn, with his lady and another, a servant brought him word that a great person wished to speak with him. 'Tell him,' said the doctor, 'I am too happily engaged to change my situation.' The ladies insisted he should go, as his visitor was a man of rank, his patron and his friend; and as persuasion had no effect on him, they took him, one by the right hand, the other by the left, and led him to the garden gate. He then laid his hand upon his heart, and in the expressive manner for which he was so remarkable, uttered the following lines:
| "Thus Adam looked when from the garden driven, And thus disputed orders sent from heaven; Like him I go, but yet to go am loth— Like him I go, for angels drove us both. Hard was his fate, but mine still more unkind— His Eve went with him, but mine stays behind." |
Passages occurred between our Poet and Voltaire while the latter was in England, and in these his powers of improvisation stood him in good stead. I will not quote instances.
Dr. Young has been reckoned an example of primeval piety, but gloom was mingled with it. When at his house in the country, he spent many hours among the tombs of his own churchyard. I have noticed his mode of study while at Oxford. These peculiarities betokened gloominess of temper, in spite of his occasional fondness for hunting and the bowling-green. "His wit was" more crushing than "poignant"—his poetic faculties were rather strong than beautiful.—Indeed his works often display a dark, stern roughness. In a word, he was a writer of a vast and sombre imagination—full of metaphor—rather metaphysical—sometimes obscure, and this rather from idea than expression; for his diction (as that of most great writers is,) was simple and healthy. He had the force of the later Pollock, without his extravagance—the melancholy of Kirke White, without his proneness to inane complaint; and in a word, possessed many merits with few failings.
Edward Young died in April, 1765, aged eighty-four years, and was buried beside his wife under the altarpiece of the church at Welwyn.
III. William Shenstone, of the Leasowes, in Hales Owen, a detached portion of Shropshire, was born in November, 1714. In early youth he manifested a great fondness for books—a fondness which increased upon him with years.
Shenstone did not write from necessity; and until summoned by the death, in 1745, of Mr. Dolman—a gentleman who appears to have been in loco parentis—to the management of his own estate, he lived "a restless life, flying to places of fashionable resort, and from one to another of these."
Four years before the death of Mr. Dolman, he had published two poems—The Judgment of Hercules, and The Schoolmistress—the latter of considerable merit. After retiring to his estate in Hales Owen, he wrote his elegies, odes, ballads, levities, &c. &c, the first of which have, more than any thing else, gained him his renown as a poet.
Shenstone passed many years of his life in embellishing his grounds at the Leasowes. Improving on the admirable lessons of Lord Bacon, he formed an Utopia at the foot of the Wrekin, and "became famous even on the continent for his taste in gardening." But with Shenstone as a gardener I have nothing to do. Of his poems, the Schoolmistress is the most amiable and natural. We find the simplicity of this combined with a querulous tenderness in his elegies. I scarcely know of any thing in the elegiac order so pretty and touching as the little poem in which he refers to the murder of Kenelm the Saxon boy, by a sister who had been his nurse, and who had doted on him—until an ambitious yearning after the crown of Mercia, and the words of a paramour, made her, while hunting among the Clent hills, "do murder on him"—on him whom an old chronicler has quaintly yet touchingly styled "the sunnye hayred brotherr of her hearte."