Of humble life, secure from foes! My judgment clear, And gentle business my repose! Prophetic schemes, And golden dreams, May I, unsanguine, cast away! And live, not leave, My hours my own! My faults unknown! My chief revenue in content! Then leave one beam Of honest fame! And scorn the labour'd monument! The glaring disparity between these lines and his own conduct, struck Young with so much force, that, when he re-published the Ode, he entirely omitted the stanzas which contain the wish; it is a wish indeed, as Sir Herbert Croft has observed, "which few would have suspected Young of forming; and of which few, after having formed it, would confess something like their shame by suppression.” With these exceptions, the life of Young is an exemplary instance of piety and virtue. His manners and conversation were likewise extremely pleasing; and, though an unbroken gloom pervade the Night Thoughts, their poet was re 1 markable for cheerfulness. He loved to promote innocent recreation, and was, it is recorded in his own parish, the institutor of an assembly, and a bowling-green. His poetry, though too often wild, irregular, and abrupt, and exhibiting no great proofs of taste, will, however, long bear testimony to the strength and brilliancy of his genius. That Dr. Young was a contributor to the Guardian, during his residence at Oxford, has been the general opinion; but the annotators have found few data for the ascription of any particular paper to his pen. They have pitched, however, upon N° 86, as most probably of his composition; and the grounds for their choice. appear not to have been lightly assumed. It is written from Oxford; it has much of the style of Young; and it is employed on a subject which at that time actually engaged his attention, and which, in a few years afterwards, he brought before the bar of the public in a finished form. He has in this essay instituted a comparison between the author of Job and the ancient classical poets, with regard to superiority in the description of the war-horse; a parallelism very likely to occur to a scholar engaged in paraphrasing the Hebrew bard. After quoting the beautiful, but well known passages, relative to this noble animal, from Homer, Virgil, Lucan, Silius Italicus, Oppian, and Nemesian, he contrasts them minutely with the picture in the sacred writer, and gives a decided preference to the latter. In this decision we cannot absolutely acquiesce; we are willing to acknowledge, that in sublimity and grandeur the Hebrew poet is superior; but as a zoologist he is not sufficiently characteristic and picturesque; his descriptions, in short, are not, in general, such as a painter could copy from. An elegant living critic has placed the subject in a very different light from that in which Dr. Young seems to have viewed it, and in one which strikes me as more accordant with the truth. "The genius of the western poets," he remarks, "bold, ardent, and precipitate, was peculiarly averse to precision and accuracy. Hurried away by the warm emotions arising from an idea forcibly impressed upon their minds, they often seem entirely to lose sight of the train of thought which the proposed subject would seem naturally to suggest*. Hence their descriptions, however animated and striking in certain points, are seldom full and distinct enough to form accurate representations. I will venture * See the Bishop of Oxford's truly classical and ingenious Prelections on Sacred Poetry. to cite those highly celebrated zoological paintings in the book of Job, in confirmation of this remark. In all of these it is found, that some one property of the animal, which it indeed possesses in an eminent degree, but not exclusively, gives the leading tone to the description, and occupies the whole attention of the poet, to the neglect of every minuter, though perhaps more discriminating, circumstance. Thus, the sole quality of the horse which is dwelt upon, is his courage in war. This, indeed, is pictured with great force and sublimity, but by images, many of which are equally applicable to any other war. like creature. Even the noble expression of ' his neck being clothed with thunder,' is not so finely descriptive, because it is less appropriated than the luxuriat toris animosum pectus' of Vir gil; and, for the same reason, I can scarcely agree with Mr. Warton in preferring the passage, 'He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage, neither believeth he that it is the sound of the trumpet,' to the lines Stare loco nescit; micat auribus, et tremit artus; "The indistinctness of most of the other descriptions in this book may be inferred from the very different opinions entertained by critics concern ing the animals which the writer intended. Thus, the behemoth is by some supposed to be the elephant, by others the hippopotamus. The reem, absurdly in our version rendered the unicorn, is variously interpreted the rhinoceros, urus, oryx, and bison. What is more extraordinary, the leviathan, to which a whole chapter is appropriated, has, with almost equal plausibility, been maintained to be the whale and the crocodile-a fish, and an amphibious quadruped. It may, indeed, be alledged, that the design of the poet in this place, which was to inculcate sublime ideas of the Divine Power and Majesty from considerations of the grandeur of his works, and sentiments of humiliation from the comparison of human strength and courage to those of other creatures, did not require, or even admit of, minuteness in zoological description. Still, however, such want of precision in the great outlines of his figures, must be imputed to the prevalence of a characteristic manner, rather than to the decision of the judgment *." 13. AMBROSE PHILIPS, descended from a family of some antiquity in Leicestershire, was, after the usual grammatical education, sent to * Aikin's Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry, 8vo. 1777, p. 11, et seq. |