apart, it would be extremely irrational in any man not to be a knave.
Man, he thinks, is a compound of the angel and the brute; the brute is
to be humbled by being reminded of its "relation to the stalls," and
frightened into moderation by the contemplation of death-beds and
skulls; the angel is to be developed by vituperating this world and
exalting the next; and by this double process you get the
Christian--"the highest style of man." With all this, our new-made
divine is an unmistakable poet. To a clay compounded chiefly of the
worldling and the rhetorician, there is added a real spark of
Promethean fire. He will one day clothe his apostrophes and
objurgations, his astronomical religion and his charnel-house morality,
in lasting verse, which will stand, like a Juggernaut made of gold and
jewels, at once magnificent and repulsive; for this divine is Edward
Young, the future author of _Night Thoughts_.

She says, "One of the most striking characteristics of Young is his
_radical insincerity as a poetic artist_."

Indeed, we remember no mind in poetic literature that seems to have
absorbed less of the beauty and the healthy breath of the common
landscape than Young's. His images, often grand and finely presented,
lie almost entirely within that circle of observation which would be
familiar to a man who lived in town, hung about the theatres, read the
newspaper, and went home often by moon and star light. There is no
natural object nearer than the moon that seems to have any strong
attraction for him, and even to the moon he chiefly appeals for
patronage, and "pays his court" to her.... He describes nothing so well
as a comet, and is tempted to linger with fond detail over nothing more
familiar than the day of judgment and an imaginary journey among the
stars.... The adherence to abstractions, or to the personification of