retirement, seems to make an unusual struggle to escape from
retirement. But every one who sings in the dark does not sing from
joy. It is addressed, in no common strain of flattery, to a
chancellor, of whom he clearly appears to have had no kind of
knowledge.

Of his Satires it would not have been possible to fix the dates
without the assistance of first editions, which, as you had occasion
to observe in your account of Dryden, are with difficulty found. We
must then have referred to the poems, to discover when they were
written. For these internal notes of time we should not have
referred in vain. The first Satire laments, that "Guilt's chief foe
in Addison is fled." The second, addressing himself, asks:--

"Is thy ambition sweating for a rhyme,
Thou unambitious fool, at this late time?
A fool at FORTY is a fool indeed."

The Satires were originally published separately in folio, under the
title of "The Universal Passion." These passages fix the appearance
of the first to about 1725, the time at which it came out. As Young
seldom suffered his pen to dry after he had once dipped it in
poetry, we may conclude that he began his Satires soon after he had
written the "Paraphrase on Job." The last Satire was certainly
finished in the beginning of the year 1726. In December, 1725, the
King, in his passage from Helvoetsluys, escaped with great
difficulty from a storm by landing at Rye; and the conclusion of the
Satire turns the escape into a miracle, in such an encomiastic
strain of compliment as poetry too often seeks to pay to royalty.
From the sixth of these poems we learn,