Is it not somewhat singular that Young preserved, without any
palliation, this Preface, so bluntly decisive in favour of laughing
at the world, in the same collection of his works which contains the
mournful, angry, gloomy "Night Thoughts!" At the conclusion of the
Preface he applies Plato's beautiful fable of the "Birth of Love" to
modern poetry, with the addition, "that Poetry, like Love, is a
little subject to blindness, which makes her mistake her way to
preferments and honours; and that she retains a dutiful admiration
of her father's family; but divides her favours, and generally lives
with her mother's relations." Poetry, it is true, did not lead
Young to preferments or to honours; but was there not something like
blindness in the flattery which he sometimes forced her, and her
sister Prose, to utter? She was always, indeed, taught by him to
entertain a most dutiful admiration of riches; but surely Young,
though nearly related to Poetry, had no connection with her whom
Plato makes the mother of Love. That he could not well complain of
being related to Poverty appears clearly from the frequent bounties
which his gratitude records, and from the wealth which he left
behind him. By "The Universal Passion" he acquired no vulgar
fortune--more than three thousand pounds. A considerable sum had
already been swallowed up in the South Sea. For this loss he took
the vengeance of an author. His Muse makes poetical use more than
once of a South Sea Dream.

It is related by Mr. Spence, in his "Manuscript Anecdotes," on the
authority of Mr. Rawlinson, that Young, upon the publication of his
"Universal Passion," received from the Duke of Grafton two thousand
pounds; and that, when one of his friends exclaimed, "Two thousand
pounds for a poem!" he said it was the best bargain he ever made in