Richardson, the author of "Clarissa," appeared in 1759. Though he
despairs "of breaking through the frozen obstructions of age and
care's incumbent cloud into that flow of thought and brightness of
expression which subjects so polite require," yet it is more like
the production of untamed, unbridled youth, than of jaded fourscore.
Some sevenfold volumes put him in mind of Ovid's sevenfold channels
of the Nile at the conflagration:--

"--ostia septem
Pulverulenta vocant, septem sine flumine valles."

Such leaden labours are like Lycurgus's iron money, which was so
much less in value than in bulk, that it required barns for strong
boxes, and a yoke of oxen to draw five hundred pounds. If there is
a famine of invention in the land, we must travel, he says, like
Joseph's brethren, far for food, we must visit the remote and rich
ancients. But an inventive genius may safely stay at home; that,
like the widow's cruse, is divinely replenished from within, and
affords us a miraculous delight. He asks why it should seem
altogether impossible that Heaven's latest editions of the human
mind may be the most correct and fair? And Jonson, he tells us, was
very learned, as Samson was very strong, to his own hurt. Blind to
the nature of tragedy, he pulled down all antiquity on his head, and
buried himself under it. Is this "care's incumbent cloud," or "the
frozen obstructions of age?" In this letter Pope is severely
censured for his "fall from Homer's numbers, free as air, lofty and
harmonious as the spheres, into childish shackles and tinkling
sounds; for putting Achilles into petticoats a second time:" but we
are told that the dying swan talked over an epic plan with Young a
few weeks before his decease. Young's chief inducement to write