To "Resignation" was prefixed an apology for its appearance, to
which more credit is due than to the generality of such apologies,
from Young's unusual anxiety that no more productions of his old age
should disgrace his former fame. In his will, dated February, 1760,
he desires of his executors, IN A PARTICULAR MANNER, that all his
manuscript books and writings, whatever, might be burned, except his
book of accounts. In September, 1764, he added a kind of codicil,
wherein he made it his dying entreaty to his housekeeper, to whom he
left 1,000 pounds, "that all his manuscripts might be destroyed as
soon as he was dead, which would greatly oblige her deceased
FRIEND."

It may teach mankind the uncertainty of wordly friendships to know
that Young, either by surviving those he loved, or by outliving
their affections, could only recollect the names of two FRIENDS, his
housekeeper and a hatter, to mention in his will; and it may serve
to repress that testamentary pride, which too often seeks for
sounding names and titles, to be informed that the author of the
"Night Thoughts" did not blush to leave a legacy to his "friend
Henry Stevens, a hatter at the Temple-gate." Of these two remaining
friends, one went before Young. But, at eighty-four, "where," as he
asks in The Centaur, "is that world into which we were born?" The
same humility which marked a hatter and a housekeeper for the
friends of the author of the "Night Thoughts," had before bestowed
the same title on his footman, in an epitaph in his "Churchyard"
upon James Baker, dated 1749; which I am glad to find in the late
collection of his works. Young and his housekeeper were ridiculed,
with more ill-nature than wit, in a kind of novel published by
Kidgell in 1755, called "The Card," under the names of Dr. Elwes and
Mrs. Fusby. In April, 1765, at an age to which few attain, a period