must be allowed of Young's poetry that it abounds in thought, but
without much accuracy or selection. When he lays hold of an
illustration he pursues it beyond expectation, sometimes happily, as
in his parallel of Quicksilver with Pleasure, which I have heard
repeated with approbation by a lady, of whose praise he would have
been justly proud, and which is very ingenious, very subtle, and
almost exact; but sometimes he is less lucky, as when, in his "Night
Thoughts," having it dropped into his mind that the orbs, floating
in space, might be called the CLUSTER of creation, he thinks of a
cluster of grapes, and says, that they all hang on the great vine,
drinking the "nectareous juice of immortal life." His conceits are
sometimes yet less valuable. In the "Last Day" he hopes to
illustrate the reassembly of the atoms that compose the human body
at the "Trump of Doom" by the collection of bees into a swarm at the
tinkling of a pan. The Prophet says of Tyre that "her merchants are
princes." Young says of Tyre in his "Merchant,"

"Her merchants princes, and each DECK A THRONE."

Let burlesque try to go beyond him.

He has the trick of joining the turgid and familiar: to buy the
alliance of Britain, "Climes were paid down." Antithesis is his
favourite, "They for kindness hate:" and "because she's right, she's
ever in the wrong." His versification is his own; neither his blank
nor his rhyming lines have any resemblance to those of former
writers; he picks up no hemistichs, he copies no favourite
expressions; he seems to have laid up no stores of thought or
diction, but to owe all to the fortuitous suggestions of the present
moment. Yet I have reason to believe that, when once he had formed