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OF Young's Poems it is difficult to give any general character; for he has no uniformity of manner: one of his picces has no great refemblance to another. He began to write early, and continued long; and at different times had different modes of poetical excellence in view. His numbers are fometimes fmooth, and fometimes rugged; his file is fometimes concatenated, and fometimes abrupt; fometimes diffufive, and fometimes concife. His plan feems to have started in his mind at the prefent moment, and his thoughts appear the effects of chance, fometimes adverfe,

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verfe, and fometimes lucky, with very little operation of judgement.

He was not one of the writers whom experience improves, and who obferving their own faults become gradually correct. His Poem on the Last Day, his firft great performance, has an equability and propriety, which he afterwards either never endeavoured or never attained. Many paragraphs are noble, and few are mean, yet the whole is lamguid; the plan is too much extended, and a fucceffion of images divides and weakens the general conception; but the great reason why the reader is dif appointed is, that the thought of the LAST DAY makes every man more than poetical, by spreading over his mind a generat

general obfcurity of facred horror, that oppreffes diftinction, and difdains expreffion.

His story of Jane Grey was never popular. It is written with elegance enough, but Jane is too heroick to be pitied.

The Univerfal Paffion is indeed a very great performance. It is faid to be a feries of Epigrams; but if it be, it is what the author intended: his endeavour was at the production of striking diftichs and pointed fentences; and his diftichs have the weight of folid fentiment, and his points the sharpness of refiftless truth. His characters are often felected with difcernment, and drawn with nicety; his illuftrations are often happy,

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and his reflections often juft. His fpecies of fatire is between thofe of Horace and of Juvenal; he has the gaiety of Horace without his laxity of numbers, and the morality of Juvenal with greater variation of images. He plays, indeed, only on the furface of life; he never penetrates the receffes of the mind, and therefore the whole power of his poetry is exhaufted by a fingle perufal; his conceits pleafe only when they furprise.

To tranflate he never condefcended, unless his Paraphrafe on Job may be confidered as a verfion; in which he has not, I think, been unfuccefsful: he indeed favoured himself, by chufing those parts which moft eafily admit the ornaments of English poetry.

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He had leaft fuccefs in his lyrick attempts, in which he feems to have been under fome malignant influence: he is always labouring to be great, and at last is only turgid..

In his Night Thoughts he has exhi-bited a very wide difplay of original poetry, variegated with deep reflections and ftriking allufions, a wilderness of thought, in which the fertility of fancy fcatters flowers of every hue and of every odour. This is one of the few poems. in which blank verfe could not be changed for rhyme but with difadvan-tage. The wild diffufion of the fentiments, and the digreffive fallies of imagination, would have been compreffed

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