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"of Job, printed by Mr. Tonfon." The Dedication, which was only fuffered to appear in Tonfon's edition, while it speaks of his prefent retirement, feems to make an unusual ftruggle to escape from retirement. It is addreffed, in no common strain of flattery, to a Lord Chancellor, of whom he clearly appears to have had no kind of knowledge.

Of his Satires it would not have been difficult to fix the dates without the affistance of first editions, which, as you had occafion to obferve in the Life of Dryden, are with difficulty found. We must then have referred to the Poems, to find when they were written. For these internal notes of time we fhould not have rcferred in vain. The firft Satire laments that "Guilt's

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"Guilt's chief foe in Addifon is fled;' and the fecond, addreffing himself, afks,

Is thy ambition fweating for a rhyme, Thou unambitious fool, at this late time?

A fool at forty is a fool indeed. The Satires were originally published feparately in folio, and thefe paffages fix the appearance of the firft to about 1725, the time at which it came out. As Young feldom fuffered his pen to dry, after he had once dipped it in poetry, we may conclude that he began

his Satires foon after he had written the Paraphrafe on Job. The laft was certainly finished in the beginning of the year 1726; for in December 1725 the

King, in his paffage from Helvoetfluys,. efcaped with great difficulty from a ftorm by landing at Rye; and the conclufion of the Satire turns the escape iuto a miracle, in fuch an encomiaftick ftrain of compliment as poetry too often feeks to pay to royalty. From the fixthof these poems we learn,

Midft empire's charms, how Carolina's

heart

Glow'd with the love of virtue and of

art:

fince the grateful poet tells us in the next couplet,

Her favour is diffus'd to that degree,
Excefs of goodness! it has dawn'd on

me.

Of the nature of this favour we must

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now

now reft contented in ignorance. The fifth Satire, on Women, was not published till 1727; and the fixth not till 1728.

To thefe Poems, when he gathered them into one publication under the title of The Univerfal Paffion, he prefixed a Preface, in which he obferves, that "no man can converfe much in the "world but, at what he meets with, he "muft either be infenfible or grieve, or "be angry or fmile. Now to smile at

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it, and turn it into ridicule," adds he,

"I think moft eligible, as it hurts our"felves leaft, and gives vice and folly "the greatest offence.-Laughing at the "mifconduct of the world, will, in a

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great measure, cafe us of any more "difagreeable paffion about it. One "paffion is more effectually driven out

"by

"by another than by reafon, whatever "fome teach." So wrote, and fo of

course thought the lively and witty Satirift at the grave age of almoft fifty, who, many years earlier in life, wrote the Last Day. After all, Swift pronounced of these Satires, that they should either have been more angry, or more merry. Is it not fomewhat fingular that Young preferved, without any palliation, this Preface, fo bluntly deci five in favour of laughing at the world, in the fame collection of his works which contains the mournful, angry, gloomy Night Thoughts?

At the conclufion of the Preface he applies Plato's beautiful fable of the Birth of Love to modern poetry, with

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