ten upon the plan of a French piece of great merit; and though it brought but little addition to his fame as a Poet, did yet reflect much additional lustre on his character as a Man, the entoluments arising from its exhibition having been generously allotted by the Author to the purposes of publick charity.

Having followed Dr. Young through his dramatick career, let us now consider him as the moral and plaintive; the pious but gloomy, Author of The Night-Thoughts; a work composed in a style so strictly peculiar to himself, that of the many efforts which have been made to imitate it, none have proved in any degree successful. Than the Night-Thoughts never was any poem received with applause more general or unbounded. "The unhappy bard, whose grief "in melting numbers flows, and melancholy joys dif"fuse around," has been sung by the profane as well as the pious. These, as already observed, were written under the recent, the overwhelming pressure of sorrow for the death of his wife, and of his daughter and son in law; the former of whom, though distinguished by no name, he often pathetically alludes to, while the two latter he beautifully characterizes under the poetical appellations of Narcissa and Philander.

This sublime performance is addressed to Lorenzo, an infidel man of pleasure and dissipation; in a word, a mere man of the world. By Lorenzo, if general report says true, we are to understand his own son,

who, borne away by the passions too often fatal to youth, is well known to have long laboured under the heavy punishment of a father's just displeasure. Whatever there may be in this, (and indeed it is of little moment to the publick) every page of the poem abounds with the noblest flights of fancy---flights which, especially in his description of Death, in the act of noting down, from his secret stand, the exercises of a Bacchanalian society; in his epitaph on the departed World; in the issuing of Satan from his dungeon on the day of judgment, and a few others, might tempt a reader of warm imagination to suppose the poet under the immediate inspiration of the Divinity.

Uniformly a friend to virtue, and an indefatigable assertor of the dignity of human nature against all the cavils, not of the rude multitude only, but of many well-disposed, tho' mistaken and discontented moralists in 1754, under the patronage of Queen Caroline, our Author published his Estimate of Human Life; a valuable tract, which, while it exhibits a striking picture of the writer's pious benevolence and charity, evinces him to have been alike qualified to shine in prose and verse---Of this piece, according to his own account of it, the grand scope is to remove a prevalent opinion, highly reflective on Providence, "this world is, in its own nature, (in other words, by "God's appointment) a world of misery; and that "to be in it is to be wretched unavoidably,"

"That

ten upon the plan of a French piece of great merit; and though it brought but little addition to his fame as a Poet, did yet reflect much additional lustre on his character as a Man, the entoluments arising from its exhibition having been generously allotted by the Author to the purposes of publick charity.

Having followed Dr. Young through his dramatick career, let us now consider him as the moral and plaintive; the pious but gloomy, Author of The Night-Thoughts; a work composed in a style so strictly peculiar to himself, that of the many efforts which have been made to imitate it, none have proved in any degree successful. Than the Night-Thoughts never was any poem received with applause more general or unbounded. "The unhappy bard, whose grief "in melting numbers flows, and melancholy joys dif"fuse around," has been sung by the profane as well as the pious. These, as already observed, were written under the recent, the overwhelming pressure of sorrow for the death of his wife, and of his daughter and son in law; the former of whom, though distinguished by no name, he often pathetically alludes to, while the two latter he beautifully characterizes under the poetical appellations of Narcissa and Philander.

This sublime performance is addressed to Lorenzo, an infidel man of pleasure and dissipation; in a word, a mere man of the world. By Lorenzo, if general report says true, we are to understand his own son,

who, borne away by the passions too often fatal to youth, is well known to have long laboured under the heavy punishment of a father's just displeasure. Whatever there may be in this, (and indeed it is of little moment to the publick) every page of the poem abounds with the noblest flights of fancy---flights which, especially in his description of Death, in the act of noting down, from his secret stand, the exercises of a Bacchanalian society; in his epitaph on the departed World; in the issuing of Satan from his dungeon on the day of judgment, and a few others, might tempt a reader of warm imagination to suppose the poet under the immediate inspiration of the Divinity.

Uniformly a friend to virtue, and an indefatigable assertor of the dignity of human nature against all the cavils, not of the rude multitude only, but of many well-disposed, tho' mistaken and discontented moralists in 1754, under the patronage of Queen Caroline, our Author published his Estimate of Human Life; a valuable tract, which, while it exhibits a striking picture of the writer's pious benevolence and charity, evinces him to have been alike qualified to shine in prose and verse---Of this piece, according to his own account of it, the grand scope is to remove a prevalent opinion, highly reflective on Providence," That "this world is, in its own nature, (in other words, by "God's appointment) a world of misery; and that "to be in it is to be wretched unavoidably,"