nother Young, who really sat for the portrait, and who, we
imagine, had both more Greek and more genuine simplicity than the poet.
His love of chatting with Colley Cibber was an indication that the old
predilection for the stage survived, in spite of his emphatic contempt
for "all joys but joys that never can expire;" and the production of "The
Brothers," at Drury Lane in 1753, after a suppression of fifteen years,
was perhaps not entirely due to the expressed desire to give the proceeds
to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. The author's profits
were not more than 400 pounds--in those days a disappointing sum; and
Young, as we learn from his friend Richardson, did not make this the
limit of his donation, but gave a thousand guineas to the Society. "I
had some talk with him," says Richardson, in one of his letters, "about
this great action. 'I always,' said he, 'intended to do something
handsome for the Society. Had I deferred it to my demise, I should have
given away my son's money. All the world are inclined to pleasure; could
I have given myself a greater by disposing of the sum to a different use,
I should have done it.'" Surely he took his old friend Richardson for
"Lorenzo!"

His next work was "The Centaur not Fabulous; in Six Letters to a Friend,
on the Life in Vogue," which reads very much like the most objurgatory
parts of the "Night Thoughts" reduced to prose. It is preceded by a
preface which, though addressed to a lady, is in its denunciations of
vice as grossly indecent and almost as flippant as the epilogues written
by "friends," which he allowed to be reprinted after his tragedies in the
latest edition of his works. We like much better than "The Centaur,"
"Conjectures on Original Composition," written in 1759, for the sake, he
says, of communicating to the world the well-known anecdote about
Addison's deathbed, and with the exception of his poem on Resignation,
the last thing he ever published.

The estrangement from his son, which must have embittered the later years
of his life, appears to have begun not many years after the mother's
death. On the marriage of her second daughter, who had previously
presided over Young's household, a Mrs. Hallows, understood to be a woman
of discreet age, and the daughter (a widow) of a clergyman who was an old
friend of Young's, became housekeeper at Welwyn. Opinions about ladies
are apt to differ. "Mrs. Hallows was a woman of piety, improved by
r