nteracted by our sense of the constraint he
suffered from the necessities of rhyme--that "Gothic demon," as he
afterward called it, "which, modern poetry tasting, became mortal." In
relation to his own power, no one will question the truth of this dictum,
that "blank verse is verse unfallen, uncurst; verse reclaimed,
reinthroned in the true language of the gods; who never thundered nor
suffered their Homer to thunder in rhyme." His want of mastery in rhyme
is especially a drawback on the effects of his Satires; for epigrams and
witticisms are peculiarly susceptible to the intrusion of a superfluous
word, or to an inversion which implies constraint. Here, even more than
elsewhere, the art that conceals art is an absolute requisite, and to
have a witticism presented to us in limping or cumbrous rhythm is as
counteractive to any electrifying effect as to see the tentative grimaces
by which a comedian prepares a grotesque countenance. We discern the
process, instead of being startled by the result.

This is one reason why the Satires, read _seriatim_, have a flatness to
us, which, when we afterward read picked passages, we are inclined to
disbelieve in, and to attribute to some deficiency in our own mood. But
there are deeper reasons for that dissatisfaction. Young is not a
satirist of a high order. His satire has neither the terrible vigor, the
lacerating energy of genuine indignation, nor the humor which owns loving
fellowship with the poor human nature it laughs at; nor yet the personal
bitterness which, as in Pope's characters of Sporus and Atticus, insures
those living touches by virtue of which the individual and particular in
Art becomes the universal and immortal. Young could never describe a
real, complex human being; but what he _could_ do with eminent success
was to describe, with neat and finished point, obvious _types_, of
manners rather than of character--to write cold and clever epigrams on
personified vices and absurdities. There is no more emotion in his
satire than if he were turning witty verses on a waxen image of Cupid or
a lady's glove. He has none of these felicitious epithets, none of those
pregnant lines, by which Pope's Satires have enriched the ordinary speech
of educated men. Young's wit will be found in almost every instance to
consist in that antithetic combination of ideas which, of all the forms
of wit, is most within reach of a clever effort. In his gravest
arguments, as well as i