n, which makes us
tolerant of egoism and hyperbole:

"In every varied posture, place, and hour,
How widow'd every thought of every joy!
Thought, busy thought! too busy for my peace!
Through the dark postern of time long elapsed
Led softly, by the stillness of the night,--
Led like a murderer (and such it proves!)
Strays (wretched rover!) o'er the pleasing past,--
In quest of wretchedness, perversely strays;
And finds all desert now; and meets the ghosts
Of my departed joys."

But when he becomes didactic, rather than complaining--when he ceases to
sing his sorrows, and begins to insist on his opinions--when that
distaste for life which we pity as a transient feeling is thrust upon us
as a theory, we become perfectly cool and critical, and are not in the
least inclined to be indulgent to false views and selfish sentiments.

Seeing that we are about to be severe on Young's failings and failures,
we ought, if a reviewer's space were elastic, to dwell also on his
merits--on the startling vigor of his imagery--on the occasional grandeur
of his thought--on the piquant force of that grave satire into which his
meditations continually run. But, since our "limits" are rigorous, we
must content ourselves with the less agreeable half of the critic's duty;
and we may the rather do so, because it would be difficult to say
anything new of Young, in the way of admiration, while we think there are
many salutary lessons remaining to be drawn from his faults.

One of the most striking characteristics of Young is his _radical
insincerity as a poetic artist_. This, added to the thin and artificial
texture of his wit, is the true explanation of the paradox--that a poet
who is often inopportunely witty has the opposite vice of bombastic
absurdity. The source of all grandiloquence is the want of taking for a
criterion the true qualities of the object described or the emotion
expressed. The grandiloquent man is never bent on saying what he feels
or what he sees, but on producing a certain effect on his audience; hence
he may float away into utter inanity without meeting any criterion to
arrest him. Here lies the distinction between grandiloquence and genuine
fancy or bold imaginativeness. The fantastic or the boldly imaginative
poet may be as sincere as the most realistic: he is true to his own
sensibilities or inward vision, and in his wildest flights he never
breaks loose from his criterion