hem rest.

Sir Henry Newbolt, like Sir Sidney Colvin, no doubt, would hold that here
Keats dismisses too slightingly his own best work. But how noble is
Keats's dissatisfaction with himself! It is such noble dissatisfaction as
this that distinguishes the great poets from the amateurs. Poetry and
religion--the impulse is very much the same. The rest is but a
parlour-game.

IX.--EDWARD YOUNG AS CRITIC

So little is Edward Young read in these days that we have almost forgotten
how wide was his influence in the eighteenth century. It was not merely
that he was popular in England, where his satires, _The Love of Fame, the
Universal Passion_, are said to have made him L3,000. He was also a power
on the Continent. His _Night Thoughts_ was translated not only into all
the major languages, but into Portuguese, Swedish and Magyar. It was
adopted as one of the heralds of the romantic movement in France. Even his
_Conjectures on Original Composition_, written in 1759 in the form of a
letter to Samuel Richardson, earned in foreign countries a fame that has
lasted till our own day. A new edition of the German translation was
published at Bonn so recently as 1910. In England there is no famous
author more assiduously neglected. Not so much as a line is quoted from
him in _The Oxford Book of English Verse_. I recently turned up a fairly
full anthology of eighteenth-century verse only to find that though it has
room for Mallet and Ambrose Phillips and Picken, Young has not been
allowed to contribute a purple patch even five lines long. I look round my
own shelves, and they tell the same story. Small enough poets stand there
in shivering neglect. Akenside, Churchill and Parnell have all been
thought worth keeping. But not on the coldest, topmost shelf has space
been found for Young. He scarcely survives even in popular quotations. The
copy-books have perpetuated one line:

Procrastination is the thief of time.

Apart from that, _Night Thoughts_ have been swallowed up in an eternal
night.

And certainly a study of the titles of his works will not encourage the
average reader to go to him in search of treasures of the imagination. At
the age of thirty, in 1713, he wrote a _Poem on the Last Day_, which he
dedicated to Queen Anne. In the following year he wrote _The Force of
Religion, or Vanquish'd Love_, a poem about Lady Jane Grey, which he
dedicated to the Countess of Salisbury. And no sooner was Queen Anne dead
than he m