t still some intervening chance should rise,
Leap forth at once, and snatch the golden prize,
Inflame his woe, by bringing it so late,
And stab him in the crisis of his fate.'

His next poem, _The Force of Religion, or Vanquished Love_, was
suggested by the execution of Lady Jane Grey and Lord Guildford, a
subject chosen for a tragedy by John Banks (1694), by Rowe in 1715, and
treated with considerable dramatic power in our own day by Ross Neil. In
Young's hands this fine theme becomes a rhetorical exercise without
poetry and without pathos. A few lines will suffice to show the style of
the poem. Jane and Dudley, it must be premised, are imprisoned in a
gloomy hall:

'What can they do? They fix their mournful eyes--
Then Guildford, thus abruptly: "I despise
An empire lost; I fling away the crown;
Numbers have laid that bright delusion down;
But where's the Charles, or Dioclesian, where,
Could quit the blooming, wedded, weeping fair?
Oh! to dwell ever on thy lip! to stand
In full possession of thy snowy hand!
And thro' the unclouded crystal of thine eye
The heavenly treasures of thy mind to spy!
Till rapture reason happily destroys,
And my soul wanders through immortal joys!
Give me the world, and ask me, where's my bliss?
I clasp thee to my breast and answer, this."'

Verse of this quality, which might be amply quoted, is of interest to
the student of literature, since in Young's day it passed current for
poetry. But in accepting his claims as a poet the faith of the age must
have been often strained.

Walpole, who despised the whole tribe of poets, and cared nothing for
literature, had by some strange chance awarded to Young a pension of
L200 a-year, whereupon in a piece called _The Instalment_, addressed to
Sir Robert, Britain is called upon to behold

'His azure ribbon and his radiant star,'

and the poet's breast 'glows with grateful fire' as he exclaims:

'The streams of royal bounty turned by thee
Refresh the dry domains of poesy.
My fortune shows, when arts are Walpole's care,
What slender worth forbids us to despair:
Be this thy partial smile from censure free,
'Twas meant for merit, though it fell on me.'

Following in the steps of George Sandys, but with inferior power, and in
a less racy diction, Young performed the vain task of paraphrasing part
of the Book of Job, one of the noblest poems the world