or be angry or smile. Now to smile at it, and turn it into
ridicule," he adds, "I think most eligible, as it hurts ourselves least,
and gives vice and folly the greatest offence. Laughing at the
misconduct of the world, will, in a great measure, ease us of any more
disagreeable passion about it. One passion is more effectually driven
out by another than by reason, whatever some teach." So wrote, and so of
course thought, the lively and witty satirist at the grave age of almost
fifty, who, many years earlier in life, wrote the Last Day. After all,
Swift pronounced of these satires, that they should either have been
more angry or more merry.

Is it not somewhat singular that Young preserved, without any
palliation, this preface, so bluntly decisive in favour of laughing at
the world, in the same collection of his works which contains the
mournful, angry, gloomy Night Thoughts?

At the conclusion of the preface he applies Plato's beautiful fable of
the Birth of Love to modern poetry, with the addition, "that poetry,
like love, is a little subject to blindness, which makes her mistake her
way to preferments and honours; and that she retains a dutiful
admiration of her father's family; but divides her favours, and
generally lives with her mother's relations." Poetry, it is true, did
not lead Young to preferments or to honours; but was there not something
like blindness in the flattery which he sometimes forced her, and her
sister prose, to utter? She was always, indeed, taught by him to
entertain a most dutiful admiration of riches; but surely Young, though
nearly related to poetry, had no connexion with her whom Plato makes the
mother of love. That he could not well complain of being related to
poverty, appears clearly from the frequent bounties which his gratitude
records, and from the wealth which he left behind him. By the Universal
Passion he acquired no vulgar fortune, more than three thousand pounds.
A considerable sum had already been swallowed up in the South sea. For
this loss he took the vengeance of an author. His muse makes poetical
use more than once of a South sea dream.

It is related by Mr. Spence, in his manuscript anecdotes, on the
authority of Mr. Rawlinson, that Young, upon the publication of his
Universal Passion, received from the duke of Grafton two thousand
pounds; and that, when one of his friends exclaimed, "two thousand
pounds for a poem!" he said it was the best bargain he ever made in his
lif