r and burning tears? "Who hath believed our report, and to
whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?"

In 1731, Young, at the mature age of fifty, married the Lady Elizabeth
Lee, daughter of the Earl of Lichfield, and widow of Colonel Lee. This
marriage sprung out of his father's acquaintance with Lady Ann Wharton,
who was co-heiress of Sir Henry Lee of Ditchley in Oxfordshire, and seems
to have been very happy. He next published another of those stupid odes
by which he seemed predestined to disgrace his genius, entitled "A Sea
Piece." It was as though Milton had tried to write Anacreontics. A few
years afterwards appeared "The Foreign Address, or the Best Argument for
Peace," occasioned by the posture of affairs in which the British fleet
was then placed, and written in the character of a sailor. It is a mere
tissue of sounding verbiage--or, as Hamlet hath it, "Words, words,
words." About this time Young met with Voltaire, who, according to the
story, was ridiculing Milton's allegory of "Death and Sin," when our hero
struck in with the extempore epigram:--

"Thou art so witty, profligate, and thin,
That thou thyself art Milton, Death, and Sin."

We cannot see very much wit in this epigram, even in that best shape
which we have now given it; but it was not inappropriate to the lean
denier, who sought to empty everything of the important element--its God;
to leave the universe, like himself, a grinning skeleton, and to smile in
ghastly sympathy over the completed ruin. We fancy we see the two gifted
men, the one the representative of the scepticism of France, the other,
of the belief of England, meeting and conversing together. Voltaire is
not much in advance of thirty; Young is fifty, and more. Voltaire's face
is worn with premature thought and inordinate laughter; Young's, though
older, bears a warmer and more sanguine flush. Voltaire has the
insincerest of smiles playing constantly over his face like the light of
an aurora borealis; Young's countenance is grave, settled, open, and
serene, as the radiance of an autumn sunset. In Voltaire's eye you see
the future "Candide" laughing down in its depths, while on Young's brow
lies the dim and magnificent promise of the "Night Thoughts." After
meeting, talking, bowing, wondering, and recoiling, they part for ever;
Voltaire sighing through smiles as he thinks of the "misled giant of
Religion;" and Young smiling through sighs as he thinks of the "wondrous
and well-nigh huma