irty ere he began to tune that lyre which
was afterwards to thrill with vibrations of song so powerful and
melodious. His first choice of a subject was characteristic of the lofty
and ambitious tone of his genius: it was, "The Last Day." This poem was
written in 1710, although not given to the world till 1713. He had
previously, in 1712, published an epistle to Lord Lansdown, which
displayed little of his peculiar power, but was at once feeble and
pretentious. Young became afterwards heartily ashamed of it. In the same
year that "The Last Day" appeared, he prefixed to Addison's "Cato" a copy
of verses of no great merit. Shortly after, he issued a poem entitled,
"The Force of Religion; or, Vanquished Love:" it was founded on the story
of Lady Jane Grey and her husband, and was ushered in by a flaming
dedication to the Countess of Salisbury. On the death of the Queen, in
1714, he published a panegyric in verse on her memory, and inscribed it
to Addison. In these days flattery to princes and nobles was a commodity
almost essential to poetry--a tawdry court dress which every poet was
obliged to put on for the nonce; and not even Dryden has excelled Young
in the violent unlikeness and unsparing incense of his adulations. It is
satisfactory to remember that, on cool reflection, he cancelled the most
of those unworthy effusions; although he continued to the last very much
of a courtier, as the dedications to the "Night Thoughts" sufficiently
prove. He is supposed about the year 1717 to have visited Ireland in
company with Wharton.

In 1719 his tragedy of "Busiris" appeared on the stage, and had
considerable success. He sold the copyright afterwards to B. Lintot, for
L84, which, for a first play by an author previously unknown, was thought
a large sum. "Busiris" is a play of that solemnly pompous and intensely
artificial school, the race of which has been long since gathered to its
fathers. It is conceived and written in Ercles' vein;[1] and Nat Lee
himself, in his wild ranting plays, has scarcely surpassed the torrents
of bombastic nonsense which issue from the lips of Myron. Immediately
after "Busiris" he published his Paraphrase on part of the Book of Job, a
production scarcely worthy either of Young or of the sublime original.
The descriptions in that grandest of all poems, which are so rich and
massive as to press almost on the sense, are more fairly represented in
our common prose translation than in the poetical paraphras