d class till in the _Night Thoughts_ he opened a new vein which
exactly met the contemporary taste. The success was no doubt due to some
really brilliant qualities, but I need not here ask in what precise rank
he should be placed, as an author or a moralist. His significance for us
is simple. The _Night Thoughts_, as he tells us, was intended to supply
an omission in Pope's _Essay on Man_. Pope's deistical position excluded
any reference to revealed religion, to posthumous rewards and penalties,
and expressed an optimistic philosophy which ignored the corruption of
human nature. Young represents a partial revolt against the domination
of the Pope circle. He had always been an outsider, and his life at
Oxford had, you may perhaps hope, preserved his orthodoxy. He writes
blank verse, though evidently the blank verse of a man accustomed to the
'heroic couplets'; he uses the conventional 'poetic diction'; he strains
after epigrammatic point in the manner of Pope, and the greater part of
his poem is an elaborate argumentation to prove the immortality of
man--chiefly by the argument from astronomy. But though so far accepting
the old method, his success in introducing a new element marks an
important change. He is elaborately and deliberately pathetic; he is
always thinking of death, and calling upon the readers to sympathise
with his sorrows and accept his consolations. The world taken by itself
is, he maintains, a huge lunatic asylum, and the most hideous of sights
is a naked human heart. We are, indeed, to find sufficient consolation
from the belief in immortality. How far Young was orthodox or logical or
really edifying is a question with which I am not concerned. The
appetite for this strain of melancholy reflection is characteristic.
Blair's _Grave_, representing another version of the sentiment, appeared
simultaneously and independently. Blair, like Thomson, living in
Scotland, was outside the Pope circle of wit, and had studied the old
English authors instead of Pope and Dryden. He negotiated for the
publication of his poem through Watts and Doddridge, each of whom was an
eminent interpreter of the religious sentiment of the middle classes.
Both wrote hymns still popular, and Doddridge's _Rise and Progress of
Religion in the Soul_ has been a permanently valued manual. The Pope
school had omitted religious considerations, and treated religion as a
system of abstract philosophy. The new class of readers wants something
mo