ss in value than in bulk, that it required barns for strong boxes,
and a yoke of oxen to draw five hundred pounds. If there is a famine of
invention in the land, we must travel, he says, like Joseph's brethren,
far for food, we must visit the remote and rich ancients. But an
inventive genius may safely stay at home; that, like the widow's
cruse, is divinely replenished from within, and affords us a miraculous
delight. He asks why it should seem altogether impossible that Heaven's
latest editions of the human mind may be the most correct and fair? And
Jonson, he tells us, was very learned, as Samson was very strong, to his
own hurt. Blind to the nature of tragedy, he pulled down all antiquity
on his head, and buried himself under it. Is this "care's incumbent
cloud," or "the frozen obstructions of age?" In this letter Pope is
severely censured for his "fall from Homer's numbers, free as air,
lofty and harmonious as the spheres, into childish shackles and tinkling
sounds; for putting Achilles into petticoats a second time:" but we are
told that the dying swan talked over an epic plan with Young a few weeks
before his decease. Young's chief inducement to write this letter was,
as he confesses, that he might erect a monumental marble to the memory
of an old friend. He, who employed his pious pen for almost the last
time in thus doing justice to the exemplary death-bed of Addison, might
probably, at the close of his own life, afford no unuseful lesson for
the deaths of others. In the postscript he writes to Richardson that he
will see in his next how far Addison is an original. But no other letter
appears.

The few lines which stand in the last edition, as "sent by Lord Melcombe
to Dr. Young not long before his lordship's death," were indeed so sent,
but were only an introduction to what was there meant by "The Muse's
Latest Spark." The poem is necessary, whatever may be its merit, since
the Preface to it is already printed. Lord Melcombe called his Tusculum
"La Trappe":--

"Love thy country, wish it well,
Not with too intense a care;
'Tis enough, that, when it fell,
Thou its ruin didst not share.

Envy's censure, Flattery's praise,
With unmoved indifference view;
Learn to tread life's dangerous maze,
With unerring Virtue's clue.

Void of strong desire and fear,
Life's void ocean trust no more;
Strive thy little bark to steer
With the