olgotha and "the skies;" it walks in
graveyards, or it soars among the stars. His religion exhausts itself in
ejaculations and rebukes, and knows no medium between the ecstatic and
the sententious. If it were not for the prospect of immortality, he
considers, it would be wise and agreeable to be indecent or to murder
one's father; and, heaven apart, it would be extremely irrational in any
man not to be a knave. Man, he thinks, is a compound of the angel and
the brute; the brute is to be humbled by being reminded of its "relation
to the stalls," and frightened into moderation by the contemplation of
death-beds and skulls; the angel is to be developed by vituperating this
world and exalting the next; and by this double process you get the
Christian--"the highest style of man." With all this, our new-made
divine is an unmistakable poet. To a clay compounded chiefly of the
worldling and the rhetorician, there is added a real spark of Promethean
fire. He will one day clothe his apostrophes and objurgations, his
astronomical religion and his charnel-house morality, in lasting verse,
which will stand, like a Juggernaut made of gold and jewels, at once
magnificent and repulsive: for this divine is Edward Young, the future
author of the "Night Thoughts."

It would be extremely ill-bred in us to suppose that our readers are not
acquainted with the facts of Young's life; they are among the things that
"every one knows;" but we have observed that, with regard to these
universally known matters, the majority of readers like to be treated
after the plan suggested by Monsieur Jourdain. When that distinguished
_bourgeois_ was asked if he knew Latin, he implied, "Oui, mais faites
comme si je ne le savais pas." Assuming, then, as a polite writer
should, that our readers know everything about Young, it will be a direct
_sequitur_ from that assumption that we should proceed as if they knew
nothing, and recall the incidents of his biography with as much
particularity as we may without trenching on the space we shall need for
our main purpose--the reconsideration of his character as a moral and
religious poet.

Judging from Young's works, one might imagine that the preacher had been
organized in him by hereditary transmission through a long line of
clerical forefathers--that the diamonds of the "Night Thoughts" had been
slowly condensed from the charcoal of ancestral sermons. Yet it was not
so. His grandfather, apparently, wrote h