monarchs to bombast
about the resurrection, in the "Last Day" itself. The dedication of the
poem to Queen Anne, Young afterward suppressed, for he was always ashamed
of having flattered a dead patron. In this dedication, Croft tells us,
"he gives her Majesty praise indeed for her victories, but says that the
author is more pleased to see her rise from this lower world, soaring
above the clouds, passing the first and second heavens, and leaving the
fixed stars behind her; nor will he lose her there, he says, but keep her
still in view through the boundless spaces on the other side of creation,
in her journey toward eternal bliss, till he behold the heaven of heavens
open, and angels receiving and conveying her still onward from the
stretch of his imagination, which tires in her pursuit, and falls back
again to earth."

The self-criticism which prompted the suppression of the dedication did
not, however, lead him to improve either the rhyme or the reason of the
unfortunate couplet--

"When other Bourbons reign in other lands,
And, if men's sins forbid not, other Annes."

In the "Epistle to Lord Lansdowne" Young indicates his taste for the
drama; and there is evidence that his tragedy of "Busiris" was "in the
theatre" as early as this very year, 1713, though it was not brought on
the stage till nearly six years later; so that Young was now very
decidedly bent on authorship, for which his degree of B.C.L., taken in
this year, was doubtless a magical equipment. Another poem, "The Force
of Religion; or, Vanquished Love," founded on the execution of Lady Jane
Grey and her husband, quickly followed, showing fertility in feeble and
tasteless verse; and on the Queen's death, in 1714, Young lost no time in
making a poetical lament for a departed patron a vehicle for extravagant
laudation of the new monarch. No further literary production of his
appeared until 1716, when a Latin oration, which he delivered on the
foundation of the Codrington Library at All Souls, gave him a new
opportunity for displaying his alacrity in inflated panegyric.

In 1717 it is probable that Young accompanied the Duke of Wharton to
Ireland, though so slender are the materials for his biography that the
chief basis for this supposition is a passage in his "Conjectures on
Original Composition," written when he was nearly eighty, in which he
intimates that he had once been in that country. But there are many
facts surviving to indicate that