ely picture of the
"divine Doctor" in her letters to the Duchess of Portland, on whom Young
had bestowed the superlative bombast to which we have recently alluded.
We shall borrow the quotations from Dr. Doran, in spite of their length,
because, to our mind, they present the most agreeable portrait we possess
of Young:

"I have great joy in Dr. Young, whom I disturbed in a reverie. At
first he started, then bowed, then fell back into a surprise; then
began a speech, relapsed into his astonishment two or three times,
forgot what he had been saying; began a new subject, and so went on.
I told him your grace desired he would write longer letters; to which
he cried 'Ha!' most emphatically, and I leave you to interpret what
it meant. He has made a friendship with one person here, whom I
believe you would not imagine to have been made for his bosom friend.
You would, perhaps, suppose it was a bishop or dean, a prebend, a
pious preacher, a clergyman of exemplary life, or, if a layman, of
most virtuous conversation, one that had paraphrased St. Matthew, or
wrote comments on St. Paul. . . . You would not guess that this
associate of the doctor's was--old Cibber! Certainly, in their
religious, moral, and civil character, there is no relation; but in
their dramatic capacity there is some.--Mrs. Montagu was not aware
that Cibber, whom Young had named not disparagingly in his Satires,
was the brother of his old school-fellow; but to return to our hero.
'The waters,' says Mrs. Montagu, 'have raised his spirits to a fine
pitch, as your grace will imagine, when I tell you how sublime an
answer he made to a very vulgar question. I asked him how long he
stayed at the Wells; he said, 'As long as my rival stayed;--as long
as the sun did.' Among the visitors at the Wells were Lady
Sunderland (wife of Sir Robert Sutton), and her sister, Mrs.
Tichborne. 'He did an admirable thing to Lady Sunderland: on her
mentioning Sir Robert Sutton, he asked her where Sir Robert's lady
was; on which we all laughed very heartily, and I brought him off,
half ashamed, to my lodgings, where, during breakfast, he assured me
he had asked after Lady Sunderland, because he had a great honor for
her; and that, having a respect for her sister, he designed to have
inquired after her, if we had not put it out of his head by laughing
at him.