as early as 1710,
before he was thirty; for part of it is printed in the Tatler[188] It
was inscribed to the queen, in a dedication, which, for some reason, he
did not admit into his works. It tells her, that his only title to the
great honour he now does himself, is the obligation which he formerly
received from her royal indulgence.

Of this obligation nothing is now known, unless he alluded to her being
his godmother. He is said, indeed, to have been engaged at a settled
stipend as a writer for the court. In Swift's Rhapsody on Poetry are
these lines, speaking of the court:

Whence Gay was banish'd in disgrace,
Where Pope will never show his face,
Where Y---- must torture his invention
To flatter knaves, or lose his pension.

That Y---- means Young seems clear from four other lines in the same
poem:

Attend, ye Popes and Youngs and Gays,
And tune your harps and strew your bays;
Your panegyricks here provide;
You cannot err on flatt'ry's side.

Yet who shall say, with certainty, that Young was a pensioner? In all
modern periods of this country, have not the writers on one side been
regularly called hirelings, and on the other patriots?

Of the dedication, the complexion is clearly political. It speaks in the
highest terms of the late peace; it 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 towards
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 queen was soon called away from this lower world, to a place where
human praise or human flattery, even less general than this, are of
little consequence. If Young thought the dedication contained only the
praise of truth, he should not have omitted it in his works. Was he
conscious of the exaggeration of party? Then he should not have written
it. The poem itself is not without a glance towards politicks,
notwithstanding the subject. The cry that the church was in danger, had
not yet subsided. The Last Day, written by a layman, was much approved
by th