nly suffered to appear in Mr. Tonson's edition, while it
speaks with satisfaction of his present retirement, seems to make an
unusual struggle to escape from retirement. But every one who sings in
the dark does not sing from joy. It is addressed, in no common strain of
flattery, to a chancellor, of whom he clearly appears to have had no
kind of knowledge.

Of his satires it would not have been possible to fix the dates, without
the assistance of first editions, which, as you had occasion to observe
in your account of Dryden, are with difficulty found. We must then have
referred to the poems, to discover when they were written. For these
internal notes of time we should not have referred in vain. The first
satire laments, that "Guilt's chief foe in Addison is fled." The second,
addressing himself, asks:

Is thy ambition sweating for a rhyme,
Thou unambitious fool, at this late time?
A fool at _forty_ is a fool indeed.

The Satires were originally published separately, in folio, under the
title of the Universal Passion. These passages fix the appearance of the
first to about 1725, the time at which it came out. As Young seldom
suffered his pen to dry, after he had once dipped it in poetry, we may
conclude that he began his satires soon after he had written the
Paraphrase on Job. The last satire was certainly finished in the
beginning of the year 1726. In December, 1725, the king, in his passage
from Helvoetsluys, escaped, with great difficulty, from a storm by
landing at Rye; and the conclusion of the Satire turns the escape into a
miracle, in such an encomiastick strain of compliment, as poetry too
often seeks to pay to royalty.

From the sixth of these poems we learn,

Midst empire's charms, how Carolina's heart
Glow'd with the love of virtue and of art:

since the grateful poet tells us, in the next couplet,

Her favour is diffus'd to that degree,
Excess of goodness! it has dawn'd on me.

Her majesty had stood godmother, and given her name, to the daughter of
the lady whom Young married in 1731; and had, perhaps, shown some
attention to lady Elizabeth's future husband.

The fifth satire, on Women, was not published till 1727; and the sixth
not till 1728.

To these poems, when, in 1728, he gathered them into one publication, he
prefixed a preface; in which he observes, that "no man can converse much
in the world, but at what he meets with he must either be insensible or
grieve,