e, for the poem was worth four thousand.

This story may be true; but it seems to have been raised from the two
answers of lord Burghley and sir Philip Sidney in Spenser's Life.

After inscribing his satires, not perhaps without the hopes of
preferment and honours, to such names as the duke of Dorset, Mr.
Dodington, Mr. Spencer Compton, lady Elizabeth Germaine, and sir Robert
Walpole, he returns to plain panegyrick. In 1726, he addressed a poem to
sir Robert Walpole, of which the title sufficiently explains the
intention. If Young must be acknowledged a ready celebrator, he did not
endeavour, or did not choose, to be a lasting one. The Instalment is
among the pieces he did not admit into the number of his _excusable
writings_. Yet it contains a couplet which pretends to pant after the
power of bestowing immortality:

Oh! how I long, enkindled by the theme,
In deep eternity to launch thy name!

The bounty of the former reign seems to have been continued, possibly
increased, in this. Whatever it might have been, the poet thought he
deserved it; for he was not ashamed to acknowledge what, without his
acknowledgment, would now, perhaps, never have been known:

My breast, O Walpole, glows with grateful fire.
The streams of royal bounty, turn'd by thee,
Refresh the dry domains of poesy.

If the purity of modern patriotism will term Young a pensioner, it must,
at least, be confessed he was a grateful one.

The reign of the new monarch was ushered in by Young with Ocean, an Ode.
The hint of it was taken from the royal speech, which recommended the
increase and the encouragement of the seamen; that they might be
"invited, rather than compelled by force and violence, to enter into the
service of their country;" a plan which humanity must lament that policy
has not even yet been able, or willing, to carry into execution.
Prefixed to the original publication were an Ode to the King, Pater
Patriae, and an Essay on Lyrick Poetry. It is but justice to confess,
that he preserved neither of them; and that, the ode itself, which in
the first edition, and in the last, consists of seventy-three stanzas,
in the author's own edition is reduced to forty-nine. Among the omitted
passages is a Wish, that concluded the poem, which few would have
suspected Young of forming; and of which few, after having formed it,
would confess something like their shame by suppression.

It stood originally so high in the author's opi