oble, ingenious,
accomplished, and most wretched Altamont." His last words were, "my
principles have poisoned my friend, my extravagance has beggared my boy,
my unkindness has murdered my wife!" Either Altamont and Lorenzo were
the twin production of fancy, or Young was unlucky enough to know two
characters who bore no little resemblance to each other in perfection of
wickedness. Report has been accustomed to call Altamont lord Euston.

The Old Man's Relapse, occasioned by an epistle to Walpole, if written
by Young, which I much doubt, must have been written very late in life.
It has been seen, I am told, in a miscellany published thirty years
before his death. In 1758, he exhibited the Old Man's Relapse, in more
than words, by again becoming a dedicator, and publishing a sermon
addressed to the king.

The lively letter in prose, on Original Composition, addressed to
Richardson, the author of Clarissa, appeared in 1759. "Though he
despairs of breaking through the frozen obstructions of age and care's
incumbent cloud, into that flow of thought and brightness of expression,
which subjects so polite require;" yet is it more like the production of
untamed, unbridled youth, than of jaded fourscore. Some sevenfold
volumes put him in mind of Ovid's sevenfold channels of the Nile at the
conflagration:

----ostia septem
Pulverulenta vocant, septem sine flumine valles.

Such leaden labours are like Lycurgus's iron money, which was so much
less in value than in bulk, that it required barns for strong boxes, and
a yoke of oxen to draw five hundred pounds.

If there is a famine of invention in the land, we must travel, he says,
like Joseph's brethren, far for food; we must visit the remote and rich
ancients. But an inventive genius may safely stay at home: that, like
the widow's cruise, is divinely replenished from within, and affords us
a miraculous delight. He asks why it should seem altogether impossible,
that heaven's latest editions of the human mind may be the most correct
and fair? And Jonson, he tells us, was very learned, as Sampson was very
strong, to his own hurt. Blind to the nature of tragedy, he pulled down
all antiquity on his head, and buried himself under it.

Is this "care's incumbent cloud," or "the frozen obstructions of age?"

In this letter Pope is severely censured for his "fall from Homer's
numbers, free as air, lofty and harmonious as the spheres, into childish
shackles and tinkling sounds;