papers that may possibly see the light by a posthumous publication.
God send us health while we stay, and an easy journey!

"My dear Dr. Young,
"yours, most cordially,
"MELCOMBE."

In 1762, a short time before his death, Young published Resignation.
Notwithstanding the manner in which it was really forced from him by the
world, criticism has treated it with no common severity. If it shall be
thought not to deserve the highest praise, on the other side of
fourscore, by whom, except by Newton and by Waller, has praise been
merited?

To Mrs. Montagu, the famous champion of Shakespeare, I am indebted for
the history of Resignation. Observing that Mrs. Boscawen, in the midst
of her grief for the loss of the admiral, derived consolation from the
perusal of the Night Thoughts, Mrs. Montagu proposed a visit to the
author. From conversing with Young, Mrs. Boscawen derived still further
consolation; and to that visit she and the world were indebted for this
poem. It compliments Mrs. Montagu in the following lines:

Yet write I must. A lady sues:
How shameful her request!
My brain in labour with dull rhyme,
Hers teeming with the best!

And again;

A friend you have, and I the same,
Whose prudent, soft address
Will bring to life those healing thoughts
Which dy'd in your distress.

That friend, the spirit of thy theme
Extracting for your ease,
Will leave to me the dreg, in thoughts
Too common; such as these.

By the same lady I am enabled to say, in her own words, that Young's
unbounded genius appeared to greater advantage in the companion than
even in the author; that the christian was in him a character still more
inspired, more enraptured, more sublime, than the poet; and that, in his
ordinary conversation,

Letting down the golden chain from high,
He drew his audience upward to the sky.

Notwithstanding Young had said, in his Conjectures on original
Composition, that "blank verse is verse unfallen, uncurst; verse
reclaimed, reinthroned in the true language of the gods,"
notwithstanding he administered consolation to his own grief in this
immortal language, Mrs. Boscawen was comforted in rhyme.

While the poet and the Christian were applying this comfort, Young had
himself occasion for comfort, in consequence of the sudden death of
Richardson, who was printing the former part of the poem. Of
Richardson's death he says,