The Project Gutenberg EBook of Young's Night Thoughts, by Edward Young

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Title: Young's Night Thoughts
With Life, Critical Dissertation and Explanatory Notes

Author: Edward Young

Editor: George Gilfillan

Release Date: July 14, 2010 [EBook #33156]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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YOUNG'S
NIGHT THOUGHTS.

YOUNG'S
NIGHT THOUGHTS.

_With Life, Critical Dissertation, and
Explanatory Notes,_
BY THE
REV. GEORGE GILFILLAN.

EDINBURGH:
JAMES NICHOL, 9 NORTH BANK STREET.
LONDON: JAMES NISBET AND CO.
DUBLIN: W. ROBERTSON.
M.DCCC.LIII.

ON THE LIFE AND POETIC GENIUS OF EDWARD YOUNG.

Between the period of George Herbert, and that of Edward Young, some
singular changes had taken place in British poetry as well as in British
manners, politics, and religion. There had passed over the land the
thunderstorm of the Puritanic Revolt, which had first clouded and then
cleared, for a season, the intellectual and moral horizon. The effect of
this on poetry was, for such fugitive though felicitous hymns as those of
Herbert, to substitute the epic unities and grand choral harmonies of
Milton. Then came the Restoration--the Apotheosis of falsehood; including
in that term false principles, false politics, and false taste. Britain
became the degraded slave of France, at once in laws and in literature.
Dryden, indeed, maintained, in some measure, the character and the taste
of his nation, but he stood almost alone. To him succeeded Addison and
Pope, both gifted but both timid men, whose genius, great as it was,
never, or rarely, ventured on original and daring flights, and who s