h, 1739, wherein he says that he has
not leisure to review what he formerly wrote, and adds, "I have not the
'Epistle to Lord Lansdowne.' If you will take my advice, I would have
you omit that, and the oration on Codrington. I think the collection
will sell better without them."

There are who relate that, when first Young found himself independent,
and his own master at All Souls, he was not the ornament to religion
and morality which he afterwards became. The authority of his father,
indeed, had ceased, some time before, by his death; and Young was
certainly not ashamed to be patronised by the infamous Wharton. But
Wharton befriended in Young, perhaps, the poet, and particularly the
tragedian. If virtuous authors must be patronised only by virtuous
peers, who shall point them out? Yet Pope is said by Ruffhead to have
told Warburton that "Young had much of a sublime genius, though without
common sense; so that his genius, having no guide, was perpetually
liable to degenerate into bombast. This made him pass a FOOLISH YOUTH,
the sport of peers and poets: but his having a very good heart enabled
him to support the clerical character when he assumed it, first with
decency, and afterwards with honour."

They who think ill of Young's morality in the early part of his life
may perhaps be wrong; but Tindal could not err in his opinion of Young's
warmth and ability in the cause of religion. Tindal used to spend much
of his time at All Souls. "The other boys," said the atheist, "I can
always answer, because I always know whence they have their arguments,
which I have read a hundred times; but that fellow Young is continually
pestering me with something of his own."

After all, Tindal and the censurers of Young may be reconcilable. Young
might, for two or three years, have tried that kind of life, in which
his natural principles would not suffer him to wallow long. If this were
so, he has left behind him not only his evidence in favour of virtue,
but the potent testimony of experience against vice. We shall soon see
that one of his earliest productions was more serious than what comes
from the generality of unfledged poets.

Young perhaps ascribed the good fortune of Addison to the "Poem to his
Majesty," presented with a copy of verses, to Somers: and hoped that
he also might soar to wealth and honours on wings of the same kind.
His first poetical flight was when Queen Anne called up to the House of
Lords the sons of the Ear