Excess of goodness! it has dawned on me."

Her Majesty had stood godmother, and given her name, to the daughter
of the lady whom Young married in 1731; and had perhaps shown some
attention to Lady Elizabeth's future husband.

The fifth Satire, "On Women," was not published till 1727; and the sixth
not till 1728.

To these poems, when, in 1728, he gathered them into one publication, he
prefixed a Preface, in which he observes that "no man can converse much
in the world, but at what he meets with he must either be insensible
or grieve, or be angry or smile. Now to smile at it, and turn it into
ridicule," he adds, "I think most eligible, as it hurts ourselves
least, and gives vice and folly the greatest offence. Laughing at the
misconduct of the world will, in a great measure, ease us of any more
disagreeable passion about it. One passion is more effectually driven
out by another than by reason, whatever some teach." So wrote, and so of
course thought, the lively and witty satirist at the grave age of almost
fifty, who, many years earlier in life, wrote the "Last Day." After all,
Swift pronounced of these Satires, that they should either have been
more angry or more merry.

Is it not somewhat singular that Young preserved, without any
palliation, this Preface, so bluntly decisive in favour of laughing
at the world, in the same collection of his works which contains the
mournful, angry, gloomy "Night Thoughts!" At the conclusion of the
Preface he applies Plato's beautiful fable of the "Birth of Love" to
modern poetry, with the addition, "that Poetry, like Love, is a little
subject to blindness, which makes her mistake her way to preferments
and honours; and that she retains a dutiful admiration of her father's
family; but divides her favours, and generally lives with her mother's
relations." Poetry, it is true, did not lead Young to preferments or
to honours; but was there not something like blindness in the flattery
which he sometimes forced her, and her sister Prose, to utter? She was
always, indeed, taught by him to entertain a most dutiful admiration
of riches; but surely Young, though nearly related to Poetry, had no
connection with her whom Plato makes the mother of Love. That he could
not well complain of being related to Poverty appears clearly from the
frequent bounties which his gratitude records, and from the wealth which
he left behind him. By "The Universal Passion" he acquired no vulgar
fortune--more th