in Hertfordshire. In May, 1731, he married Lady Elizabeth Lee, daughter
of the Earl of Lichfield, and widow of Colonel Lee. His connection with
this lady arose from his father's acquaintance, already mentioned, with
Lady Anne Wharton, who was co-heiress of Sir Henry Lee of Ditchley in
Oxfordshire. Poetry had lately been taught by Addison to aspire to
the arms of nobility, though not with extraordinary happiness. We may
naturally conclude that Young now gave himself up in some measure to
the comforts of his new connection, and to the expectations of that
preferment which he thought due to his poetical talents, or, at least,
to the manner in which they had so frequently been exerted.

The next production of his muse was "The Sea-piece," in two odes.

Young enjoys the credit of what is called an "Extempore Epigram on
Voltaire," who, when he was in England, ridiculed, in the company of the
jealous English poet, Milton's allegory of "Sin and Death:"

"You are so witty, profligate and thin,
At once we think thee Milton, Death, and Sin."

From the following passage in the poetical dedication of his "Sea-piece"
to Voltaire it seems that this extemporaneous reproof, if it must be
extemporaneous (for what few will now affirm Voltaire to have deserved
any reproof), was something longer than a distich, and something more
gentle than the distich just quoted.

"No stranger, sir, though born in foreign climes.
On DORSET Downs, when Milton's page,
With Sin and Death provoked thy rage,
Thy rage provoked who soothed with GENTLE rhymes?"

By "Dorset Downs" he probably meant Mr. Dodington's seat. In Pitt's
Poems is "An Epistle to Dr. Edward Young, at Eastbury, in Dorsetshire,
on the Review at Sarum, 1722."

"While with your Dodington retired you sit,
Charmed with his flowing Burgundy and wit," etc.

Thomson, in his Autumn, addressing Mr. Dodington calls his seat the seat
of the Muses,

"Where, in the secret bower and winding walk,
For virtuous Young and thee they twine the bay."

The praises Thomson bestows but a few lines before on Philips, the
second,

"Who nobly durst, in rhyme-unfettered verse,
With British freedom sing the British song,"

added to Thomson's example and success, might perhaps induce Young, as
we shall see presently, to write his great work without rhyme.

In 1734 he published "The Foreign Address, or the best Argument for
Peace,