for the book, "which," he says, "he shall
never lay far out of his reach; for a greater demonstration of a sound
head and a sincere heart he never saw."

In 1753, when The Brothers had lain by him above thirty years, it
appeared upon the stage. If any part of his fortune had been acquired
by servility of adulation, he now determined to deduct from it no
inconsiderable sum, as a gift to the Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel. To this sum he hoped the profits of The Brothers would amount.
In his calculation he was deceived; but by the bad success of his play
the Society was not a loser. The author made up the sum he originally
intended, which was a thousand pounds, from his own pocket.

The next performance which he printed was a prose publication, entitled
"The Centaur Not Fabulous, in Six Letters to a Friend on the Life in
Vogue." The conclusion is dated November 29, 1754. In the third letter
is described the death-bed of the "gay, young, noble, ingenious,
accomplished, and most wretched Altamont." His last words were--"My
principles have poisoned my friend, my extravagance has beggared my boy,
my unkindness has murdered my wife!" Either Altamont and Lorenzo were
the twin production of fancy, or Young was unlucky enough to know two
characters who bore no little resemblance to each other in perfection of
wickedness. Report has been accustomed to call Altamont Lord Euston.

"The Old Man's Relapse," occasioned by an Epistle to Walpole, if written
by Young, which I much doubt, must have been written very late in life.
It has been seen, I am told, in a Miscellany published thirty years
before his death. In 1758 he exhibited "The Old Man's Relapse," in
more than words, by again becoming a dedicator, and publishing a sermon
addressed to the king.

The lively letter in prose, on "Original Composition," addressed to
Richardson, the author of "Clarissa," appeared in 1759. Though he
despairs "of breaking through the frozen obstructions of age and care's
incumbent cloud into that flow of thought and brightness of expression
which subjects so polite require," yet it is more like the production
of untamed, unbridled youth, than of jaded fourscore. Some sevenfold
volumes put him in mind of Ovid's sevenfold channels of the Nile at the
conflagration:--

"--ostia septem
Pulverulenta vocant, septem sine flumine valles."

Such leaden labours are like Lycurgus's iron money, which was so much
le