ith deep reflections and striking allusions, a
wilderness of thought, in which the fertility of fancy scatters flowers
of every hue and of every odour. This is one of the few poems in which
blank verse could not be changed for rhyme but with disadvantage.
The wild diffusion of the sentiments and the digressive sallies of
imagination would have been compressed and restrained by confinement
to rhyme. The excellence of this work is not exactness but copiousness;
particular lines are not to be regarded; the power is in the whole,
and in the whole there is a magnificence like that ascribed to Chinese
plantation, the magnificence of vast extent and endless diversity.

His last poem was the "Resignation," in which he made, as he was
accustomed, an experiment of a new mode of writing, and succeeded better
than in his "Ocean" or his "Merchant." It was very falsely represented
as a proof of decaying faculties. There is Young in every stanza, such
as he often was in the highest vigour. His tragedies, not making part
of the collection, I had forgotten, till Mr. Stevens recalled them to
my thoughts, by remarking, that he seemed to have one favourite
catastrophe, as his three plays all concluded with lavish suicide, a
method by which, as Dryden remarked, a poet easily rids his scene
of persons whom he wants not to keep alive. In Busiris there are the
greatest ebullitions of imagination, but the pride of Busiris is such
as no other man can have, and the whole is too remote from known life to
raise either grief, terror, or indignation. The Revenge approaches much
nearer to human practices and manners, and therefore keeps possession
of the stage; the first design seems suggested by Othello, but the
reflections, the incidents, and the diction, are original. The moral
observations are so introduced and so expressed as to have all the
novelty that can be required. Of The Brothers I may be allowed to say
nothing, since nothing was ever said of it by the public. It must be
allowed of Young's poetry that it abounds in thought, but without much
accuracy or selection. When he lays hold of an illustration he pursues
it beyond expectation, sometimes happily, as in his parallel of
Quicksilver with Pleasure, which I have heard repeated with approbation
by a lady, of whose praise he would have been justly proud, and which is
very ingenious, very subtle, and almost exact; but sometimes he is less
lucky, as when, in his "Night Thoughts," having it drop