to the gate; upon which, with his peculiar expressiveness of manner, he said

"Thus Adam look'd, when from the garden driven,

And thus disputed orders sent from Heaven.
Like him I go, and yet to go am loth:

Like him I go, for Angels drove us both.
Hard was his fate, but mine still more unkind;

His Eve went with him, but mine stays behind."

In the early part of his life, he is said to have played with great taste on the German flute. On his way by water to Vauxhall with some ladies, he played some tunes, and then put his flute in his pocket. An officer, rowing near, insisted that he should continue his music, on pain of being thrown into the river. To calm the apprehensions of his party, he complied, till both parties reached Vauxhall. Having marked his man however, Young addressed him in one of the dark walks, and insisted upon satisfaction; the weapons swords, and the time the next morning. Upon their meeting, he advanced toward his military antagonist with a large horse-pistol, with which he threatened to shoot him through the head, if he did not instantly dance a minuet. The delinquent, after many fruitless remonstrances, did as he was ordered, and (it is added) had the good sense to own, that his impertinence had received an appropriate castigation.

"Of his Poems," says Dr. Johnson, "it is difficult to give any general character, for he has no uniformity of manner: one of his pieces has no great resemblance to another. He began to write early, and continued long; and at different times had different modes of poetical excellence in view. His numbers are sometimes smooth, and sometimes rugged; his stile is

sometimes concatenated, and sometimes abrupt; some times diffusive, and sometimes concise. His plan seems to have started in his mind at the present mo ment, and his thoughts appear the effects of chance, sometimes adverse and sometimes lucky, with very little operation of judgement,

"He was not one of the writers whom experience improves, and who observing their own faults become gradually correct. His Poem on the Last Day,' his first great performance, has an equality and propriety, which he afterward either never endeavoured, or never attained. Many paragraphs are noble, and few are mean; yet the whole is languid. The plan is too much extended, and a succession of images divides and weakens the general conception. But the great reason why the reader is disappointed is, that the Last Day makes every man more than poetical, by spreading over his mind a general obscurity of sacred horror, that oppresses distinction and disdains expression.

-"In his Night-Thoughts' he has exhibited a very wide display of original poetry, variegated with deep reflexions 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 arę not to be regarded; the power is in the whole, and in the whole there is a magnificence like that ascribed

to a Chinese plantation, the magnificence of vast extent and of endless diversity.-With all his defects, he was a man of genius, and a poet.”

In 1762, Dr. Young published a selection of what he thought his best works, in four volumes 8vo., under the title of The Works of the Author of the Night Thoughts.'* To these, a fifth volume was added soon after his death, and a sixth in 1778.

EXTRACT.

The Death of Altamont.

'THE sad evening before the death of this noble youth, I was with him. No one was there, but his physician, and an intimate friend whom he loved, and whom he had ruined. At my first coming in, he said;

'You and the physician are come too late.—I have neither life nor hope. You both aim at miracles. You would raise the dead.

Heaven, I said, was merciful—

Or I could not have been thus guilty. What has it not done to bless and to save me?-I have been too strong for omnipotence! I plucked down ruin! I said, The blessed Redeemer

* The rejected pieces, it ought to be added, contained nothing prejudicial to the cause of virtue, or religion. They might exhibit him, perhaps, in a less respectable light as a poet, and despicable as a dedicator: but he would not appear a worse Christian, or a worse man. This enviable praise-due to how few of those, whose writings have extended over half a century! may justly be claimed by the author of the Night Thoughts."

'Hold! hold! you wound me!This is the rock on which I split.—I denied his name.

'Refusing to hear any thing from me, or take any thing from the physician, he lay silent, as far as sudden darts would permit, till the clock struck. Then with vehemence;

"Oh, time! time! it is fit thou shouldest thus strike thy murtherer to the heart.-How art thou fled for ever!-A month!-Oh, for a single week! I ask not for years; though an age were too little for the much I have to do.

On my saying, We could not do too much: that Heaven was a blessed place

So much the worse. "Tis lost! 'tis lost!Heaven is to me the severest part of hell!

• Soon after I proposed prayer.

6

Pray you that can. I never prayed. I cannot. pray-Nor need I. Is not Heaven on my side already? It closes with my conscience. It's severest strokes but second my own.

. His friend being much touched, even to tears, at this-who could forbear? I could not-with a most affectionate look, he said:

6

Keep those tears for thyself. I have undone thee.-Dost weep for me? That's cruel. What can pain me more?

'Here his friend, too much affected, would have left him.

"No, stay. Thou still mayest hope.-Therefore, hear me. How madly have I talked? How madly hast thou listened, and believed? But look on my present state, as a full answer to thee, and to myself. This body is all weakness and pain: but my soul, as if strung up by torment to greater strength and spirit,

is full powerful to reason; full mighty to suffer. And that, which thus triumphs within the jaws of mortality, is doubtless immortal.-And, as for a Deity, nothing less than an Almighty could inflict what I feel.

'I was about to congratulate this passive involuntary confessor on his asserting the two prime articles of his creed, extorted by the rack of nature; when he thus, very passionately:

No, no! let me speak on. I have not long to speak. My much-injured friend! my soul, as my body, lies in ruins; in scattered fragments of broken thought. Remorse for the past throws my thoughts on the future: worse dread of the future strikes it back on the past. I turn, and turn, and find no ray. Didst thou feel half the mountain that is on me, thou would'st struggle with the martyr for his stake; and bless Heaven for the flames;-that is not an everlasting flame; that is not an unquenchable fire.

'How were we struck! Yet, soon after, still more. With what an eye of distraction, what a face of despair, he cried out :

6

My principles have poisoned my friend; my extravagance has beggared my boy; my unkindness has murthered my wife! And is there another hell ?--Oh! thou blasphemed, yet most indulgent Lord God! Hell itself is a refuge, if it hides me from thy frown!

Soon afterward, his understanding failed. His terrified imagination uttered horrors not to be repeated, or ever forgotten. And ere the sun arose, the gay, young, noble, ingenious, accomplished, and most wretched Altamont expired.'