Apart from that, Night Thoughts have been swallowed up in an eternal night.

And certainly a study of the titles of his works will not encourage the average reader to go to him in search of treasures of the imagination.  At the age of thirty, in 1713, he wrote a Poem on the Last Day, which he dedicated to Queen Anne.  In the following year he wrote The Force of Religion, or Vanquish’d Love, a poem about Lady Jane Grey, which he dedicated to the Countess of Salisbury.  And no sooner was Queen Anne dead than he made haste to salute the rising sun in an epistle On the Late Queen’s Death and His Majesty’s Accession to the Throne.  Passing over a number of years, we find him, in 1730, publishing a so-called Pindaric ode, Imperium Pelagi; a Naval Lyric, in the preface to which he declares with characteristic italics:  “Trade is a very noble subject in itself; more proper than any for an Englishman; and particularly seasonable at this juncture.”  Add to this that he was the son of a dean, that he married the daughter of an earl, and that, other means of advancement having failed, he became a clergyman at the age of between forty and fifty, and the suggested portrait is that of a prudent hanger-on rather than a fiery man of genius.  His prudence was rewarded with a pension of L200 a year, a Royal Chaplaincy, and the position (after George III.’s accession) of Clerk of the Closet to the Princess Dowager.  In the opinion of Young himself, who lived till the age of 82, the reward was inadequate.  At the age of 79, however, he had conquered his disappointment to a sufficient degree to write a poem on Resignation.

Readers who, after a hasty glance at his biography, are inclined to look satirically on Young as a time-server, oily with the mediocrity of self-help, will have a pleasant surprise if they read his Conjectures on Original Composition for the first time.  It is a bold and masculine essay on literary criticism, written in a style of quite brilliant, if old-fashioned, rhetoric.  Mrs. Thrale said of it:  “In the Conjectures upon Original Composition ... we shall perhaps read the wittiest piece of prose our whole language has to boast; yet from its over-twinkling, it seems too little gazed at and too little admired perhaps.”  This is an exaggerated estimate.  Dr. Johnson, who heard Young read the Conjectures at Richardson’s house, said that “he was surprised to find Young receive as novelties what he thought very common maxims.”  If one tempers Mrs. Thrale’s enthusiasms and Dr. Johnson’s scorn, one will have a fairly just idea of the quality of Young’s book.