He left this life for a better,

Sept. 25, 1764,

In the 61st year of his age." -KNIGHT, CHARLES, 1865, Shadows of the Old Booksellers, p. 213.

Personally Dodsley is an attractive figure. Johnson had ever a kindly feeling for his "patron," and thought he deserved a biography. His early condition lent a factitious importance to some immature verse, and his unwearied endeavours for literary fame gained him a certain contemporary fame. Some of his songs have merit-One kind kiss before we part" being still sung-and the epigram on the words "one Prior" in Burnet's "History" is well known. As a bookseller he showed remarkable enterprise and business aptitude, and his dealings were conducted with liberality and integrity. He deserves the praise of Nichols as "that admirable. patron and encourager of learning.' TEDDER, H. R., 1888, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. xv, p. 173.

GENERAL

The first edition of the present volumes was one of the many excellent plans produced by the late Mr. Robert Dodsley; a man to whom literature is under so many obligations that it would be unpardonable to neglect this opportunity of informing those who may have received any pleasure from the work, that they owe it to a person whose merit and abilities raised him from an obscure situation in life to affluence and independence.-REED, ISAAC, 1780, ed., Select Collection of Old Plays.

His plan of republishing "Old English Plays" is said to have been suggested to him by the literary amateur Coxeter, but the execution of it leaves us still indebted to Dodsley's enterprise. CAMPBELL, THOMAS, 1819, Specimens of the British Poets.

"Dodsley's Collection" turned out to be a chance "medley:" unskilled in the language and the literature and the choice of his dramatists, he, as he tells us, "by the assistance of a little common sense, set a great number of these passages right; that is, the dramatist of the dull "Cleone" brought down the ancient genius to his own; and, if he became intelligible, at least he was spurious. If, after all, some parts were left unintelligible, the reader must consider how many such

remain in Shakespeare.--DISRAELI, ISAAC, 1841, Shakespeare, Amenities of Literature. Good DODSLEY honest, bustling, hearty soul, A foot-man, verse-man, prose-man, bibliopole;

A menial first beneath a lady's roof,
Then Mercury to guttling Dartineuf,
His humble education soon complete,
He learnt good things to write, good things

to eat.

Then boldly ventured on the buskin'd stage, And show'd how toys may help to make us sage:

Nay, dared to bite the great with satire's tooth,

And made a Miller tell his King the truth.
In tragic strain he told Cleone's woes,
The touching sorrows and the madd'ning
throes

Of a fond mother and a faithful wife.
He wrote "The Economy of Human Life."
For flights didactic then his lyre he strung,
Made rhymes on Preaching, and blank verse
on Dung;

Anon with soaring weary, much at his ease,
Wrote Epigrams, and Compliments, and

Kisses.

All styles he tried, the tragic, the comic, lyric,

The grave didactic and the keen satiric;
Now preach'd and taught as sober as a dom-
inie,

Now went pindaric-mad about Melpomene;
Now tried the pastoral pipe and oaten stop,
Yet all the while neglected not his shop.
Fair be his fame, among a knavish clan
His noblest title was an honest man.
A bookseller, he robb'd no bard of pelf,
No bard he libell'd, though a bard himself.

COLERIDGE, HARTLEY, 1849, Sketches of English Poets, Poems, vol. II, p. 307.

Dodsley attempted literary fame in many branches, but among all his productions nothing is so well known as his "Select Collection of Old Plays," 1744, dedicated to Sir Clement Cotterel Dormer, who probably contributed some of its contents. The great ladies who first patronised Dodsley had not forgotten him, and the subscription list displays a host of aristocratic names. The art of collation was then unknown, and when he first undertook the work the duties of an editor of other than classical literature were not so well understood as in more recent times. . . . His most important commercial achievement was the foundation of the "Annual Register" in 1758, which is still published.-TEDDER, H. R., 1888, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XV. pp. 171, 172.

Hare. No! to Mr. Pope; who, in a youthful frolic, recommended Thomas Aquinas to him. With this treasure he retired, in order to be free from interruption, to an obscure place in the suburbs. His director hearing no more of him in six months, and apprehending he might have carried the jest too far, sought after him, and found him out just in time to prevent an irretrievable derangement.-RUFFHEAD, OWEN, 1769, Life of Pope, p. 291, note.

There are who relate, that, when first Young found himself independent, and his own master at All Souls, he was not the ornament to religion and morality which he afterwards became. They who think ill of Young's morality, in the early part of his life, may perhaps be wrong; but Tindal could not err in his opinion of Young's warmth and ability in the cause of religion. Tindal used to spend much of his time at All Souls. "The other boys," said the atheist, "I can always answer, because I always know whence they have their arguments, which I have read a hundred times; but that fellow Young is continually pestering me with something of his own.' all, Tindal and the censurers of Young may be reconcilable. Young might, for two or three years, have tried that kind of life in which his natural principles would not suffer him to wallow long. If this were so, he has left behind him not only his evidence in favour of virtue, but the potent testimony of experience against vice.-CROFT, JR., HERBERT, 1780, Young, Lives of the English Poets by Samuel Johnson.

After

That there was an air of benevolence in his manner, but that he could obtain from him less information than he had hoped to receive from one who had lived too much in intercourse with the brightest men of what had been called the Augustan age of England; and that he shewed a degree of eager curiosity concerning the common occurrences that were then passing, which appeared somewhat remarkable in a man of such intellectual stores, of such an advanced age, and who had retired from life with declared disappointment in his expectations. LANGTON, BENNET, 1781, Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. Hill, vol. IV, p. 69.

We stopped at Welwin, where I wished much to see, in company with Johnson,

the residence of the authour of "Night Thoughts," which was then possessed by his son, Mr. Young. We went into the garden, where we found a gravel walk, on each side of which was a row of trees, planted by Dr. Young, which formed a handsome gothic arch. Dr. Johnson called it a fine grove. I beheld it with reverence. We sat some time in the summer-house, on the outside wall of which was inscribed "Ambulantes in horto audiebant vocem Dei;" and in reference to a brook by which it is situated, "Vivendi rectè qui prorogat horam," &c. I said to Mr. Young that I had been told his father was cheerful. "Sir," said he, "he was too well bred a man not to be cheerful in company; but he was gloomy when alone. He never was cheerful after my mother's death, and he had met with many disappointments." Dr. Johnson observed to me afterwards "That this was no favourable account of Dr. Young; for it is not becoming in a man to have so little acquiescence in the ways of Providence as to be gloomy because he has not obtained as much preferment as he expected, nor to contine gloomy for the loss of his wife. Grief has its time."-BOSWELL, JAMES, 1781, Life of Johnson, ed. Croker, ch. lxxiii.

Young, whose satires give the very anatomy of human foibles, was wholly governed by his housekeeper. She thought and acted for him, which probably greatly assisted the "Night Thoughts," but his curate exposed the domestic economy of a man of genius by a satirical novel. If I am truly informed, in that gallery of satirical poets in his "Love of Fame," Young has omitted one of the most striking-his own! While the poet's eye was glancing from "earth to heaven," he totally overlooked the lady whom he married, and who soon became the object of his contempt; and not only his wife, but his only son, who when he returned home for the vacation from Winchester school, was only admitted into the presence of his poetical father on the first and the last day; and whose unhappy life is attributed to this unnatural neglect: -a lamentable domestic catastrophe, which, I fear, has too frequently occurred amidst the ardour and occupations of literary glory.-DISRAELI, ISAAC, 17961818, Domestic Life, The Literary Character.

The outline of Young's character is too distinctly traceable in the well-attested facts of his life, and yet more in the selfbetrayal that runs through all his works, for us to fear that our general estimate of him may be false. For, while no poet seems less easy and spontaneous than Young, no poet discloses himself more completely. Men's minds have no hidingplace out of themselves their affections do but betray another phase of their nature. And if, in the present view of Young, we seem to be more intent on laying bare unfavourable facts than on shrouding them in "charitable speeches, it is not because we may have any irreverential pleasure in turning men's characters the seamy side without, but because we see no great advantage in considering a man as he was not. Young's biographers and critics have usually set out from the position that he was a great religious teacher, and that his poetry is morally sublime; and they have toned down his failings into harmony with their conception of the divine and the poet. For our own part, we set out from precisely the opposite conviction-namely, that the religious and moral spirit of Young's poetry is low and false; and we think it of some importance to show that the "Night Thoughts" are the reflex of a mind in which the higher human sympathies were inactive. This judgment is entirely opposed to our youthful predilections and enthusiasm.

The sweet garden-breath of early enjoyment lingers about many a page of the "Night Thoughts," and even of the "Last Day," giving an extrinsic charm to passages of stilted rhetoric and false sentiment, but the sober and repeated reading of maturer years has convinced us that it would hardly be possible to find a more typical instance than Young's poetry, of the mistake which substitutes interested obedience for sympathetic emotion, and baptizes egoism as religion. ELIOT, GEORGE, 1857, Worldliness and Other-Worldliness: The Poet Young; Essays.

One of the greatest sycophants of a very adulatory age; a self-seeking, greedy, worldly man.-NICOLL, HENRY J., 1882, Landmarks of English Literature, p. 196.

It was a curious chance which brought together the future author of the "Night

Thoughts" and the future author of "La Pucelle;" it was a still more curious circumstance that they should have formed a friendship which remained unbroken, when the one had become the most rigid of Christian divines, and the other the most daring of anti-Christian propagandists. Many years afterwards Young dedicated to him in very flattering terms one of the most pleasing of his minor poems -the "Sea Piece." COLLINS, JOHN CHURTON, 1886, Bolingbroke, A Historical Study, and Voltaire in England, p. 244.

He closed his long career, rich indeed through his marriage with the Earl of Lichfield's daughter, Lady Elizabeth Lee, but petulant, proud, and solitary. The insatiable ambition of Young has been the theme of many moralists, and the tendency of his personal character was indubitably parasitic; but it would be easy to show, on the other hand, that he really was, to an eminent degree, what Hobbes calls an "episcopable" person, and that his talents, his address, his loyalty, and his moral force were qualities which not only might, but for the honour of the English Church should, have been publicly acknowledged by preferment.-GOSSE, EDMUND, 1888, A History of Eighteenth Century Literature, p. 210.

NIGHT THOUGHTS

1742-46

The title of my poem (Night Thoughts) not affected; for I never compose but at night, except sometimes when I am on horseback. YOUNG, EDWARD, 1758, Spence's Anecdotes, ed. Singer, p. 288.

I will venture to say that in point of depth this poet is what Homer and Pindar are in point of grandeur. I should find. it difficult to explain the effect produced upon me by my first perusal of this work. I might experience much the same impression in the heart of the desert on a dark and stormy night, when the surrounding blackness is pierced at intervals by flashes of lightning.-BISSY, COMTE DE, 1762, Journal étranger, Feb.

A great poet, who is certain to share the immortality of Swift, Shaftesbury, Pope, Addison, and Richardson.- LETOURNEUR, PIERRE, 1769, Les Nuits d'Young.

Sir, you have conferred a high honour on my old acquaintance Young; the taste of the translator appears to be better