cases of Dodington and Stanhope it must be remembered that the poet had no more to gain that he was assured of by reason of a friendship already established; the Duke of Dorset was hardly a promising Maecenas; Walpole had already placed the poet under a weighty obligation; while of the Lady Elizabeth Germain nothing more can be urged than that she was a wealthy widow with a past.

While the satires were in course of separate publication— they were begun in 1725 and concluded in 1728-Young had become a pensioner of the crown. A year prior to the issuing of the first poem, Dodington had attached himself to Walpole and had been made a Lord of the Treasury. The latter honour was no doubt bestowed in recognition of his political importance, for some four or five members of the House of Commons were returned in his interests. Hence we need search no further for the instrument of the poet's preferment. From their earliest days at Oxford to the close of his long life, Dodington entertained a sincere regard for Young, and there can be no question that it was he and he alone who persuaded Walpole to award the poet a pension. The royal grant, which was dated the 3rd of May, 1726, set forth that it was the King's will and pleasure that "an annual pension of £200 be established and paid from Lady Day, 1725, unto Edward Young, Doctor of Laws," and that the said sum was to be disbursed in quarterly payments. As the pension was made retrospective, the poet could look forward to drawing a comfortable sum from the exchequer on the Lady Day of 1726.

Anticipation of that £200 must be his excuse for The Instalment, that poem of 1726 written in honour of Walpole's installation as Knight of the Garter in the late May of that year. With the ink hardly dry on the royal grant, what wonder that the poet scorned the assistance of the musea Walpole is my theme "-or that he called upon all the mighty dead of the most noble order to arise from their graves to grace the "pomp of that distinguished day"? Young was in an ecstasy of thankfulness.

"My breast, O Walpole, glows with grateful fire.
The streams of royal bounty, turn'd by thee,
Refresh the dry domains of poesy."

Nor did he forget George I. As "Brunswick's smile" had authorised his muse he realised that her conduct must be chaste," for, he added, with delightful insouciance,

"False praises are the whoredoms of the pen,
Which prostitute fair fame to worthless men."

Remembering his preference for horses and dogs, it seems probable that if Walpole ever read either The Instalment or the satire inscribed to him, he did so with his tongue in his cheek. The important matter for Young, however, was that a good round sum of £200 had been added to his fellowship income.

That increased revenue must have been a great relief. It has been seen that the Wharton pensions were at present unrealisable assets; his income from his poems and tragedies was at the best spasmodic; what he badly needed was such an assured addition to the proceeds of his fellowship as would enable him to meet those expenses of wardrobe, travelling, etc., incidental to his visits to such wealthy friends as Doding

That he was in great need of money has already been inferred from that anxiety as to the success of The Brothers which he confessed to Lady Wortley Montagu several months before he received the royal pension.

So far as our evidence goes, it would appear that Young's companionship was much sought after. He was a frequent guest of Dodington, either at his Eastbury country seat or in his house at Hammersmith. It was in the former mansion he made the acquaintance of Voltaire during that writer's sojourn in England from 1726 to 1729, an experience which he recalled in inscribing one of his later poems to the distinguished Frenchman.

"'Tell me,' say'st thou, 'who courts my smile?
What stranger stray'd from yonder isle?'

No stranger, sir! though born in foreign climes.

On Dorset downs, when Milton's page,

With Sin and Death, provoked thy rage,

Thy rage provoked who soothed with gentle rhymes ? "

An anecdote in Spence is the best commentary on that verse. It seems that during that visit to Dodington on "Dorset downs " Voltaire, when Milton was under discussion, objected that that poet's "Death" and "Sin" were non-existents, whereupon Young retorted—

"Thou art so witty, profligate, and thin

At once we think thee Milton's Death and Sin."

It is obvious from Young's address to Voltaire that the debate waxed vigorous for a time, but that he at length extorted from his opponent the admission that "Milton's blindness lay not in his song." According to Spence, it was during this visit to Eastbury that Voltaire asked Young to correct one of his essays, and that on being presented with the results he laughed in his critic's face.

One other anecdote of these years has been preserved by Boswell. On a wild, stormy evening, when the poet was staying with Dodington at Hammersmith, he went out into the garden for a few minutes, and on his return was greeted by his host with the remark that it was a dreadful night. "No, Sir," rejoined Young, "it is a very fine night. The Lord is abroad!" That anticipation of Ruskin's dictum that there is no bad weather, taken in conjunction with his defence of Milton's theology, would seem to indicate that the poet's thoughts were turning at last towards his father's sacred profession.

CHAPTER V

HOLY ORDERS

1728-1741

PERSISTENT as was Young's ill luck in his choice of patrons, he was fortunate in deciding upon the time for changing his profession. The death of Queen Anne ushered in a new era for the littérateur; George I could hardly be expected to take an interest in books he could not read; and George II, in addition to his atrocious taste in art, so completely ignored belles-lettres as to have richly deserved the sarcasms of Pope and Swift. "Places in the Customs," observed Sir Leslie Stephen, "were no longer to be given to writers of plays or complimentary epistles in verse, or even to promising young politicians, but to members of parliament or the constituents in whom they were interested. The placemen, who were denounced as one of the great abuses of the time, were rewarded for voting power not for literary merit."1 These statements relate, it is true, to a slightly earlier period, but they are indicative of a change which had hardened by the time Young adopted a new career.

Perhaps the poet's chief reason for deciding to enter the clerical profession was a desire for such a settled income as would enable him to establish a home of his own. His anxiety for the success of The Brothers has been attributed to financial needs; even when that misgiving was relieved by the grant of the royal pension, he must have been haunted by the uncertainty of that grant being renewed in the event of the King's death; at his age, too, he was approaching his fortythird year-it was surely natural that he should wish to attain a position that would release him from monetary apprehensions. Not the worthiest of motives, this, for aspiring to the sacred responsibilities of the ministry; yet it may be urged in his 1 English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century, 101.

excuse that such an impulse was regarded as blameless in his day, and that he had not offended against either religion or morality in any of his writings. Nay, The Last Day and The Force of Religion were such impressive sermons in verse that they would have done him honour had he been already ordained.

Exactly at what date he decided to reverse the satire of his own lines and abandon the classics for the Scripture, is unknown. It has been usual with his biographers to regard his appointment as a chaplain to the King in the April of 1728 as the earliest fixed landmark in his clerical career, but that is to ignore evidence which anticipates that appointment by nearly a year. The title-page of Young's first contribution to theology, A Vindication of Providence, states that it was preached in St. George's Church, Hanover Square, "soon after the last King's death." This takes us back to the summer of 1727, for George I died in the June of that year. It is clear, then, that Young must have been ordained some months prior to his appointment as a royal chaplain. But that he had begun to read for holy orders in the early summer of the previous year is a natural conclusion from the statement that it was his resolve to enter the Church which decided him to withdraw The Brothers from rehearsal. To this period belongs the anecdote related by Owen Ruffhead as an example of Young's dependence on others. "When he had determined to go into orders, he addressed himself, like an honest man, for the best directions in the study of theology. But to whom did he apply? It may, perhaps, be thought, to Sherlock or Atterbury; to Burnet or Hare. No! to Mr. Pope, who, in a youthful frolic, recommended Thomas Aquinas to him. With this treasure he retired to an obscure place in the suburbs. His director hearing no more of him in six months, and apprehending that he might have carried the jest too far, sought after him, and found him out just in time to prevent an irretrievable derangement." It has been suggested that this picturesque anecdote is an example of how a joke may be transformed into a statement of fact; certainly a comparison