And puffs them wide of hope: with hearts of proof
Full against wind and tide, some win their way,
And when strong effort has deserved the port,
And tugged it into view, 'tis won! 'tis lost!

Though strong their oar, still stronger is their fate:
They strike! and while they triumph they expire.
In stress of weather most, some sink outright:
O'er them and o'er their names the billows close;
To-morrow knows not they were ever born.
Others a short memorial leave behind,
Like a flag floating when the bark's ingulfed ;
It floats a moment, and is seen no more.
One Cæsar lives; a thousand are forgot.
How few beneath auspicious planets born-
Darlings of Providence! fond fates elect!-
With swelling sails make good the promised port,
With all their wishes freighted! yet even these,
Freighted with all their wishes, soon complain;
Free from misfortune, not from nature free,
They still are men, and when is man secure?
As fatal time, as storm! the rush of years
Beats down their strength, their numberless escapes
In ruin end. And now their proud success
But plants new terrors on the victor's brow :
What pain to quit the world, just made their own,
Their nest so deeply downed, and built so high!
Too low they build, who build beneath the stars.

On Night.

These thoughts, O Night! are thine; From thee they came like lovers' secret sighs, While others slept. So Cynthia, poets feign, In shadows veiled, soft, sliding from her sphere, Her shepherd cheered; of her enamoured less Than I of thee.-And art thou still unsung, Beneath whose brow and by whose aid I sing? Immortal silence! where shall I begin? Where end? or how steal music from the spheres To soothe their goddess?

O majestic night!

Nature's great ancestor! Day's elder born!
And fated to survive the transient sun!

By mortals and immortals seen with awe!

A starry crown thy raven brow adorns,

An azure zone thy waist; clouds, in heaven's loom
Wrought through varieties of shape and shade,
In ample folds of drapery divine,

Thy flowing mantle form, and, heaven throughout,
Voluminously pour thy pompous train :
Thy gloomy grandeurs-Nature's most august,
Inspiring aspect!-claim a grateful verse;
And like a sable curtain starred with gold,
Drawn o'er my labours past, shall close the scene.

On Retirement.

Blest be that hand divine, which gently laid
My heart at rest beneath this humble shed!
The world's a stately bark, on dangerous seas,
With pleasure seen, but boarded at our peril :
Here, on
single plank, thrown safe ashore,

I hear the tumult of the distant throng,
As that of seas remote, or dying storms;
And meditate on scenes more silent still;
Pursue thy theme, and fight the fear of Death.
Here, like a shepherd gazing from his hut,
Touching his reed, or leaning on his staff,

Eager ambition's fiery chace I see;
I see the circling hunt of noisy men
Burst law's inclosure, leap the mounds of right,
Pursuing and pursued, each other's prey;
As wolves for rapine; as the fox for wiles;
Till Death, that mighty hunter, earths them all.
Why all this toil for triumphs of an hour?
What though we wade in wealth, or soar in fame;
Earth's highest station ends in 'Here he lies,'
And dust to dust' concludes her noblest song.

Procrastination.

Be wise to-day; 'tis madness to defer:
Next day the fatal precedent will plead ;
Thus on, till wisdom is pushed out of life.
Procrastination is the thief of time;
Year after year it steals, till all are fled,
And to the mercies of a moment leaves
The vast concerns of an eternal scene.
If not so frequent, would not this be strange?
That 'tis so frequent, this is stranger still.

Of man's miraculous mistakes, this bears
The palm, 'That all men are about to live,'
For ever on the brink of being born:
All pay themselves the compliment to think
They one day shall not drivel, and their pride
On this reversion takes up ready praise;
At least their own their future selves applaud;
How excellent that life they ne'er will lead !
Time lodged in their own hands is Folly's vails;
That lodged in Fate's to wisdom they consign;
The thing they can't but purpose, they postpone.
'Tis not in folly not to scorn a fool,

And scarce in human wisdom to do more.

All promise is poor dilatory man.

And that through every stage. When young, indeed,
In full content we sometimes nobly rest,
Unanxious for ourselves, and only wish,

As duteous sons, our fathers were more wise.
At thirty, man suspects himself a fool;
Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan;
At fifty, chides his infamous delay,
Pushes his prudent purpose to resolve ;
In all the magnanimity of thought
Resolves, and re-resolves; then dies the same.

And why? because he thinks himself immortal.
All men think all men mortal but themselves;
Themselves, when some alarming shock of fate
Strikes through their wounded hearts the sudden dread :
But their hearts wounded, like the wounded air,
Soon close; where passed the shaft no trace is found,
As from the wing no scar the sky retains,
The parted wave no furrow from the keel,
So dies in human hearts the thought of death:
E'en with the tender tear which nature sheds
O'er those we love, we drop it in their grave.
(From The Complaint-Night I.)

The Night Thoughts eclipsed Young's other works; but his Love of Fame; in Seven Characteristical Satires, shows real satiric power, often almost equalling Pope's. Parts of Pope's seem indeed to have been suggested by Young's.

From The Love of Fame.'
Not all on books their criticism waste:
The genius of a dish some justly taste,

And eat their way to fame! with anxious thought
The salmon is refused, the turbot bought.
Impatient Art rebukes the sun's delay,
And bids December yield the fruits of May.
Their various cares in one great point combine
The business of their lives, that is, to dine;
Half of their precious day they give the feast,
And to a kind digestion spare the rest.
Apicius here, the taster of the town,
Feeds twice a week, to settle their renown.
These worthies of the palate guard with care
The sacred annals of their bills of fare;
In those choice books their panegyrics read,
And scorn the creatures that for hunger feed;
If man, by feeding well, commences great,

Much more the worm, to whom that man is meat.

Brunetta's wise in actions great and rare,
But scorns on trifles to bestow her care.
Thus every hour Brunetta is to blame,
Because th' occasion is beneath her aim.
Think nought a trifle, though it small appear;
Small sands the mountain, moments make the year,
And trifles, life. Your care to trifles give,
Or you may die before you truly live.

Belus with solid glory will be crowned;
He buys no phantom, no vain empty sound,
But builds himself a name; and to be great,
Sinks in a quarry an immense estate;
In cost and grandeur Chandos he'll outdo;
And, Burlington, thy taste is not so true;
The pile is finished, every toil is past,
And full perfection is arrived at last;

When lo! my lord to some small corner runs,
And leaves state-rooms to strangers and to duns.

The man who builds, and wants wherewith to pay,
Provides a home from which to run away.
In Britain, what is many a lordly seat,
But a discharge in full for an estate?

Some for renown on scraps of learning dote,
And think they grow immortal as they quote.
To patchwork learned quotations are allied;
Both strive to make our poverty our pride.

Let high birth triumph! what can be more great?
Nothing-but merit in a low estate.
To Virtue's humblest son let none prefer
Vice, though descended from the Conqueror.
Shall men, like figures, pass for high or base,
Slight or important only by their place?
Titles are marks of honest men, and wise;
The fool or knave that wears a title, lies.
They that on glorious ancestors enlarge,
Produce their debt instead of their discharge.

From the 'First Epistle to Mr Pope.'
With fame in just proportion envy grows;
The man that makes a character makes foes;
Slight peevish insects round a genius rise,
As a bright day awakes the world of flies;
With hearty malice, but with feeble wing,
(To show they live) they flutter and they sting:
But as by depredations wasps proclaim
The fairest fruit, so these the fairest fame.
Shall we not censure all the motley train,
Whether with ale irriguous or champagne?

Whether they tread the vale of prose, or climb
And whet their appetites on cliffs of rhyme;
The college sloven or embroidered spark,
The purple prelate or the parish clerk,
The quiet quidnunc or demanding prig,
The plaintiff Tory or defendant Whig ;
Rich, poor, male, female, young, old, gay or sad,
Whether extremely witty or quite mad;
Profoundly dull or shallowly polite,

Men that read well, or men that only write;
Whether peers, porters, tailors, tune the reeds,
And measuring words to measuring shapes succeeds;
For bankrupts write, when ruined shops are shut,
As maggots crawl from out a perished nut.
His hammer this, and that his trowel quits,
And wanting sense for tradesmen, serve for wits.
By thriving men, subsists each other trade;
Of every broken craft a writer's made.
Thus his material, paper, takes its birth
From tattered rags of all the stuff on earth.

Burns, who knew most of Young by heart, no doubt took from the sixth satire the material for the climax of his 'Address to the Deil :'

But fare-you-weel, auld 'Nickie-ben!'

O wad ye tak a thought an' men'!
Ye aiblins might—I dinna ken—
Still hae a stake:

I'm wae to think upo' yon den,
Ev'n for your sake!

The idea that perhaps the devil might yet find salvation is often set to the credit of the ploughman-poet's unheard-of generosity. Unreasonably; for though Burns may not have known that Origen's doctrine of the Apocatastasis or Final Restitution expressly included the devil and his angels, or that the benevolent scheme of St Macarius (who actually persuaded God to pardon the devil) fell through only because Satan would not stoop to beg forgiveness, he could not have been ignorant of Young's 'devil's fair apologist' and her comment on Tillotson's heresy. After having chastised, not too tenderly, the foibles and vices of many types of women, and raised the question of 'she-atheists,' Young goes on:

Atheists are few: most nymphs a Godhead own; And nothing but his attributes dethrone. From atheists far, they steadfastly believe God is, and is Almighty-to forgive. His other excellence they'll not dispute ; But mercy, sure, is his chief attribute. Shall pleasures of a short duration chain A lady's soul in everlasting pain? Will the great Author us poor worms destroy, For now and then a sip of transient joy? No, he's for ever in a smiling mood;

He's like themselves; or how could he be good?

And they blaspheme, who blacker schemes suppose.— Devoutly thus Jehovah they depose,

The pure! the just! and set up in his stead

A deity that's perfectly well-bred.

'Dear T-1-n! be sure the best of men; Nor thought he more, than thought great Origen.

Though once upon a time he misbehaved;

Poor Satan! doubtless, he'll at length be saved.
Let priests do something for their one in ten;
It is their trade; so far they 're honest men.
Let them cant on, since they have got the knack,
And dress their notions, like themselves, in black;
Fright us with terrors of a world unknown,
From joys of this, to keep them all their own.
Of earth's fair fruits, indeed, they claim a fee;
But then they leave our untithed virtue free.
Virtue's a pretty thing to make a show:
Did ever mortal write like Rochefoucault?'
Thus pleads the devil's fair apologist,
And, pleading, safely enters on his list.

6

Burns's Address to the Deil,' it should be noted, is essentially comic or serio-comic, though, like this ironical excursus of Young's, it may contain some slight element of serious thought.

Young expounded in prose his views 'On Lyric Poetry,' and illustrated them in an ode on 'Ocean,' which has a more artificial air than his blank verse, and is full of bathos to boot. These are a few of the stanzas (nearly seventy in all !), the last of which contains an adumbration of Thomson's guardian angels chorusing 'Rule Britannia :'

The Life of Young in Johnson's Lives of the Poets is by Herbert Croft (written 1782). Mitford and Doran, in the memoirs prefixed to their editions (1852 and 1854) of the works, added a few facts; and so also Leslie Stephen's article in the last volume of the Dictionary of National Biography (1900). George Eliot's 'Worldliness and Other-worldliness,' reprinted in her Essays (1884), contains a severe attack on Young's character. For Young in France, see Texte's Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan in Literature (trans. 1899).

George Berkeley (1685-1753), the good bishop to whom Pope assigned 'every virtue under heaven,' was born at Dysert Castle near Kilkenny. Like Swift, he passed from Kilkenny school to Trinity College, Dublin, where, student and Fellow, he remained thirteen years. His Commonplace Book of 1705-6 (published in 1871) reveals the influence of Locke's psychology on a subtle and original mind. Berkeley's Essay towards a new Theory of Vision (1709) showed that the act of

seeing, which seems so immediate, is really a reasoning interpretation of signs and hints, and argued that the process involves the assisting agency of God. The argument was extended in 1710 by a Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, further illustrating his 'new principle' that the world which we see and touch is not an abstract independent substance, of which our sensations are an effect; the very world presented to our senses depends for its actuality on being perceived. In 1711, having taken orders, he published a Discourse of Passive Obedience, a defence of the Christian duty of not resisting the supreme civil power; and in 1713 he visited London, and wrote some papers for Steele's Guardian. The same year he published his Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, the

design of which was plainly to demonstrate the immateriality of the external world, the incorporeal nature of the soul, and the immediate providence of a Deity, in opposition to sceptics and deists. Berkeley now became intimate with Addison, Arbuthnot, Swift, Pope, Steele, and the rest of that gifted circle, by whom he seems to have been sincerely beloved. He accompanied the brilliant and eccentric Earl of Peterborough, ❘ as chaplain and secretary, on his embassy to Sicily, and afterwards for four years travelled on the Continent as tutor to a son of the Bishop of Clogher. While abroad we find him writing to Pope: 'As merchants, antiquaries, men of pleasure, &c. have all different views in travelling, I know not whether it might not be worth a poet's while to travel, in order to store his mind with strong images of nature. Green fields and groves, flowery meadows, and purling streams, are nowhere in such perfection as in England; but if you would know lightsome days, warm suns, and blue skies, you must come to Italy; and to enable a man to describe rocks and precipices, it is absolutely necessary that he pass the Alps.' A story was long current that while at Paris Berkeley visited Malebranche, then in ill-health; and a dispute as to Berkeley's theory of the external world so excited the French philosopher that a violent access of his ailment carried him off in a few days! In reality Berkeley was still in England when Malebranche died. On his return he published a Latin tract, De Motu. In an Essay towards preventing the Ruin of Great Britain (1721) Berkeley says he would regard the collapse of the South Sea scheme as a blessing if it should make all honest men of one party, put religion and virtue in countenance, and 'turn our thought from cozenage and stock-jobbing to industry and frugal methods of life;' denounces that fearful prevalence of bribery and perjury; makes proposals for new taxes (on bachelors, &c.) and for improving many manufactures; calls for the interposition of the legislature against the ruinous folly of masquerades and for the reformation of the drama; recommends the enaction of comprehensive sumptuary laws, and for the suppression of the more aggressive forms of freethinking. 'I am not,' he says, 'for placing an invidious power in the hands of the clergy or complying with the narrowness of any mistaken zealots who should incline to persecute Dissenters. But whatever conduct common sense as well as Christian charity obligeth us to use towards those who differ from us in some points of religion, yet the public safety requireth that the avowed contemners of all religion should be severely chastised. And perhaps it may be no easy matter to assign a good reason why blasphemy against God should not be inquired into and punished with the same rigour as treason against the king.'

Through Pope he was recommended to the Duke of Grafton, Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, who

made him his chaplain and secured for him the deanery of Derry. The benevolent philosopher had long been cherishing 'a scheme for converting the savage Americans to Christianity, by a college to be erected in the Summer Islands, otherwise called the Isles of Bermuda.' In this college he most 'exhorbitantly proposed,' as Swift commented, 'a whole hundred pounds a year for himself, forty pounds for a fellow and ten for a student.' No anticipated difficulties could daunt him; coadjutors were obtained, a royal charter was granted, and Sir Robert Walpole promised £20,000 from Government. In January 1729 Berkeley and his friends landed at Newport in Rhode Island; in August the saintly missionary (who had no scruple about holding negro slaves) removed inland, having bought a farm and built a house. But when Walpole declined to advance the sum promised, the project was at an end; Berkeley returned to Europe, and was in London in February 1732. Next month appeared the largest and most finished of his works, Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher, a religious presentation of nature giving pleasant pictures of American scenery and life, conveyed in a series of dialogues, which in scope and charm have often been compared with Plato's. Berkeley became a favourite with Queen Caroline, and, in 1734, was appointed to the bishopric of Cloyne. Lord Chesterfield afterwards offered him the see of Clogher, which was double the value of that of Cloyne; but he declined the preferment. Some useful tracts on schemes for ameliorating Irish social conditions were published by the Bishop. One of them was The Querist (1735-37), containing many acute suggestions; that called Siris (1744), a chain of philosophical reflections on the medicinal virtues of water in which pine-tar has been stirred, cost him, he said, more thought than any of the rest of his works. The resin of the tar is compared with the creative spirit present in nature; the thought has a neoplatonic flavour. His last literary labour was a tract, Further Thoughts on Tar-water (1752). The best way of making this panacea, he thinks, is 'in a stone jug or earthen vessel, throughout well glazed,' and by no means in a metallic vessel. By increasing the proportion of tar to the water and by stirring it longer, tar-water may be made strong enough for a spoonful to impregnate a glass, a thing very useful on the road.' 'Tar-water must be drank warm in agues, small-pox, measles, and fevers, in cholic and disorders of the bowels, in gout also and rheumatism; in most other ailments cold or warm at the choice of the patient. In fevers the patient cannot begin too soon or drink too much.' He records a case of an old woman cured in a fortnight of combined ague, colic, and jaundice by drinking three pints of warm tarwater every day.

Failing health (spite of tar-water) and bereavement led Berkeley, in 1752, to resolve to resign

I

his bishopric and settle in Oxford; and there
next year he died. His dislike to the pursuits and
troubles of ambition are thus expounded by him to
a friend in 1747: 'In a letter from England, which
I told you came a week ago, it was said that several
of our Irish bishops were earnestly contending for
the primacy. Pray, who are they? I thought
Bishop Stone was only talked of at present.
ask this question merely out of curiosity, and not
from any interest, I assure you. I am no man's
rival or competitor in this matter. I am not in love
with feasts, and crowds, and visits, and late hours,
and strange faces, and a hurry of affairs often
insignificant. For my own private satisfaction, I
had rather be master of my time than wear a
diadem. I repeat these things to you, that I may
not seem to have declined all steps to the primacy
out of singularity, of pride, or stupidity, but from
solid motives. As for the argument from the
opportunity of doing good, I observe that duty
obliges men in high station not to decline occa-
sions of doing good; but duty doth not oblige
men to solicit such high stations.' The Bishop
was a poet as well as a mathematician and phil-
osopher. When inspired with his transatlantic
mission, he enshrined in verse-somewhat tame
for the inspiration-his apocalyptic vision of a
transcendently glorious American world-empire,
reviving the golden age on a vaster scale. The
first line of the concluding verse has long since
been quoted into a proverb.

Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and
Learning in America.

The Muse, disgusted at an age and clime

Barren of every glorious theme,

In distant lands now waits a better time,
Producing subjects worthy fame :

In happy climes where from the genial sun
And virgin earth such scenes ensue,
The force of art by nature seems outdone,
And fancied beauties by the true :

In happy climes, the seat of innocence,

Where nature guides and virtue rules,
Where men shall not impose for truth and sense
The pedantry of courts and schools:
There shall be sung another golden age,
The rise of empire and of arts,
The good and great inspiring epic rage,
The wisest heads and noblest hearts.

Not such as Europe breeds in her decay;
Such as she bred when fresh and young,
When heavenly flame did animate her clay,
By future poets shall be sung.

Westward the course of empire takes its way;
The four first acts already past,

A fifth shall close the drama with the day;
Time's noblest offspring is the last.

Berkeley's Theory of Vision, long considered a philosophical romance, is now a part of scientific

optics. His doctrine of the immateriality of the outer world, which he insisted on regarding as the simplest, most obvious, and only logical way of interpreting our perceptions-that what is perceived is the perceptions, not a dead, inert world of matter lying behind them and (needlessly) inferred from them-puzzled his contemporaries, and has been consistently rejected by all 'common-sense' philosophers and laymen, though the dependence of matter on mind (not my mind but some mind) is a familiar element in idealist systems. Probably his chiefest aim was, by means of his immaterialism, to turn the tables on materialists, and confute those who taught that there is neither soul nor God by proving that we know only our own souls and can logically prove only the existence of other souls, including the Creative Spirit. He applied to the analysis and dissolution of the assumed outer material world the principles of Locke's psychology; hardly foreseeing that Hume would afterwards, with greater audacity, apply the same principles to soul as such, and analyse it too, by cognate methods, into fleeting successions of sensations and feelings. Berkeley's philosophy is nowhere completely set forth in the form of a systematic treatise; but amongst English writers on abstruse philosophical problems he stands alone for lucidity and charm of exposition, for felicity of illustration, and for the union of gentle but humorous fancy with keen wit and trenchant logic. His style is clear and unaffected, with the easy grace of the polished philosopher; and his descriptions of external nature at times remind one of Izaak Walton. The following extracts, from the opening of the first and end of the last of the three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, show how skilfully he could manage this device for popularising abstract argument:

The Point in Dispute.

Philonous. Good morrow, Hylas: I did not expect to find you abroad so early.

Hylas. It is indeed something unusual; but my thoughts were so taken up with a subject I was discoursing of last night, that finding I could not sleep, I resolved to rise and take a turn in the garden.

Phil. It happened well, to let you see what innocent and agreeable pleasures you lose every morning. Can there be a pleasanter time of the day or a more delightful season of the year? That purple sky, those wild but sweet notes of birds, the fragrant bloom upon the trees and flowers, the gentle influence of the rising sun, these and a thousand nameless beauties of nature inspire the soul with secret transports; its faculties too being at this time fresh and lively, are fit for these meditations, which the solitude of a garden and tranquillity of the morning naturally dispose us to. But I am afraid I interrupt your thoughts for you seemed very intent on something.

Hyl. It is true I was, and shall be obliged to you if you will permit me to go on in the same vein; not that I would by any means deprive myself of your company, for my thoughts always flow more easily in conversation