Page:The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, Volume 4.djvu/398

394 as no other man can have, and the whole is too remote from known life to raise either grief, terrour, or indignation. The "Revenge" approaches much nearer to human practices and manners, and therefore keeps possession of the stage: the first design seems suggested by "Othello;" but the reflections, the incidents, and the diction, are original. The moral observations are so introduced, and so expressed, as to have all the novelty that can be required. Of "The brothers" I may be allowed to say nothing, since nothing was ever said of it by the publick.

It must be allowed of Young's poetry, that it abounds in thought, but without much accuracy or selection. When he lays hold of an illustration, he pursues it beyond expectation, sometimes happily, as in his parallel of Quicksilver with Pleasure, which I have heard repeated with approbation by a Lady, of whose praise he would have been justly proud, and which is very ingenious, very subtle, and almost exact; but sometimes he is less lucky, as when, in his "Night Thoughts," having it dropped into his mind, that the orbs, floating in space, might be called the cluster of creation, he thinks on a cluster of grapes, and Rh