One remarkable book marks the opening of the period. The first part of Young's _Night Thoughts_ appeared in 1742, and the poem at once acquired a popularity which lasted at least through the century. Young had been more or less associated with the Addison and Pope circles, in the later part of Queen Anne's reign. He had failed to obtain any satisfactory share of the patronage which came to some of his fellows. He is still a Wit till he has to take orders for a college living as the old Wits' circle is decaying. He tried with little success to get something by attaching himself to some questionable patrons who were induced to carry on the practice, and the want of due recognition left him to the end of his life as a man with a grievance. He had tried poetical epistles, and satires, and tragedies with undeniable success and had shown undeniable ability. Yet somehow or other he had not, one may say, emerged from the second class till in the _Night Thoughts_ he opened a new vein which exactly met the contemporary taste. The success was no doubt due to some really brilliant qualities, but I need not here ask in what precise rank he should be placed, as an author or a moralist. His significance for us is simple. The _Night Thoughts_, as he tells us, was intended to supply an omission in Pope's _Essay on Man_. Pope's deistical position excluded any reference to revealed religion, to posthumous rewards and penalties, and expressed an optimistic philosophy which ignored the corruption of human nature. Young represents a partial revolt against the domination of the Pope circle. He had always been an outsider, and his life at Oxford had, you may perhaps hope, preserved his orthodoxy. He writes blank verse, though evidently the blank verse of a man accustomed to the 'heroic couplets'; he uses the conventional 'poetic diction'; he strains after epigrammatic point in the manner of Pope, and the greater part of his poem is an elaborate argumentation to prove the immortality of man--chiefly by the argument from astronomy. But though so far accepting the old method, his success in introducing a new element marks an important change. He is elaborately and deliberately pathetic; he is always thinking of death, and calling upon the readers to sympathise with his sorrows and accept his consolations. The world taken by itself is, he maintains, a huge lunatic asylum, and the most hideous of sights is a naked human heart. We are, indeed, to find sufficient consolation from the belief in immortality. How far Young was orthodox or logical or really edifying is a question with which I am not concerned. The appetite for this strain of melancholy reflection is characteristic. Blair's _Grave_, representing another version of the sentiment, appeared simultaneously and independently. Blair, like Thomson, living in Scotland, was outside the Pope circle of wit, and had studied the old English authors instead of Pope and Dryden. He negotiated for the