So little is Edward Young read in these days that we have almost forgotten how wide was his influence in the eighteenth century. It was not merely that he was popular in England, where his satires, _The Love of Fame, the Universal Passion_, are said to have made him £3,000. He was also a power on the Continent. His _Night Thoughts_ was translated not only into all the major languages, but into Portuguese, Swedish and Magyar. It was adopted as one of the heralds of the romantic movement in France. Even his _Conjectures on Original Composition_, written in 1759 in the form of a letter to Samuel Richardson, earned in foreign countries a fame that has lasted till our own day. A new edition of the German translation was published at Bonn so recently as 1910. In England there is no famous author more assiduously neglected. Not so much as a line is quoted from him in _The Oxford Book of English Verse_. I recently turned up a fairly full anthology of eighteenth-century verse only to find that though it has room for Mallet and Ambrose Phillips and Picken, Young has not been allowed to contribute a purple patch even five lines long. I look round my own shelves, and they tell the same story. Small enough poets stand there in shivering neglect. Akenside, Churchill and Parnell have all been thought worth keeping. But not on the coldest, topmost shelf has space been found for Young. He scarcely survives even in popular quotations. The copy-books have perpetuated one line: Procrastination is the thief of time. Apart from that, _Night Thoughts_ have been swallowed up in an eternal night.