Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/806

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YOUNG


by prohibitions and bounties; of the latter he censured in specially strong terms the bounty on the inland carriage of corn to Dublin. He deplored the drain of rents and the neglect of their tenantry by absentee proprietors. The state of agriculture, generally low though improving, he found particularly unsatisfactory in Ulster, owing to the prevalence there of the linen manufacture, at that time carried on in the homes of the people, who were constantly divided between this occupation and the labours of the field. Emigration, he thought, was not sufficiently encouraged; indeed it scarcely existed at the period of his visit. It had previously been practised to a greater extent, and, besides relieving the population which remained, had been useful in removing restless spirits who would have been troublesome at home. He favoured a legislative union of Ireland with Great Britain, though lie did not regard such a measure as absolutely necessary, many of its advantages being otherwise attain able, without incurring the risk of some possible inconveniences.

The soil of France he found in general superior to that of England, and its produce less. Agriculture was neither as well understood nor as much esteemed as in England. He severely censured the higher classes for their neglect of it. "Banishment (from court) alone will force the French nobility to execute what the English do for pleasure reside upon and adorn their estates." Young saw the commencement of violence and outrage in the rural districts, being himself more than once in peril from popular suspicion. His sympathies began to take the side of the classes suffering from the excesses of the Revolution, and this change of attitude was distinctly shown by his publication in 1793 of a tract entitled The Example of France a Warning to England. Of the profounder significance of the French outbreak, as the commencement of a world-wide movement and a new era in social history, he seems to have had little idea, and thought the crisis would be sufficiently met by a constitutional adjustment in accordance with the English type. Yet he had much of the feeling which then inspired the Revolutionary actors, and, along with it, it may be added, some thing of the general sentimentalism of the period. Another enthusiasm he frequently exhibits namely, for music, and especially for the Italian opera. But his master passion was the devotion to agriculture, which constantly showed itself. He strongly condemned the metayer system then widely prevalent in France, as "perpetuating poverty and excluding instruction," as, in fact, the curse and ruin of the country. Some of his phrases have been often quoted by the advocates of peasant proprietorship as favouring their view. "The magic of property turns sand to gold." "Give a man the secure possession of a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden; give him a nine years lease of a garden, and he will convert it into a desert." But these sentences, in which the epigrammatic form exaggerates a truth, and which might seem to represent the possession of capital as of no importance in agriculture, must not be taken as conveying his approbation of the system of small properties in general. He approved it only when the subdivision was strictly limited, and even then with great reserves; and he remained to the end what J. S. Mill calls him, "the apostle of la grande culture," The French acknowledge the valuable services which his criticisms and counsels rendered to their agriculture. The directory in 1801 ordered his writings on the art to be translated and published at Paris in 20 volumes under the title of Le Cultivateur Anglais. His Travels in France were translated in 1793-94 by Soules; and a new version by M. Lesage, with an introduction by M. de Lavergne, appeared in 1856. An interesting review of the latter publication, under the title of Arthur Young et la France de 1789, will be found in M. Baudrilkrt's Pullicistes Moderncs, 2d ed., 1873.(j. k. i.)

YOUNG, Brigham (1801-1877), Mormon president, was born in Whitingham, Vermont, on 1st June 1801. His father was a farmer, and he himself learned the trade of a painter and glazier. He originally belonged to the Baptist Church, but joined the Mormons at Kirtland, Ohio, in 1832. In the same year he was ordained "elder;" in 1835 he was made an apostle; and in 1844 he succeeded Joseph Smith as president. He died at Salt Lake City, on 29th August 1877. See Mormons.

YOUNG, Edward (1681-1765), author of Night Thoughts, was born at Upham, near Winchester, in 1681. The minute facts of his life are to be found in the biography contributed to Johnson's Lives of the Poets by Herbert Croft. The son of the dean of Sarum, educated at Winchester and Oxford (New College and Corpus), Young obtained a law fellowship at All Souls in 1708, and proceeded to use it as a base of operations for gratifying his "ruling passion," the love of fame. There was at the time an open career for young men of talent who showed ability to recommend the policy and the persons of states men in their struggle for power, and Young, full of unbounded energy and eloquence, exuberant to eccentricity, joined in the race with a vigour that soon raised him to distinction. He seems to have been for a time in the family of the earl of Exeter as tutor; but the notorious marquis of Wharton (see Wharton) took a fancy to him, bribed him away from this post with liberal promises of maintenance and patronage, settled two annuities on him, and tried to get him into Parliament. Meantime Young began to publish and to dedicate, the poems and the dedications taken together (The Last Day, 1713, and The Force of Religion, 1714) showing the simple mixture of piety and worldliness that is one of the notes of his character. He essayed tragedy, writing at mid-day with closed shutters, by the light of a candle fixed in a human skull. Busiris was performed at Drury Lane in 1719, The Revenge in 1721. Far from gloomy in the company of Wharton and his friends, he had a decided bent for gloomy themes when alone, and a most copious and lofty often extravagantly lofty eloquence in the treatment of them; a paraphrase of the book of Job was one of his productions about this time. But he showed equal facility in dashing and effective satire: his first great literary success was made with the series of satires published between 1725 and 1728, and collected in the latter year under the title Love of Fame, the Universal Passion. These satires do not bear comparison with Pope's, to which they pointed the way, but they have a charm of exuberant vitality and power, an irregular abundance of wit and bold imagery, a frequent felicity of diction, that entitle them to Johnson's praise "a very great performance" and enable us to understand the impression produced by Young in conversation. One of the features in Young's character that disarms resentment of his fulsome adulation, and other extravagances and eccentricities, is his humorous Falstaffian consciousness of his own faults. "Who can write the true absurd like me?" he cries in one of his satires. He abundantly proved this in Ocean: an Ode, with which he hailed the accession of George II. Soon after, when nearly fifty, he took orders, was appointed a royal chaplain, and presented by his college to the rectory of Welwyn. He was disappointed in his desire of further promotion in the church; he had succeeded some time before in extracting a pension of £200 from Walpole, and this favour was cynically treated as a satisfaction in full of his claims on the Government. The Night Thoughts were published in separate "Nights" between 1742 and 1744. In the preface Young said that "the occasion of this poem was real, not fictitious, and that the facts mentioned did naturally force these moral reflexions on the mind of the writer." Croft has shown that this statement, though justifiable in the main, has to be taken with some qualifications, and that a common belief that Lorenzo was meant for the author's own son was undoubtedly a mistake. Still, it is true that Young's wife, her daughter, and her daughter's husband died in rapid succession, and the poem a great work in spite of all its inequalities was, like In Memoriam, the expression of a real sorrow and search for consolation. Young continued to write occasionally even after he had passed his eightieth year. His death took place on 12th April 1765.

Besides Croft's Life, there are interesting references to Young in Boswell's Johnson (see Birkbeck's ed., iv. 119, v. 270).

YOUNG, Thomas (1773-1829), one of the most remarkable figures alike in literature and science in the beginning of the 19th century in Great Britain. He belonged to a Quaker family of Milverton, Somerset, and was the youngest of ten children, having been born on 13th June 1773. His precocity, especially in the acquirement of languages, was remarkable, being little