in 1759, he left Lynn, 'without education, profession, pursuits, or employment,' and for want of other occupation, took a farm belonging to his mother at Bradfield. To improve his prospects, he married at the age of twenty-four (in 1765) a Miss Martha Allen of Lynn, neither the first nor second object of his adorations, which apparently it would not be easy to enumerate. He might have made a better choice. Mrs. Young is said to have been shrewish, and Young certainly regretted his precipitance. The marriage was unhappy from the first; and Young records that, even when his wife was in good health, she became all the more 'irritable,' and life a mere 'scene of worrying.' The lady was sister-in-law of Mrs. Stephen Allen, Burney's second wife, and stepmother of Miss Burney, who has left some characteristic touches. Young confided to Miss Burney a few years later, either from confidence in her prudence, she says, or from his general 'carelessness of consequences,' that he was the 'most miserable fellow breathing,' and that 'if he were to begin the world again, no earthly thing should prevail with him to marry.' On the whole, one might expect that a youth, who is bound to an uncongenial wife and proposes to make his living by farming, chiefly because he
