his life, for the poem was worth four thousand. This story may be
true; but it seems to have been raised from the two answers of Lord
Burghley and Sir Philip Sidney in Spenser's Life.

After inscribing his Satires, not perhaps without the hopes of
preferments and honours, to such names as the Duke of Dorset, Mr.
Dodington, Mr. Spencer Compton, Lady Elizabeth Germain, and Sir
Robert Walpole, he returns to plain panegyric. In 1726 he addressed
a poem to Sir Robert Walpole, of which the title sufficiently
explains the intention. If Young must be acknowledged a ready
celebrator, he did not endeavour, or did not choose, to be a lasting
one. "The Instalment" is among the pieces he did not admit into the
number of his EXCUSABLE WRITINGS. Yet it contains a couplet which
pretends to pant after the power of bestowing immortality:--

"Oh! how I long, enkindled by the theme,
In deep eternity to launch thy name!"

The bounty of the former reign seems to have been continued,
possibly increased, in this. Whatever it might have been, the poet
thought he deserved it; for he was not ashamed to acknowledge what,
without his acknowledgment, would now perhaps never have been
known:--

"My breast, O Walpole, glows with grateful fire.
The streams of royal bounty, turned by thee,
Refresh the dry remains of poesy."

If the purity of modern patriotism will term Young a pensioner, it
must at least be confessed he was a grateful one.