Night Thoughts with the Life of the Author and Notes Critical & Explanatory

Original straight grained full red morocco, all edges gilt Gilt border and tooling to board edges. Spine slightly darkened and moderate shelf wear. 24pp & 364pp & engraved frontispiece & title & 8 single sided engraved plates after Stothard. occasional minor marginal foxing and moderate shelf wear. Later Edition. Overall in VERY GOOD condition. Edward Young (1683 - April 5, 1765) was an English poet, best remembered for Night Thoughts. Although Night Thoughts is long and disconnected, it abounds in brilliant isolated passages. Its success was enormous. It was translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish and Magyar. In France it became a classic of the romantic school. The suspicion of insincerity did not trouble French readers. If Young did not invent "melancholy and moonlight" in literature, he did much to spread the fashionable taste for them. Madame Klopstock thought the king ought to make him Archbishop of Canterbury, and some German critics preferred him to John Milton. Young wrote good blank verse, and Samuel Johnson pronounced Night Thoughts to be one of "the few poems" in which blank verse could not be changed for rhyme but with disadvantage. The poem was a poetic treatment of sublimity and had a profound influence on the young Edmund Burke, who's philosophic investigations and writings on the Sublime and the Beautiful were a pivotal turn in Eighteenth-Century aesthetic theory. Young is not well remembered in the English-speaking world, though his reputation in France is somewhat higher. His best-known line is, "Procrastination is the thief of time." Size: 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.…