After his father’s death in 1759, his mother gave him the direction of Bradfield Hall; and in 1767 he undertook on his own account the management of a farm in Essex. Possessing no practical acquaintance with agriculture, but being active-minded and of an inquiring turn, he engaged in experiments of various kinds, and embodied the results of them in A Course of Experimental Agriculture, which appeared in 1770. Though Young’s experiments were, in general, unsuccessful, he acquired in the process of making them a solid knowledge of agriculture; and, writing in a lively style, he was able to make his disquisitions on the subject interesting to the public. He had already commenced a series of journeys through different parts of England and Wales, and gave an account of his observations in books which appeared from 1768 to 1770— A Six Weeks’ Tour through the Southern Counties of England and Wales, A Six Months’ Tour through the North of England, and the Farmer’s Tour through the East of England. He says that these books contained the only extant information relative to the rental, produce, and stock of England that was founded on actual examination. They were very favourably received at home and abroad, being translated into most Continental languages by 1792.

In 1768 he published the Farmer’s Letters to the People of England, in 1771 the Farmer’s Calendar, which has gone through a great number of editions, and in 1774 his Political Arithmetic, which was soon translated into several foreign languages. About this time Young acted as parliamentary reporter for the Morning Post. He made a tour in Ireland in 1776, and drew up the results, with copious observations on the state of that kingdom, in the years 1776-79, publishing a quarto volume on them in 1780. In 1784 he commenced the publication of the Annals of Agriculture, which was continued for 45 volumes; this work had contributions from many authors, among whom was George III., writing under the nom de plume of Ralph Robinson. Young’s first visit to France was made in 1787. In May of that year he went to join Rochefoucauld-Liancourt at Paris, and accompanied by him and another gentleman travelled south to Bagnères de Luchon, making also an excursion into Spain. In November he was again in London; but in July 1788 he returned to France to study at leisure what he had before cursorily observed. He then saw the western part of the country, travelling alone on horseback, and came back a third time to see the east. The motive of these visits was “to make himself a master of their agriculture, that, if he found anything good and applicable to England, he might copy it.” But he had an eye no less for political and social phenomena, and, traversing France in every direction just before and during the first movements of the Revolution, he has given us interesting and valuable notices of the condition of the people and the conduct of public affairs at that critical juncture. The Travels in France appeared in two vols. 4to in 1792. On his return home he was appointed secretary of the Board of Agriculture, then just formed under the presidency of Sir John Sinclair. In this capacity he gave the most valuable assistance in the collection and preparation of agricultural surveys of the English counties. In 1765 he had married a Miss Allen; but the union is said not to have been a very happy one, though he was of domestic habits and a most affectionate father. His sight failed, and he submitted to an operation for cataract, which proved unsuccessful. He suffered also in his last years from stone. He died in February 1820.

“To the works of Arthur Young,” said Kirwan, “the world is more indebted for the diffusion of agricultural knowledge than to any writer who has yet appeared.” To the same effect is the more recent testimony of Mr Hoskyns, who tells us that “the Farmer's Letters and Calendar, as well as the Tours, displayed the mind and pen of a master in his art, and went far towards laying the foundation of a practical agricultural literature.” But it is as a social and political observer that Young is now best known to the reading public, and the books which have established his reputation in these departments—his Τaur in Ireland aud Travels in France— are still full of interest and instruction.

He found that Ireland had “flourished for the last thirty years to an uncommon degree, more,” he believed, “than any country in Europe and he protested against the turbulence of the population and the outcries of the gentry at a time when Ireland had “experienced more favour from three sessions of a British parliament than from three centuries before.” But he saw clearly and exposed unsparingly the causes which retarded the progress of the nation. He strongly urged the repeal of the penal laws which pressed upon the Catholics; he thought, however, that their disabilities should be removed, not by a single measure, but gradually. He protested against the harshness with which the labouring classes were treated by their superiors, and denounced the middlemen as being, not merely a useless class, but by their oppression and insolent manners the chief causes of popular discontent. He condemned the restrictions imposed by Great Britain on the commerce of Ireland, and also the perpetual interference of the Irish parliament with industry 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 ou 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 he did not regard such a measure as absolutely uecessary, many of its advantages being otherwise attainable, 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, something 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 métayer 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 Soulès; and a new version by Μ. Lesage, with an introduction by Μ. 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 Μ. Baudrillart’s Publicistes Modernes, 2d ed., 1873.

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 statesmen 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 Hay, 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 inferior to that of Sir W. Rowan Hamilton. But his thirst for knowledge was unlimited in its range. He was not content with languages, mathematics, and physical science: natural science, medicine, and even ancient philosophy were eagerly studied by him; and he was passionately devoted to athletic exercises. His medical studies were pursued successively in London, Edinburgh, Göttingen, and finally at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he took his doctor’s degree. The death of a maternal uncle put him in a position of comfortable independence, and he did not heartily enter upon practice. He was secured in 1802 by the Royal Institution as a colleague of Davy and professor of natural philosophy. Here his special talents found ample occupation, and the chief result was the publication in 1807 of his celebrated Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy, a work which is even now regarded as a valuable authority. Some years before he had made his remarkable discovery of the interference of light, and begun that wonderful series of researches which, as completed by Fresnel, secured the triumph of the undulatory theory. He was foreign secretary of the Royal Society for more than a quarter of a century; and it is curious to note that his reputation stood higher in foreign than in home scientific circles. He was one of the eight foreign associates of the Institute of France. He was one of the Commissioners of Weights and Measures, and secretary to the Board of Longitude, which in those days conducted the Nautical Almanac. A few years before his death he became interested in life assurance, with great benefit to the company whose scientific business he conducted. His death, on 10th May 1829, was probably hastened by the extraordinary amount and variety of the labours he undertook, and the self-sacrificing zeal with which he devoted himself to them.

His Life, by Dr Peacock, dean of Ely and a well-known mathematician, was published in 1855, along with a collection of his Miscellaneous Works and Scientific Memoirs. Young was a somewhat copious contributor to the 6th edition of this Encyclopaedia, and some of the best of his smaller papers appeared in it for the first time. For a résumé of his contributions to the subject of haemadynamics, see Vascular System, p. 97 supra. Another of the multitudinous problems that claimed his attention was the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, in which he had made some progress as early as 1814; see his Account of some Recent Discoveries in Hiero∙ glyphical Literature (London, 1823).