ABSTRACT
George Eliot's attack on Young in 'Worldliness and Other-Worldliness' may be regarded as an episode in the long history of the nineteenth century's revolt from the eighteenth. The Night Thoughts, a poem that Roswell thought 'a mass of the grandest and richest poetry that human genius has ever produced', 1 and large parts of which Burke is said to have memorized, appeared to George Eliot as vicious rhetoric inculcating a low morality. Her criticism was accepted by her contemporaries, for, according to J. W. Mackail, the 'able and acrid' essay on Young 'dealt what for the time was a fatal blow to his reputation'. 2
