The Centaur not Fabulous: In Six Letters to a Friend; on the Life in Vogue

Overview
Edward Young’s The Centaur not Fabulous is a prose satire in six connected letters that trains a moral eye on mid-eighteenth-century fashionable life. The title emblem announces the governing conceit: modern man has become a centaur, not a myth but a living hybrid, half rational and aspiring, half animal and appetitive. Addressed to a friend, the letters anatomize the habits, entertainments, and opinions of the beau monde, arguing that the reigning “life in vogue” confuses polish with virtue, wit with wisdom, and novelty with truth. Young’s purpose is corrective rather than merely censorious. He seeks to recall readers from modish dissipation to a serious, humane Christianity, grounded in reason, conscience, and the abiding thought of immortality.

Frame and Method
The epistolary form allows Young to mix observation, anecdote, and admonition with a conversational ease that tempers the severity of his argument. He moves from coffee-house chatter to assemblies, from gaming tables to the theatre and masquerade, using vivid vignettes to expose how social rituals train desire. The centaur emblem threads these scenes together: wherever appetite overrules judgment, or reputation eclipses rectitude, the human form fuses with the brute. The refrain “not fabulous” underlines that the monster is no poetic fiction but a daily sight in streets, drawing rooms, and courts.

The Life in Vogue
Young portrays a culture governed by fashion’s quicksilver law. The center of gravity is pleasure, not virtue; the currency is wit and show, not truth. Gaming promises fortune without industry and ends in ruin; the stage flatters vice under the veil of charm; the masquerade embraces anonymity as freedom and ends in moral confusion. Conversation prizes sparkle over substance, producing skeptics by vanity rather than by argument. Even the language of honor becomes a mask for pride and resentment, feeding duels and feuds that sacrifice life to opinion.

Education and Politeness
A central target is an education that polishes manners while leaving the heart untutored. Young argues that lessons in taste, languages, and deportment, though valuable, are dangerous when detached from the discipline of virtue. He warns that parents and tutors fashion the very centaur they claim to shun when they teach youth to excel in accomplishments but neglect conscience, self-command, and the fear of God. True politeness, he insists, is the outward figure of inward goodness; without that soul, refinement becomes a brilliant vice.

Reason, Religion, and the Fashionable Sceptic
Against modish unbelief, Young contends that reason and revelation are allies, not rivals. The fashionable free-thinker boasts of independence while enslaved to appetite. Such scepticism springs less from inquiry than from the love of latitude. The practical fruits betray the root: levity in the face of death, contempt for duty, and a restless chase of entertainments to drown reflection. Young invites readers to recover the great realities of Providence, moral law, and immortality as the only firm foundation for a life that does not collapse under trial.

Wealth, Rank, and Domestic Life
The letters expose courtly intrigue and commercial lust as twin forms of idolatry. Place and profit, pursued as ends, deform character and destroy peace. Marriage, when treated as a contract of vanity or convenience, becomes a theatre of mutual torment; when grounded in piety and friendship, it civilizes the passions and ennobles household life. Young honors female influence, warning that the coquette and the reader of frivolous novels train society for misery, while the prudent and devout matron quietly sustains its virtue.

Moral Vision
Running through the satire is a solemn memento mori. The brevity of life and certainty of judgment give true scale to human pursuits. The cure for the centaur is not retreat from the world but a reformation of heart and habit: seriousness without sourness, cheerfulness without levity, social grace anchored in moral purpose. By turning fashion to serve virtue rather than dethrone it, Young hopes to make the human whole again, restoring reason to the saddle and appetite to its proper place.