In the fifth Night-·

And burns Lorenzo ftill for the fublime Of life? To hang his airy neft on high?

Is this a picture of the fon of the rector of Wellwyn?

Eighth Night

In foreign realms (for thou haft travell'd far)

which even now does not apply to his fon.

In Night five

So wept Lorenzo fair Clariffa's fate, Who gave that angel-boy on whom he

dotes,

And died to give him, orphan'd in his

birth!

E

At

At the beginning of the fifth Night we-find

Lorenzo! to recriminate is just.

I grant the man is vain who writes for praise.

But, to cut fhort all enquiry, if any one of these paffages, if any paffage in the poems, 'be applicable, my friend fhall pafs for Lorenzo. The fon of the author of the Night Thoughts was not old enough, when the Night Thoughts were written, to recriminate, or to be a father. The Night Thoughts were begun immediately after the mournful events of 1740. The first Nights appear in the Stationers' books as the property of Robert Dodfley, in 1742. The Preface to Night Seven is dated July the

7th, 1744. The marriage, in confequence of which the fuppofed Lorenzo was born, happened in April 1732. Young's child was not born till June 1733. In 1740 this Lorenzo, this finished infidel, this father, to whose education Vice had for fome years put the last hand, was only feven years old. An anecdote of this cruel fort, fo open to contradiction, fo impoffible to be true, who could propagate? Thus eafily are blafted the reputations of the living and of the dead.

Who then was Lorenzo? exclaim the readers I have mentioned. If he was not his fon, was he not his nephew, his coufin?

Thefe are queftions which I do not pretend to answer. For the fake of human nature, I could with Lorenzo to have been only the creation of the Poet's fancy. That this was the cafe, many expreffions in the Night Thoughts would feem to prove, did not a paffage in Night Eight appear to fhew that he had fomebody in his eye for the ground-work at least of the painting. Lovelace or Lorenzo may be feigned characters; but a writer does not feign a name of which he only gives the initial letter:

Tell not Califta. She will laugh thee

dead,

Or fend thee to her hermitage with LThe Biographia, not fatisfied with pointing out the fon of Young, in that fon's

fon's life-time, as his father's Lorenzo, travels out of its way into the hiftory of the fon, and tells of his having been. forbidden his college at Oxford for mifbehaviour, and of his long labouring. under the displeasure of his father. How fuch anecdotes, were they true, tend to illuftrate the Life of Young, it is not eafy to difcover. If the fon of the author of the Night Thoughts was indeed forbidden his college for a time at one of our univerfities, the author of Paradife Loft was difgracefully ejected from the other, with the additional indignity of publick corporal correction. From juvenile follies who is free? Were Nature to indulge the fon of Young. with a fecond youth, and to leave him