which even now does not apply to his son. In “Night Five:”—
“So wept Lorenzo fair Clarissa’s fate,
Who gave that angel-boy on whom he dotes,
And died to give him, orphaned in his birth!”
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 short all inquiry; if any one of these passages, if any passage in the poems, be applicable, my friend shall pass for Lorenzo. The son of the author of the “Night Thoughts” was not old enough, when they were written, to recriminate or to be a father. The “Night Thoughts” were begun immediately after the mournful event of 1741. The first “Nights” appear, in the books of the Company of Stationers, as the property of Robert Dodsley, in 1742. The Preface to “Night Seven” is dated July 7th, 1744. The marriage, in consequence of which the supposed Lorenzo was born, happened in May, 1731. Young’s child was not born till June, 1733. In 1741, this Lorenzo, this finished infidel, this father to whose education Vice had for some years put the last hand, was only eight years old. An anecdote of this cruel sort, so open to contradiction, so impossible to be true, who could propagate? Thus easily are blasted the reputation of the living and of the dead. “Who, then, was Lorenzo?” exclaim the readers I have mentioned. If we cannot be sure that he was his son, which would have been finely terrible, was he not his nephew, his cousin? These are questions which I do not pretend to answer. For the sake of human nature, I could wish Lorenzo to have been only the creation of the poet’s fancy: like the Quintus of Anti Lucretius, “quo nomine,” says Polignac, “quemvis Atheum intellige.” That this was the case many expressions in the “Night Thoughts” would seem to prove, did not a passage in “Night Eight” appear to show that he had somebody in his eye for the groundwork 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 Calista. She will laugh thee dead,
Or send thee to her hermitage with L—.”
The “Biographia,” not satisfied with pointing out the son of Young, in that son’s lifetime, as his father’s Lorenzo, travels out of its way into the history of the son, and tells of his having been forbidden his college at Oxford for misbehaviour. How such anecdotes, were they true, tend to illustrate the life of Young, it is not easy to discover. Was the son of the author of the “Night Thoughts,” indeed, forbidden his college for a time, at one of our Universities? The author of “Paradise Lost” is by some supposed to have been disgracefully ejected from the other. From juvenile follies who is free? But, whatever the “Biographia” chooses to relate, the son of Young experienced no dismission from his college, either lasting or temporary. Yet, were nature to indulge him with a second youth, and to leave him at the same time the experience of that which is past, he would probably spend it differently—who would not?—he would certainly be the occasion of less uneasiness to his father. But, from the same experience, he would as certainly, in the same case, be treated differently by his father.
Young was a poet: poets, with reverence be it spoken, do not make the best parents. Fancy and imagination seldom deign to stoop from their heights; always stoop unwillingly to the low level of common duties. Aloof from vulgar life, they pursue their rapid flight beyond the ken of mortals, and descend not to earth but when compelled by necessity. The prose of ordinary occurrences is beneath the dignity of poets. He who is connected with the author of the “Night Thoughts” only by veneration for the Poet and the Christian may be allowed to observe that Young is one of those concerning whom, as you remark in your account of Addison, it is proper rather to say “nothing that is false than all that is true.” But the son of Young would almost sooner, I know, pass for a Lorenzo than see himself vindicated, at the expense of his father’s memory, from follies which, if it may be thought blameable in a boy to have committed them, it is surely praiseworthy in a man to lament and certainly not only unnecessary, but cruel in a biographer to record.
Of the “Night Thoughts,” notwithstanding their author’s professed retirement, all are inscribed to great or to growing names. He had not yet weaned himself from earls and dukes, from the Speakers of the House of Commons, Lords Commissioners of the Treasury, and Chancellors of the Exchequer. In “Night Eight” the politician plainly betrays himself:—
“Think no post needful that demands a knave:
When late our civil helm was shifting hands,
So P— thought: think better if you can.”