But to a son of worth and sensibility it is of some little consequence whether contemporaries believe, and posterity be taught to believe, that his debauched and reprobate life cast a Stygian gloom over the evening of his father’s days, saved him the trouble of feigning a character completely detestable, and succeeded, at last, in bringing his “grey hairs with sorrow to the grave.”
The humanity of the world, little satisfied with inventing perhaps a melancholy disposition for the father, proceeds next to invent an argument in support of their invention, and chooses that Lorenzo should be Young’s own son. The Biographia and every account of Young pretty roundly assert this to be the fact; of the absolute impossibility of which the Biographia itself, in particular dates, contains undeniable evidence. Readers I know there are of a strange turn of mind, who will hereafter peruse the Night Thoughts with less satisfaction; who will wish they had still been deceived; who will quarrel with me for discovering that no such character as their Lorenzo ever yet disgraced human nature, or broke a father’s heart. Yet would these admirers of the sublime and terrible be offended, should you set them down for cruel and for savage.
Of this report, inhuman to the surviving son, if it be true, in proportion as the character of Lorenzo is diabolical, where are we to find the proof? Perhaps it is clear from the poems.
From the first line to the last of the Night Thoughts no one expression can be discovered which betrays any thing like the father. In the Second Night I find an expression which betrays something else; that Lorenzo was his friend; one, it is possible, of his former companions; one of the duke of Wharton’s set. The poet styles him “gay friend;” an appellation not very natural from a pious incensed father to such a being as he paints Lorenzo, and that being his son.
But let us see how he has sketched this dreadful portrait, from the sight of some of whose features the artist himself must have turned away with horrour. A subject more shocking, if his only child really sat to him, than the crucifixion of Michael Angelo; upon the horrid story told of which, Young composed a short poem of fourteen lines in the early part of his life, which he did not think deserved to be republished.
In the First Night, the address to the poet’s supposed son is,
Lorenzo, fortune makes her court to thee.
In the Fifth Night;
And burns Lorenzo still for the sublime
Of life? to hang his airy nest on high?
Is this a picture of the son of the rector of Welwyn?