In foreign realms (for thou hast travell’d far;)
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 dy’d to give him, orphan’d 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 reputations 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 something 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: