n."

Since we find Young departing from the truth of dates, in order to
heighten the effect of his calamity, or at least of his climax, we need
not be surprised that he allowed his imagination great freedom in other
matters besides chronology, and that the character of "Philander" can, by
no process, be made to fit Mr. Temple. The supposition that the
much-lectured "Lorenzo" of the "Night Thoughts" was Young's own son is
hardly rendered more absurd by the fact that the poem was written when
that son was a boy, than by the obvious artificiality of the characters
Young introduces as targets for his arguments and rebukes. Among all the
trivial efforts of conjectured criticism, there can hardly be one more
futile than the attempts to discover the original of those pitiable
lay-figures, the "Lorenzos" and "Altamonts" of Young's didactic prose and
poetry. His muse never stood face to face with a genuine living human
being; she would have been as much startled by such an encounter as a
necromancer whose incantations and blue fire had actually conjured up a
demon.

The "Night Thoughts" appeared between 1741 and 1745. Although he
declares in them that he has chosen God for his "patron" henceforth, this
is not at all to the prejudice of some half dozen lords, duchesses, and
right honorables who have the privilege of sharing finely-turned
compliments with their co-patron. The line which closed the Second Night
in the earlier editions--

"Wits spare not Heaven, O Wilmington!--nor thee"--

is an intense specimen of that perilous juxtaposition of ideas by which
Young, in his incessant search after point and novelty, unconsciously
converts his compliments into sarcasms; and his apostrophe to the moon as
more likely to be favorable to his song if he calls her "fair Portland of
the skies," is worthy even of his Pindaric ravings. His ostentatious
renunciation of worldly schemes, and especially of his twenty-years'
siege of Court favor, are in the tone of one who retains some hope in the
midst of his querulousness.

He descended from the astronomical rhapsodies of his "Ninth Night,"
published in 1745, to more terrestrial strains in his "Reflections on the
Public Situation of the Kingdom," dedicated to the Duke of Newcastle; but
in this critical year we get a glimpse of him through a more prosaic and
less refracting medium. He spent a part of the year at Tunbridge Wells;
and Mrs. Montagu, who was there too, gives a very liv