gel-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:

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