than of manly reason. ing to speak ill of the dead, who, if they cannot defend themselves, are at least ignorant of his abuse, will not hesitate by the most wanton calumny to destroy the quiet, the reputation, the fortune, of the living. Yet censure is not heard beneath the tomb, any more than praise. "De mortuis nil nisi verum-De vivis nil nisi bonum," would approach much nearer to good sense. After all, the few handfuls of remaining dust which once composed the body of the author of the "Night Thoughts" feel not much concern whether Young pass now for a man of sorrow, or for a "fellow of infinite jest." To this favour must come the whole family of Yorick. His immortal part, wherever that now dwells, is still less solicitous on this head.

He that has too much feel

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 every 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.

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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.

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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 horror. 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

Or life? to hang his airy nest on high?

Is this a picture of the son of the rector of Welwyn?

"Eighth Night"

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 died 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 enquiry; 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 the 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 shew 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 life-time, 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 the 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.

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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."