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
reputation 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 somebody 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 college for a time, at one of our
Universities? The author of "Paradise Lost" is by some supposed to
have been disgracefully ejected from the other. From juvenile