ye 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 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. 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."
But the son of Young would almost sooner, I know, pass for a Lorenzo
than see himself vindicated, at the expense of his father's memory, from
follies which, if it may be thought blameable in a boy to have committed
them, it is surely praiseworthy in a man to lament and certainly not
only unnecessary, but cruel in a biographer to record.

Of the "Night Thoughts,"