Page:The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, Volume 4.djvu/367

Rh 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 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:

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 our Universities? The author of "Paradise Lost" is by some supposed to have been disgracefully ejected from the other. From juvenile follies Rh