BOOKS.

RICHARD SAVAGE.* ONE of the best-known passages in Macaulay's essays is that depicting the miseries of the literati under the first two Georges. With his accustomed felicity and vigour of

language, and with a dash of his inveterate exaggeration, he tells us that all which was most squalid and most miserable could be summed up in the term "poet ":—

"To lodge in a garret up four pair of stairs, to dine in a cellar among footmen out of place, to translate ten hours a day for the wages of a ditcher, to be hunted by bailiffs from one haunt of beggary and pestilence to another, from Grub Street to St. George's Fields, and from St. George's Fields to the alleys behind St. Martin's Church, to sleep on a bulk in June and amidst the ashes of a glasshouse in December, to die in an hospital and to be buried in a parish vault, was the fate of more than one writer who, if he had lived thirty years earlier, would have been admitted to the sittings of the Kitcat or the Scriblerus club, would have sat in Parliament, and would have been entrusted with embassies to the High Allies ; who, if he had lived in our time, would have found encouragement scarcely less munificent in Albemarle Street or in Paternoster Row."

This is a composite picture, but the main features are derived from one original, the unhappy Richard Savage, whose posthumous renown is based far less on his own accomplish- ments than on the short biography which, in our judgment, is

the gem of The Lives of the Poets. In the rugged and capricious nature of Samuel Johnson gratitude was one of

the noblest and most persistent features. "If you call a dog Hervey, I shall love him," was the great lexicographer's acknowledgment of a small and unrecorded act of kindness. And at a very critical and a very unhappy period of his life Richard Savage, his elder by some twelve years, had flashed upon him like a being from another world. The bookseller's hack, uncouth, unkempt, half starved, a "stickit " Oxonian, with no accomplishment to his credit, and small promise of future achievement, was suddenly admitted to the intimacy of a man as poor, indeed, as himself, but to whom the doors of the best houses stood intermittently open, who had sat and talked at great men's feasts. In common with Samuel Johnson, we are compelled to take Savage largely at his own valuation, and the fetters of truth sat very lightly upon him.

But the indisputable fade of his career show him to have been a brilliant talker, and a boon companion of the nobility and gentry of the realm. Wherever he found himself, be took as by right the highest room, and in his greatest degradation there was a magnificent insolence about him which made honest men humble in his presence. The glamour of those days when they hungered in common, and of those nights when they walked the streets and squares together for lack of better lodging, never faded from the mind of his biographer. In the noble poem of "London" Savage is the "indignant Thales " who bids the town farewell. And though Johnson is constrained to admit "that nothing will supply the want of prudence, and that negligence and irregularity, long continued, will make knowledge useless, wit ridiculous, and genius contemptible," he makes amends in some of the most characteristic of his sentences :—

"The insolence and resentment of which he is accused were not easily to be avoided by a great mind, irritated by perpetual hard- ships, and constrained hourly to return the spurns of contempt, and repress the insolence of prosperity ; and vanity surely may be readily pardoned in him, to whom life afforded no other comforts than barren praises and the consciousness of deserving them. Those are no proper judges of his conduct who have slumbered away their time on the down of plenty ; nor will any wise man easily presume to say 'had I been in Savage's condition, I should have lived or written better than Savage.'

In the elaborate and well-illustrated volume before us Mr. Stanley Makower attempts to reconstruct the history of Richard Savage, and to unravel what he terms "a mystery in biography." For such a task the first requirements are caution and restraint; and sobriety of style is apt to be more convincing than exuberance of verbiage. Unhappily - • Richard Savage: a Mystery in Biography. By. Stanley V. Makower, With LY Illustrations. London : Hutehnuton and Co. Lisa. net.] Mr. Makower is a votary of that school of biography which elaims the license of the historical novel. His zeal, his diligence, his enthusiasm are unimpeachable, but he has not mastered the art of telling a story with directness and simplicity, and he is too ready a victim to the temptations of fine writing. The " mystery " of the book is that of the

birth and parentage of Richard Savage, a theme which calls for the most careful and critical treatment. Mr. Makower does not share the robust faith of Johnson, who not only accepted without hesitation the statements of his friend, but secured acceptance for them at the hands of a succession of writers, of whom Lord Macaulay is the most remarkable. Mr. Makower admits that there is a doubt, and he offers no explanation as to how young Savage became acquainted with the fact that he was the son of Mrs. Brett, the divorced Countess of Macclesfield ; indeed, he dismisses the details of the discovery as immaterial. Yet his whole narrative is

based on the assumption that the poet was neither impostor nor charlatan, but a deeply wronged man whose moral character as well as his material fortune were blasted by the cruelty and malignity of an unnatural mother.

Brought to the test which it courts, Savage's story is obscure and contradictory, bristling with difficulties, and exciting suspicion at every turn. Anna Margaretta, daughter of Sir Richard Mason of Sutton, in the county of Surrey, was married in 1683 to Charles Brandon, afterwards Earl of Macclesfield, a man of violent temper and irregular life, deeply involved in the plots against the reigning dynasty.

From him she was separated in the fallowing year, and divorced in 1698. In the interval she was delivered of two children, a boy and a girl, of whom the undisputed parent was Richard Savage, fourth Earl of Rivers, as headstrong a Whig as Lord Maeclesfield and a notorious profligate. The elder child, a girl, was baptised under the name of Anne Savage, and died in infancy. The boy was christened Richard Smith on January 18th, 1697. He was committed in the same year to the care of Mrs. Portlock, a baker's wife, living in Covent Garden, and from that date all certain trace of him is lost. Lord Macclesfield, engaged in accumulating evidence for his Divorce Bill, seems to have made every inquiry as to the whereabouts of the child, who would have furnished irrefutable proof of his wife's guilt ; but the secret was too well kept. Within two years of her div,ree the Countess married Colonel Henry Brett, a member of an old Gloucestershire family, by whom she had children. Her life was spent in respectable retirement, and she died in 1753 at the age of eighty.

Richard Savage, the poet, first appears on the scene in 1717 when under that name, but with no reference to his

origin, he published a poem on the Bangorian controversy,— " The Convocation ; or, A Battle of Pamphlets." In the following year the title-page of the play, Love in a Veil, bore

the statement that it was "written by Richard Savage, Gent., son of the late Earl Rivers," and in the dedication to Lord Lansdowne the author says :—" It is my misfortune to stand in such a relationship to the late Earl of Rivers by the Countess of —, as neither of us can be proud of owning.

I am one of those sons of sorrow to whom he left nothing to alleviate the sin of my birth." In 1719 in Curll's Poetical Register the story has grown in detail and precision. The Countess of Macclesfield's name is given openly and at length.

It is stated that Earl Rivers stood godfather to the child who Savage claimed to be, which was true, and gave him his own name, which was false :— "To his own mother he has not been the least obliged for his education, but to her mother, the Lady Mason ; she committed him to the care of Mrs. Lloyd, his godmother, who dying before he was ten years old, out of her tender regard left him a legacy of £300, which was embezzled by her executors."

Years rolled by, and in 1727 Savage was lying in Newgate under sentence of death : he had killed a man in a tavern brawl, and be was eventually snatched from the scaffold by the intercession of the Countess of Hertford. He was by this time a poet and playwright of some distinction ; his case attracted mueh public attention, and was excellent "copy." The .Life of Savage written by a Mr. Beck ingham had accordingly a wide circulation, and after his release from prison Savage added to it a preface over his own signature. In this Mrs. Brett was painted as a monster of unnatural cruelty, not merely neglecting her offspring, but diverting from him a

provision which Lord Rivera was desirous of making, and putting on foot a scheme to have him kidnapped and sent to the West Indies. Not only had she driven him from her door, but she had even used her influence to prevent the Royal prerogative of mercy being exercised in his favour. A few months later Savage published his ferocious poem, "The Bastard," in which "Mrs. Brett, once Countess of Maccles- field," was loaded with every insult, and all the sordid details of her adultery and divorce were set down in plain prose in an introduction. Through all this campaign of invective Mrs. Brett had uttered not a single word, had attempted no refutation ; but in the course of the year 1728 her nephew, Lord Tyrconnel, suddenly offered Savage a pension of L'200 a year and invited him to become an inmate of his house, on condition that the attacks should cease. The terms were accepted, Mrs. Brett was left in peace, and for a short space Savage lived in clover. But he was no inmate for a well- ordered establishment, and in 1734 we find him denouncing his quondam host as "Right Honourable Brute and Booby." The last years of Savage's life were chequered with disappoint- ment and poverty. He failed to obtain the coveted appointment of Poet Laureate, his much-tried friends made up a purse to get him as far away from London as he would go, and after a short and unhappy sojourn in Wales he died on the debtors' side of Bristol Prison. It is in keeping with his melancholy history that no portrait of him exists.

Johnson's Life of him, first published in 1744, revived the tale of his wrongs and stamped Mrs. Brett with infamy ; but the story adopted in that classic is based entirely on Savage's own statements, for which no solitary piece of corroboration has ever been produced, and the examination to which they were subjected by the late Mr. Moy Thomas (Notes and Queries, 1850) has left them a tissue of inconsistencies and inventions. Savage claimed to have discovered the secret of his birth from -papers in the posses- sion of the old nurse who brought him up. But those papers were never revealed to any mortal eye. Johnson appears to have accepted their existence and authenticity without cavil or suspicion. How different was his conduct in later years over the Ossian controversy. "Where are the manuscripts P" he writes to Boswell. "They can be shown if they exist, but they were never shown. 'De on existentibus et non apparentibus,' says our law, cam est ratio.' No man has a claim to credit upon his own word, when better evidence, if he had it, may be easily produced."

It may be asked why, if Savage was merely a blackmailing impostor, Mrs. Brett never refuted him and Lord Tyrconnel paid him hush-money. To the latter question we may reply that the young Peer was anxious to stop a most disagreeable scandal, that he knew very little about his aunt's past history, that he may even have believed the story, and, moreover, that Savage clothed and in his right mind was a highly agreeable companion. /sirs. Brett, on the other hand, was in a position of great difficulty. Not only would she be most reluctant to revive the shameful memories of the past, but in all probability she was unable to prove, even if she knew, what had become of the infant who was hurried from band to hand when Lord Macclesfield's agents were hot upon the scent. She adopted a course which was, at any rate, consistent: she refused to recognise "the claimant" by word or sign. The tales of her vindictive and unnatural cruelty which Johnson transcribes with such gravity are, we believe, sheer products of the imagination.

Who Richard Savage really was and bow the idea of the impersonation took form and substance will never be known. Impostures of this kind generally conform to type ; wherever there is a skeleton in the family cupboard, wherever a death remains unverified or a disappearance is imperfectly accounted for, some Tom Provis or Arthur Orton may seize his oppor- tunity. The present writer is inclined to believe that Savage had come to know that the offspring of the lawless amour was dead, and resolved to turn that knowledge to account.

We have left ourselves no room to consider him as a man of letters. His memory is preserved by his famous couplet :— "He lives to build, not boast, a gen'rous race, No tenth transmitter of a foolish face!"

Like the men of his generation, he was happiest in satire, but it was satire hardly distinguishable from lampoon. His Muse was ever at the disposal of the highest bidder, and for

some years he filled a post which he himself had invented,— that of Laureate to Queen Caroline, the wife of George II. The one great achievement of his life was his friendship with Dr. Johnson, and it is with no small reluctance that we are compelled to record our conviction that Johnson was grossly deceived.