Richard Savage, 1690[?]–1743, Born, about 1690 [?]. Play, “Woman’s a Riddle,” produced at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 4 Dec. 1716; “Love in a Veil,” Drury Lane, 17 June 1718; “Sir Thomas Overbury,” Drury Lane, 12 June 1723. Condemned to death, for murder in a tavern brawl, Nov. 1727; pardoned, March 1728. Member of Lord Tyrconnel’s household, 1728–34. Pension from Queen Caroline, 1732–37. Arrested for debt in Bristol, 10 Jan. 1743. Died in prison there, 1 Aug. 1743. Buried in St. Peter’s Churchyard, Bristol. Works: “The Convocation,” 1717; “Memoirs of Theophilus Keene” (anon.; attrib. to Savage), 1718; “Love in a Veil,” 1719; “Sir Thomas Overbury,” 1724; “A Poem, sacred to the glorious memory of … King George,” 1727; “Nature in Perfection,” 1728; “The Bastard,” 1728; “The Author to be Let” [1728?]; “The Wanderer,” 1729; “Verses occasioned by Lady Tyrconnel’s Recovery,” 1730; “Poem to the Memory of Mrs. Oldfield” (anon.; attrib. to Savage), 1730; “A Collection of Pieces…. publish’d on occasion of the Dunciad,” 1732; “The Volunteer Laureat” (6 nos.), 1732–37; “On the Departure of the Prince and Princess of Orange,” 1734; “The Progress of a Divine,” 1735; “Poem on the Birthday of the Prince of Wales,” 1735; “Of Public Spirit in regard to Public Works,” 1737. Posthumous: “London and Bristol Compared,” 1744; “Various Poems,” 1761. He edited: “Miscellaneous Poems and Translations, by several hands,” 1726. Collected Works: in 2 vols., 1775.

Personal

  It is a long time since I saw him: I have been told some of his friends make complaints of a certain little effect of a spleen in his temper, which he is no more able to help, and therefore should no more be accountable for, than the misfortunes to which, in all likelihood, his constitution may have owed it originally.

  I have really taken more pains not to affront him than if my bread had depended on him. He would be to be forgiven, if it was misfortune only, and not pride, that made him captious.

  I must be sincere with you, as our correspondence is now likely to be closed. Your language is really too high, and what I am not used to from my superiors; much too extraordinary for me, at least sufficiently so to make me obey your commands, and never more presume to advise or meddle in your affairs, but leave your own conduct entirely to your own judgment. It is with concern I find so much misconstruction joined with so much resentment in your nature. You still injure some whom you had known many years as friends, and for whose intentions I would take upon me to answer; but I have no weight with you, and cannot tell how soon (if you have not already) you may misconstrue all I can say or do; and I see in the case how unforgiving your are, I desire to prevent this in time.

  Wherever he came his address secured him friends, whom his necessities soon alienated; so that he had, perhaps, a more numerous acquaintance than any man ever before attained, there being scarcely any person eminent on any account to whom he was not known, or whose character he was not in some degree able to delineate…. He was of a middle stature, of a thin habit of body, a long visage, coarse features, and melancholy aspect; of a grave and manly deportment, a solemn dignity of mein, but which, upon a nearer acquaintance, softened into an engaging easiness of manners. His walk was slow, and his voice tremulous and mournful. He was easily excited to smiles, but very seldom provoked to laughter. His mind was in an uncommon degree vigorous and active. His judgment was accurate, his apprehension quick, and his memory so tenacious that he was frequently observed to know what he had learned from others in a short time, better than those by whom he was informed, and could frequently recollect incidents, with all their combination of circumstances, which few would have regarded at the present time, but which the quickness of his apprehension impressed upon him. He had the art of escaping from his own reflections, and accommodating himself to every new scene.

  Poor Savage was well remembered to have been as inconsiderate, inconsistent, and inconstant a mortal as ever existed, what he might have said carried but little weight; and, as he would blow both hot and cold, nay, too frequently, to gratify the company present, would sacrifice the absent, though his best friend…. I met Savage one summer, in a condition too melancholy for description. He was starving; I supported him, and my father cloathed him, ’till his tragedy was brought on the stage, where it met with success in the representation, tho’ acted by the young part of the company, in the summer season; whatever might be the merit of his play, his necessities were too pressing to wait ’till winter for its performance.

  He was, however, undoubtedly a man of excellent parts; and, had he received the full benefits of a liberal education, and had his natural talents been cultivated to the best advantage, he might have made a respectable figure in life. He was happy in an agreeable temper, and a lively flow of wit, which made his company much coveted; nor was his judgment, both of writing and of men, inferior to his wit; but he was too much a slave to his passions, and his passions were too easily excited. He was warm in his friendships, but implacable in his enmity; and his greatest fault, which is indeed the greatest of all faults, was ingratitude. He seemed to suppose everything due to his merit, and that he was little obliged to any persons for those favours which he thought it their duty to confer on him; it is therefore the less to be wondered at, that he never rightly estimated the kindness of his many friends and benefactors, or preserved a grateful and due sense of their generosity towards him.

  The history of this man is well known by the life of him written by Johnson; which, if in no other respect valuable, is curious, in that it gives to view a character self-formed, as owing nothing to parental nurture, and scarce any thing to moral tuition, and describes a mind, in which, as in a neglected garden, weeds, without the least obstruction, were suffered to grow into luxuriance: nature had endowed him with fine parts, and those he cultivated as well as he was able; but his mind had received no moral culture, and for want thereof, we find him to have been a stranger to humility, gratitude, and those other virtues that tend to conciliate the affections of men, and insure the continuance of friendship…. Savage, as to his exterior, was, to a remarkable degree, accomplished: he was a handsome, well-made man, and very courteous in the modes of salutation. I have been told, that in the taking off his hat and disposing it under his arm, and in his bow, he displayed as much grace as those actions were capable of; and that he understood the exercise of a gentleman’s weapon, may be inferred from the use he made of it in that rash encounter which is related in his life, and to which his greatest misfortunes were owing.

  An earl’s son, a shoemaker’s apprentice, who had seen life in all its forms, who had feasted among blue ribands in Saint James’s Square, and had lain with fifty pounds weight of irons on his legs, in the condemned wards of Newgate. This man had, after many vicissitudes of fortune, sunk at last into abject and hopeless poverty. His pen had failed him. His patrons had been taken away by death, or estranged by the riotous profusion with which he squandered their bounty, and the ungrateful insolence with which he rejected their advice. He now lived by begging. He dined on venison and Champagne whenever he had been so fortunate as to borrow a guinea. If his questing had been unsuccessful, he appeased the rage of hunger with some scraps of broken meat, and lay down to rest under the Piazza of Covent Garden in warm weather, and, in cold weather, as near as he could get to the furnace of a glass house. Yet, in his misery, he was still an agreeable companion. He had an inexhaustible store of anecdotes about that gay and brilliant world from which he was now an outcast. He had observed the great men of both parties in hours of careless relaxation, had seen the leaders of opposition without the mask of patriotism, and had heard the prime minister roar with laughter and tell stories not over-decent. During some months Savage lived in the closest familiarity with Johnson; and then the friends parted, not without tears. Johnson remained in London to drudge for Cave. Savage went to the west of England, lived there as he had lived everywhere, and, in 1743, died, penniless and heart-broken, in Bristol gaol.

  Savage is commonly connected with Chatterton, but except in the accident of their poverty, I could never, for my own part, find out any resemblance. As a man, Chatterton was of austere demeanor, and as a poet he was of the highest powers; but Savage as a man was extremely social, and as a poet was not greatly beyond mediocrity. Chatterton died rather than ask relief: Savage did not, indeed, solicit relief, he commanded it.

  Whatever errors there might be in the common tradition of the Countess of Macclesfield’s story, it was at least well known that she had a male child whose father was Lord Rivers, and which child had disappeared. Speculation and gossip on the fate of this child were sure to be rife, and were not unlikely to produce a pretender, who, if he could not convince the mother of his claims, might at least find some sympathy and support in the public, who were not so well informed. A romantic story, a noble birth discovered by accident, an unnatural mother, and a neglected child, could not fail to captivate some persons; and experience shows that the partisans of such claimants are not scrupulous about proof, and that even the claimants themselves, if not checked by exposure, grow at length into a kind of faith in their story, which helps them to sustain their part. I am on the whole, and notwithstanding some circumstances in his favour, to which I would allow due weight, strongly of opinion that this was Savages’s case.

  The investigations of Moy Thomas would go to show that the Savage friend of Johnson’s early days in London was the most arrant of impostors; and that of all the shame that rests upon him, he can only justly be relieved of that which counts him a child of such a woman as the Countess of Macclesfield. I have dwelt upon the Savage episode, not alone because it provoked one of Johnson’s best pieces of prose work, but because it shows how open were his sympathies to such tales of distress, and how quick he was to lift the rod of chastisement upon wrongdoers of whatever degree.

  The by-ways of our literature reek with the memories of sordid tragedies. Ghosts of neglected wits, squalid still, winnow the air in the least disturbed corners. Many a genius has here dwindled, guttered, and gone out, a beggarly unknown garreteer; hustled from earth either to vanish in oblivion or be saturated with post-mortem praise—thin food and fit for a spook to feed on. Gather together these ravelled skeins, these records of souls prodigally wasted, none will fret the heart more than that of Richard Savage, the tale of whose pilgrimage has thrilled many a heart-string. Distressed poets there have been a many, but still the miserable chronicle of this man’s privations remains unequalled.

  No documents in support of Savage’s pretensions have been produced, not even those letters from which he himself claimed to make the discovery. All the details are vague, lacking in names and dates; they cannot be independently authenticated, and long intervals in his early life are left unaccounted for. Research has been unable to confirm the existence of Mrs. Lloyd. In the register of St. Andrew’s he is only allotted one godmother, Dorothea Ousley, who married Robert Delgardno at St. James’s, Westminster, on 24 Sept. 1698. There is no record of any communication between Savage and Lady Mason, the alleged guardian of his childhood, though she did not die till 1717. Newdigate Ousley, his godfather, who lived till 1714 at Enfield in Middlesex, was unknown to him. Lord Rivers’s will is dated fourteen months before his death, and contains no codicil, though Savage asserted that he revoked the legacy to him on his deathbed. His reputed mother (Mrs. Brett) steadily maintained that he was an impostor. When to these considerations is added the fact that Savage, very late in life, contradicted essential details in the published story in a letter to Elizabeth Carter on 10 May 1739, the falsity of his tale seems demonstrated. The chief points in his favour are that Lord Tyrconnel, Mrs. Brett’s nephew, after Savage had published his story, received him into his household, and that one at least of Lord Rivers’s children, whom he styles his sister, recognised his claim, and corresponded with him in his later years. That Mrs. Brett took no decisive steps to disprove his claims was owing doubtless to her unwillingness to revive the memory of her disgrace, and to the difficulty of obtaining proof of her own child Richard’s death.

The Bastard, 1728

  A poem remarkable for the vivacious sallies of thought in the beginning, where he makes a pompous enumeration of the imaginary advantages of base birth; and the pathetick sentiments at the end, where he recounts the real calamities which he suffered by the crime of his parents. The vigour and spirit of the verses, the peculiar circumstances of the author, the novelty of the subject, and the notoriety of the story to which the allusions are made, procured this performance a very favourable reception; great numbers were immediately dispersed, and editions were multiplied with unusual rapidity.

  Almost all things written from the heart, as this certainly was, have some merit. The Poet here describes sorrows and misfortunes which were by no means imaginary; and thus there runs a truth of thinking through this poem, without which it would be of little value, as Savage is, in other respects, but an indifferent poet.

  A very forcible piece of writing.

The Wanderer, 1729

  It has been generally objected to “The Wanderer,” that the disposition of the parts is irregular; that the design is obscure, and the plan perplexed; that the images, however beautiful, succeed each other without order, and that the whole performance is not so much a regular fabrick, as a heap of shining materials thrown together by accident, which strikes rather with the solemn magnificence of a stupendous ruin, than the elegant grandeur of a finished pile. This criticism is universal, and therefore it is reasonable to believe it at least in a great degree just; but Mr. Savage was always of a contrary opinion, and thought his drift could only be missed by negligence or stupidity, and that the whole plan was regular, and parts distinct. It was never denied to abound with strong representations of nature, and just observations upon life; and it may easily be observed, that most of his pictures have an evident tendency to illustrate his first great position, “that good is the consequence of evil.”

  Did you ever read Savage’s beautiful poem of “The Wanderer?” If no, do so, and you will see the fault which, I think, attaches to Lord Maxwell—a want of distinct precision and intelligibility about the story, which counteracts, especially with ordinary readers, the effect of beautiful and forcible diction, poetical imagery, and animated description.

  “The Wanderer” of Savage is a very remarkable production; the more remarkable when we consider the circumstances in which it was composed. Stanzas of it were often written upon cobblers’ stalls, and sometimes whole passages were indited in a pauper-lodging. One special quality of the poem is the extreme purity, and moral elevation of sentiment, contrasted with his own practical conduct.

  “The Wanderer” is the poem upon which he evidently bestowed the greatest care. It may be regarded as his own epitaph, written by himself, and embodying the dark phrases of his career, the most vivid of his sensations, and the beauty of his moral sentiments, combined with the want of system, the self-esteem, recklessness, and courage, which alternated in his feelings and conduct.

  Not being compelled to write for bread, he finished it with considerable care, and it forms a very favourable specimen of his powers. It contains much that is feeble, tawdry, and in the meanest taste; but, on the other hand, the versification is fluent, and there are passages of so much vigour and excellence as to justify a belief that, with deeper study, broader culture, and a higher and wider experience of life, its author might have taken a respectable position in the front rank of our minor poets. The commonplace, however, is so mixed up with that which is more forcible and elevated that it is difficult to make quotations.

General

  Though he may not be altogether secure against the objections of the critic, it must however be acknowledged, that his works are the productions of a genius truly poetical; and, what many writers who have been more lavishly applauded cannot boast, that they have an original air, which has no resemblance of any foregoing writer, that the versification and sentiments have a cast peculiar to themselves, which no man can imitate with success, because what was nature in Savage, would in another be affectation. It must be confessed, that his descriptions are striking, his images animated, his fictions justly imagined, and his allegories artfully pursued; that his diction is elevated, though sometimes forced, and his numbers sonorous and majestick, though frequently sluggish and encumbered. Of his style, the general fault is harshness, and its general excellence is dignity; of his sentiments, the prevailing beauty is simplicity, and uniformity the prevailing defect.

  The incidents of his life rather than the creations of his genius have preserved the fame of Savage. His poems are his only writings now recognized, and we find them regularly included in editions of the British anthology. It is, however, but here and there, scattered through a long array of heroics, that we can detect either originality or raciness. Like his life, these effusions are crude and unsustained; they lack finish, completeness, and unity. Deformed by coarseness, and sometimes by obscurity, they often repel taste; and their frequent want of clear and uniform design induces weariness. Their most genuine interest is personal; we naturally associate them with the misfortunes of the author, and the special references are not without a pathetic zest…. It is evident that he possessed, in an uncommon degree, what the phrenologists call the organ of wonder, and metaphysical writers a sense of the sublime. In his descriptions of nature and life, we perceive the inspiration of a reflective ideality. His couplets occasionally glow with vital animation, and his choice of epithets is often felicitous. Vigour, fluency, and expressiveness, at times, indicate that there was an original vein in his nature, though too carelessly worked to produce a great and consistent result.

  Savage’s poem called “The Bastard” has some vigorous lines, and some touches of tenderness as well as bursts of more violent passion; but, as a whole, it is crude, spasmodic, and frequently wordy and languid. His other compositions, some of which evince a talent for satire, of which assiduous cultivation might have made something, have all passed into oblivion. The personal history of Savage, which Johnson’s ardent and expanded narrative has made universally known, is more interesting than his verse; but even that owes more than half its attraction to his biographer. He had, in fact, all his life, apparently, much more of another kind of madness than he ever had of that of poetry.

  Created an interest, and had chances in life greater than his personal merits warranted. His poetical pretensions were of no high order, and in most instances his productions were only redeemed by a few vigorous lines.

  His poems are now hopelessly unreadable.

  Savage ostentatiously described himself on his title-pages as “Son of the late Earl Rivers,” but it is more than doubtful whether this unwise son knew his own father. It is needful here only to dwell on the fact that at the age of about thirty Savage displayed for two or three years some genuine poetical talent, and published three vigorous works in heroic measure. “The Bastard” (1728), written in real or feigned indignation against his supposed mother, the Countess of Macclesfield, enjoyed a success of scandal; it is short, terse, and effective. In “The Wanderer” (1729) Savage made a very different effort to subdue the public, with a long and serious poem in five books…. It is really a kind of prototype of Goldsmith’s “Traveller,” to which it bears the sort of relation that Dryden is conventionally supposed to bear to Pope. What is mainly noticeable in “The Wanderer” … is the influence of Thomson, enlarging the range of poetic observation, and encouraging an exacter portraiture of natural objects. The last book of Savage’s poem is remarkably full of brilliant if often crude colour.