gorgeous, it is crippled prose; and familiar images in laboured language have nothing to recommend them but absurd novelty which, wanting the attractions of Nature, cannot please long One excellence of The Splendid Shilling is that it is short. Disguise can gratify no longer than it deceives.

IT

SAVAGE'

T has been observed in all ages that the advantages of nature 1 or of fortune have contributed very little to the promotion of happiness; and that those whom the splendour of their rank or the extent of their capacity have placed upon the summits of human life, have not often given any just occasion to envy in those who look up to them from a lower station 2: whether it be that apparent superiority incites great designs, and great designs are naturally liable to fatal miscarriages; or that the general lot of mankind is misery, and the misfortunes of those whose eminence drew upon them an universal attention have been more carefully recorded, because they were more generally observed, and have in reality been only more conspicuous than those of others, not more frequent, or more severe.

That affluence and power, advantages extrinsick and adventi- 2 tious, and therefore easily separable from those by whom they are possessed, should very often flatter the mind with expectations of felicity which they cannot give, raises no astonishment: but it seems rational to hope that intellectual greatness should produce better effects; that minds qualified for great attainments should first endeavour their own benefit; and that they who are most able to teach others the way to happiness should with most certainty follow it themselves.

But this expectation, however plausible, has been very fre- 3 quently disappointed. The heroes of literary as well as civil history have been very often no less remarkable for what [they have suffered than for what] they have atchieved 3; and volumes have been written only to enumerate the miseries of the learned, and relate their unhappy lives and untimely deaths*.

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To these mournful narratives I am about to add the Life of Richard Savage, a man whose writings entitle him to an eminent rank in the classes of learning, and whose misfortunes claim a degree of compassion not always due to the unhappy, as they were often the consequences of the crimes of others rather than his own.

In the year 1697 Anne Countess of Macclesfield, having lived for some time upon very uneasy terms with her husband', thought a public confession of adultery the most obvious and expeditious method of obtaining her liberty, and therefore declared that the child, with which she was then great, was begotten by the Earl Rivers. This, as may be imagined, made her husband no less desirous of a separation than herself, and he prosecuted his design in the most effectual manner; for he applied not to the ecclesiastical courts for a divorce, but to the parliament for an act, by which his marriage might be dissolved, the nuptial contract totally annulled, and the children of his wife illegitimated 3. This act, after the usual deliberation, he obtained, though without the approbation of some, who considered marriage as an affair only cognizable by ecclesiastical judges';

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* See Appendix GG.

2 See Appendix HH.

3 The want of male issue [to the Earl of Macclesfield] was the occasion of engaging two eminent Peers, Duke of Hamilton and Lord Mohun, in a duel in which they had the misfortune to kill each other.' Life of Savage, 1727, p. 4.

[This duel was fought in Hyde Park on Nov. 15, 1712. Scott's Swift, iii. 61. The two peers had married descendants of the first Earl of Macclesfield. In 1702, through the failure of the Earl's male heirs, his descendants in the female line became co-heirs. There were complicated disputes concerning the Macclesfield real estate. Cokayne's Complete Peerage. An affront given by Mohun to Hamilton at a meeting concerning the lawsuit was alleged to have been the immediate cause of the duel.]

'This year was made remarkable by the dissolution of a marriage solemnized in the face of the church.' SALMON'S Review of Hist. of Eng. 1724, ii. 89.

The following protest is registered in the books of the House of Lords: 'Dissentient.

'Because we conceive that this is the first bill of that nature that hath passed, where there was not a divorce first obtained in the Spiritual Court; which we look upon as an ill precedent, and may be of dangerous consequence in the future.

'HALIFAX. ROCHESTER.'

NOTE BY JOHNSON. 'The canon law, which the common law follows in this case, deems so highly and with such mysterious reverence of the nuptial tie, that it will not allow it to be unloosed for any cause whatsoever that arises after the union is made. ... With us in England adultery is only a cause of separation from bed and board.... However, divorces a vinculo matrimonii, for adultery, have of late years been frequently granted by act of parliament.' BLACKSTONE, Com. i. 441.

In 1694 the Duke of Norfolk had moved for a similar Act. 'All the bishops who had been made during

and on March 3d' was separated from his wife, whose fortune, which was very great, was repaid her 2, and who having, as well as her husband, the liberty of making another choice, was in a short time married to Colonel Brett 3.

While the Earl of Macclesfield was prosecuting this affair his 6 wife was, on the 10th of January, 1697-8 *, delivered of a son, and the Earl Rivers, by appearing to consider him as his own, left none any reason to doubt of the sincerity of her declaration; for he was his godfather, and gave him his own name, which was by his direction inserted in the register of St. Andrew's parish in Holborn 5, but unfortunately left him to the care of his mother, whom, as she was now set free from her husband, he probably imagined likely to treat with great tenderness the child that had contributed to so pleasing an event. It is not indeed easy to discover what motives could be found to overbalance that natural affection of a parent, or what interest could be promoted by neglect or cruelty. The dread of shame or of poverty, by which some wretches have been incited to abandon or to murder their children, cannot be supposed to have affected a woman who had proclaimed her crimes and solicited reproach, and on whom the clemency of the legislature had undeservedly bestowed a fortune, which would have been very little diminished by the expences which the care of her child could have brought upon her. It was therefore not likely that she would be wicked without temptation, that she would look upon her son from his birth with a kind of resentment and abhorrence, and, instead of supporting,

the present reign [William and Mary's] were of opinion that a second marriage in that case was lawful...; but all the bishops that had been made by the two former kings [Charles II and James II] were of another opinion.' BURNET, Hist.iii. 140.

Halifax was William Savile, Marquis of Halifax, and Rochester was Lawrence Hyde, Earl of Rochester.

The Bill passed the Lords on March 3, 1697-8, the Commons on March 15, and obtained the Royal Assent on April 2. Lords' Journals, xi. 224, 256; Commons' Journals, xii. 160.

2 Luttrell recorded on March 3, 1697-8, that by a clause added to the bill of divorce' she shall have

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assisting, and defending him, delight to see him struggling with misery; or that she would take every opportunity of aggravating his misfortunes and obstructing his resources, and with an implacable and restless cruelty continue her persecution from the first hour of his life to the last 1.

But whatever were her motives, no sooner was her son born than she discovered a resolution of disowning him; and in a very short time removed him from her sight by committing him to the care of a poor woman, whom she directed to educate him as her own, and injoined never to inform him of his true parents 2.

Such was the beginning of the life of Richard Savage. Born · with a legal claim to honour and to affluence he was in two months illegitimated by the parliament 3 and disowned by his mother, doomed to poverty and obscurity, and launched upon the ocean of life only that he might be swallowed by its quick-. sands or dashed upon its rocks.

9 His mother could not indeed infect others with the same cruelty. As it was impossible to avoid the inquiries which the curiosity or tenderness of her relations made after her child, she was obliged to give some account of the measures that she had taken; and her mother, the Lady Mason*, whether in approbation of her design or to prevent more criminal contrivances,

At the trial it was proved that she had shown great fondness for her infant daughter, and when the child died had sent for a lock of its hair. A woman moreover deposed about her second confinement that 'she often heard the gentlewoman wish the child to be a boy, and was mightily pleased when she heard it was a boy.' N. & Q. 2 S. vi. 363.

Savage, it is clear, had a great difficulty to contend with in Mrs. Brett's general character for kindness. He met it by admitting it. In The Plain Dealer, No. 28 (post, SAVAGE, 59), he is said to have given her a character for humanity with regard to the rest of the world.' In the same number he, or Aaron Hill in his name, writes of her :

'Yet has this sweet neglecter of my woes

The softest, tend'rest breast that pity knows.