Transcribed from the 1888 Cassell & Company edition by LesBowler.
CASSELL’S NATIONAL LIBRARY.
LIVES
OF THE
English Poets
Addison Savage Swift
BY
SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D.
CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited:
LONDON, PARIS,NEW YORK &MELBOURNE.
1888.
INTRODUCTION.
Johnson’s “Lives of thePoets” were written to serve as Introductions to a tradeedition of the works of poets whom the booksellers selected forrepublication. Sometimes, therefore, they dealt briefly with menin whom the public at large has long ceased to be interested.Richard Savage would be of this number if Johnson’s accountof his life had not secured for him lasting remembrance.Johnson’s Life of Savage in this volume has not lessinterest than the Lives of Addison and Swift, between which it isset, although Savage himself has no right at all to be rememberedin such company. Johnson published this piece of biography whenhis age was thirty-five; his other lives of poets appeared whenthat age was about doubled. He was very poor when the Life ofSavage was written for Cave. Soon after its publication, we aretold, Mr. Harte dined with Cave, and incidentally praised it.Meeting him again soon afterwards Cave said to Mr. Harte,“You made a man very happy t’other day.” “How could that be?” asked Harte. “Nobody wasthere but ourselves.” Cave answered by reminding himthat a plate of victuals was sent behind a screen, which was toJohnson, dressed so shabbily that he did not choose toappear.
Johnson, struggling, found Savage struggling, and was drawn tohim by faith in the tale he told. We have seen in our own timehow even an Arthur Orton could find sensible and good people tobelieve the tale with which he sought to enforce claim upon theTichborne baronetcy. Savage had literary skill, and he couldpersonate the manners of a gentleman in days when there werestill gentlemen of fashion who drank, lied, and swaggered intomidnight brawls. I have no doubt whatever that he was the son ofthe nurse with whom the Countess of Macclesfield had placed achild that died, and that after his mother’s death he foundthe papers upon which he built his plot to personate the child,extort money from the Countess and her family, and bring himselfinto a profitable notoriety.
Johnson’s simple truthfulness and ready sympathy made ithard for him to doubt the story told as Savage told it to him.But when he told it again himself, though he denounced one whomhe believed to be an unnatural mother, and dealt gently with hisfriend, he did not translate evil into good. Through