2-oS. VI. 150., Nov. 13. '58.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 



387 



Macclesfield on account of his birth. Earl Rivers himself 

 stood godfather, gave him his own name, and saw it en- 

 tered accordingly in the Register Book of St. Andrew's 

 Holborn ; and for whom, no doubt, he would have liberally 

 provided, had not some unfair methods been put in prac- 

 tice to deceive him by a false report of his son's death. To 

 his own mother he has not been the least obliged for his 

 education, but to her mother, the Lady Mason : she com- 

 mitted him to the care of Mrs. Lloyd, his godmother, who 

 dying before he was ten years old, out of her tender re- 

 gard, left him a legacy of 300/., which was embezzled by 

 her executors." 



Savage henceforth continued to announce him- 

 self as "son of the late Earl Rivers;" and, in 

 1724, the foolish goodnatured Aaron Hill in- 

 serted letters concerning his case, and finally pub- 

 lished a brief outline of his story, avowedly from 

 papers " prepared " and forwarded by Savage 

 himself. In these the mother is depicted, not as 

 a wretch without a spark of goodness, but as one 

 who " in direct opposition to the impulse of her 

 natural compassion, upon mistaken motives of a 

 false delicacy, shut her memory against his wants." 

 In some verses by Savage, inserted at the same 

 time, but not to be found in his works, he thus 

 mentions her : — 



" Yet has this sweet neglecter of my woes 

 The softest, tenderest Breast that pity knows ! 

 Her eyes shed mercy wheresoever they shine, 

 And her soul melts at every woe — but mine." 



Savage afterwards denied to Johnson the au- 

 thorship of this poem, declaring that it was written 

 for him by Aaron Hill. Motives for such a denial 

 are obvious. In the number of The Plain Dealer 

 in which they appear it is directly stated that 

 Savage "writ the following copy of verses ;" and 

 five months after, in the same publication. Savage 

 publicly refers to them as " a few ineffectual lines 

 which I had written," &c., " to which your hu- 

 manity was pleased to add certain reflections in 

 my favor." Savage, as his correspondence with 

 Hill at this period shows, had too much vanity to 

 permit another to write verses as his ; and the 

 lines are at all events, in spirit, strictly consistent 

 with his prose statement at the same period : for 

 in his letter to The Plain Dealer he speaks of 

 Mrs. Brett as " a mother whose fine qualities make 

 it impossible to me not to forgive her, even while 

 I am miserable by her means only." There are 

 also scattered over the several communications 

 frequent hints of his pecuniary distress, and of 

 the desirableness of "a competency," — threats 

 from Savage himself of complaining " in a more 

 public manner than I have yet allowed myself to 

 resolve on," and expressions of a confident hope 

 of " being shortly less oppressed than I have 

 been." In all this, however, there is no mention 

 of the name either of the Countess of Macclesfield, 

 Mrs. Brett, or Lord Rivers. The Plain Dealer 

 was not so bold as Mr. Curll, and Savage for some 

 reason was more moderate. While whining in 

 this fashion, he appears to have forgotten that he 

 Lad already put forth, or allowed to be put forth, 



in the Poetical Register the story of his being 

 deliberately deprived, by the false statement of 

 somebody, of Lord Rivers's legacy. This he 

 shortly afterwards told us alluded to his mother, 

 " the sweet neglecter of his woes," with " the 

 softest, tenderest breast," who, we are informed, 

 and as he must all along have known if his story 

 were true, was the diabolical author of this un- 

 paralleled act of cruelty. 



Savage now published his Miscellanies, and the 

 appeals in The Plain Dealer brought him many 

 subscribers, and put him in possession of funds. 

 According to his Life, published in the following 

 year (1727), he had prepared a long preface to it, 

 giving some account of his mother's unparalleled 

 ill-treatment of him. But the alleged preface, 

 though made the authority for statements in the 

 Life, did not appear till 1728 ; having, according 

 to the writer of the Life, been cancelled " at the 

 instigation of some very considerable persons." 

 In this "Preface" (that is, in 1728), Savage for the 

 first time in his own person attacked Mrs. Brett, in 

 a strain of bitter raillery — repeated the story of 

 the legacy from Lord Rivers, and added another 

 item of cruelty in the alleged attempt of his 

 mother to have him kidnapped and transported, 

 — a fact which certainly had not occurred since 

 1724, when he described her as a " sweet neglecter 

 of my woes." 



Theiiye of Savage, published in 1727, was said 

 by Johnson to have been written by Mr. Becking- 

 ham and another gentleman. Savage was then in 

 prison under sentence of death for the murder of 

 Sinclair ; and the Life was clearly intended to in- 

 crease, as it certainly did, the public interest in 

 his behalf. Though Savage had no doubt denied 

 the authorship to Johnson ; and though in Savage's 

 letter to Mrs. Carter he affected to repudiate the 

 story of the "mean nurse," and to modify other 

 statements, there can be no doubt that this pam- 

 phlet, so well adapted to serve his interests, was 

 written by him, or at least from his instructions. 

 How else could the writer quote statements from 

 Savage's " suppressed" preface ? Here we find a 

 few new facts, and the old accusations against 

 Mrs. Brett more fully and artistically developed. 

 Here, too, we find the " public confession of adul- 

 tery," and most of the other allegations which are 

 now proved to be false, although incorporated in 

 Johnson's memoir. 



It was now ten years since Savage had first 

 put himself forward as the son of Lord Rivers ; 

 and it does not appear that Mrs. Brett or her 

 family had taken any notice of his claims. It is 

 indeed stated in the Memoir of 1727 that in the 

 South Sea year " a lady whose duty it seemed to 

 have been to take some care of him," through the 

 agency of Wilks, the manager, sent him 501. as a 

 present. This sum, the Memoir says, was pro- 

 mised to — 



" Be made up Two hundred ; but it being in the height 



