lating life from its highest gradation to its
lowest.'

In this gay period of life, when he was surrounded by the affluence of
pleasure, 1729, he published the Wanderer, a Moral Poem, of which the
design is comprised in these lines.

I fly all public care, all venal strife,
To try the _Still_, compared with _Active Life_.
To prove by these the sons of men may owe,
The fruits of bliss to bursting clouds of woe,
That ev'n calamity by thought refin'd
Inspirits, and adorns the thinking mind.

And more distinctly in the following passage:

By woe the soul to daring actions swells,
By woe in plaintless patience it excells;
From patience prudent, clear experience springs,
And traces knowledge through the course of things.
Thence hope is form'd, thence fortitude, success,
Renown--Whate'er men covet or caress.

This performance was always considered by Mr. Savage as his
master-piece; but Mr. Pope, when he asked his opinion of it, told him,
that he read it once over, and was not displeased with it, that it gave
him more pleasure at the second perusal, and delighted him still more at
the third. From a poem so successfully written, it might be reasonably
expected that he should have gained considerable advantages; but the
case was otherwise; he sold the copy only for ten guineas. That he got
so small a price for so finished a poem, was not to be imputed either to
the necessity of the writer, or to the avarice of the bookseller. He was
a slave to his passions, and being then in the pursuit of some trifling
gratification, for which he wanted a supply of money, he sold his poem
to the first bidder, and perhaps for the first price which was proposed,
and probably would have been content with less, if less had been
offered. It was addressed to the earl of Tyrconnel, not only in the
first lines, but in a formal dedication, filled with the highest strains
of panegyric. These praises in a short time he found himself inclined to
retract, being discarded by the man on whom he had bestowed them, and
whom he said, he then discovered, had not deserved them.

Of this quarrel, lord Tyrconnel and Mr. Savage assigned very different
reasons. Lord Tyrconnel charged Savage with the most licentious
behaviour, introducing company into his house, and practising with them
the most irregular frolics, and committing all the outrages of
drunkenness. Lord Tyrconnel farther alledged against Savage, that the
books of which he h