at night
with literary and theological conversation at an alehouse in the city.
But the most remarkable of the persons with whom at this time Johnson
consorted was Richard Savage, 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 iron
on his legs in the condemned ward 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.

Soon after his death, while the public curiosity was strongly excited
about his extraordinary character, and his not less extraordinary
adventures, a life of him appeared widely different from the catchpenny
lives of eminent men which were then a staple article of manufacture in
Grub Street. The style was indeed deficient in ease and variety; and the
writer was evidently too partial to the Latin element of our language.
But the little work, with all its faults, was a masterpiece. No finer
specimen of literary biography existed in any language, living or dead;
and a discerning critic might have confidently predicted that the author
was destined to be the foun