he always preserved a strong
sense of the dignity, the beauty, and the necessity of virtue; and that
he never contributed deliberately to spread corruption amongst mankind.
His actions, which were generally precipitate, were often blameable; but
his writings, being the productions of study, uniformly tended to the
exaltation of the mind, and the propagation of morality and piety.

These writings may improve mankind, when his failings shall be
forgotten; and, therefore, he must be considered, upon the whole, as a
benefactor to the world; nor can his personal example do any hurt, since
whoever hears of his faults will hear of the miseries which they brought
upon him, and which would deserve less pity, had not his condition been
such as made his faults pardonable. He may be considered as a child
exposed to all the temptations of indigence, at an age when resolution
was not yet strengthened by conviction, nor virtue confirmed by habit; a
circumstance which, in his Bastard, he laments in a very affecting
manner:

No mother's care
Shielded my infant innocence with pray'r:
No father's guardian hand my youth maintain'd,
Call'd forth my virtues, or from vice restrain'd.

The Bastard, however it might provoke or mortify his mother, could not
be expected to melt her to compassion, so that he was still under the
same want of the necessaries of life; and he, therefore, exerted all the
interest which his wit, or his birth, or his misfortunes, could procure,
to obtain, upon the death of Eusden, the place of poet laureate, and
prosecuted his application with so much diligence, that the king
publickly declared it his intention to bestow it upon him; but such was
the fate of Savage, that even the king, when he intended his advantage,
was disappointed in his schemes; for the lord chamberlain, who has the
disposal of the laurel, as one of the appendages of his office, either
did not know the king's design, or did not approve it, or thought the
nomination of the laureate an encroachment upon his rights, and,
therefore, bestowed the laurel upon Colley Cibber.

Mr. Savage, thus disappointed, took a resolution of applying to the
queen, that, having once given him life, she would enable him to support
it, and, therefore, published a short poem on her birthday, to which he
gave the odd title of Volunteer Laureate. The event of this essay he has
himself related in the following letter, which he prefixed to the poem,
when he