tre of genius by the ornaments of
wealth. His condition did not appear to excite much compassion, for he
had not been always careful to use the advantages he enjoyed with
that moderation which ought to have been with more than usual caution
preserved by him, who knew, if he had reflected, that he was only a
dependent on the bounty of another, whom he could expect to support him
no longer than he endeavoured to preserve his favour by complying with
his inclinations, and whom he nevertheless set at defiance, and was
continually irritating by negligence or encroachments.

Examples need not be sought at any great distance to prove that
superiority of fortune has a natural tendency to kindle pride, and that
pride seldom fails to exert itself in contempt and insult; and if this
is often the effect of hereditary wealth, and of honours enjoyed only by
the merits of others, it is some extenuation of any indecent triumphs to
which this unhappy man may have been betrayed, that his prosperity was
heightened by the force of novelty, and made more intoxicating by a
sense of the misery in which he had so long languished, and perhaps of
the insults which he had formerly borne, and which he might now think
himself entitled to revenge. It is too common for those who have
unjustly suffered pain to inflict it likewise in their turn with the
same injustice, and to imagine that they have a right to treat others as
they have themselves been treated.

That Mr. Savage was too much elevated by any good fortune is generally
known; and some passages of his Introduction to "The Author to be Let"
sufficiently show that he did not wholly refrain from such satire, as he
afterwards thought very unjust when he was exposed to it himself; for,
when he was afterwards ridiculed in the character of a distressed poet,
he very easily discovered that distress was not a proper subject for
merriment or topic of invective. He was then able to discern, that if
misery be the effect of virtue, it ought to be reverenced; if of ill
fortune, to be pitied; and if of vice, not to be insulted, because it
is perhaps itself a punishment adequate to the crime by which it was
produced. And the humanity of that man can deserve no panegyric who is
capable of reproaching a criminal in the hands of the executioner. But
these reflections, though they readily occurred to him in the first and
last parts of his life, were, I am afraid, for a long time forgotten; at
least they were, l