ry affecting
manner:--

"No mother's care
Shielded my infant innocence with prayer;
No father's guardian hand my youth maintained,
Called forth my virtues, or from vice restrained."

"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 publicly
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 afterwards reprinted it in The Gentleman's Magazine, whence
I have copied it entire, as this was one of the few attempts in which
Mr. Savage succeeded.

"MR. URBAN,--In your Magazine for February you published the last
'Volunteer Laureate,' written on a very melancholy occasion, the death
of the royal patroness of arts and literature in general, and of the
author of that poem in particular; I now send you the first that Mr.
Savage wrote under that title. This gentleman, notwithstanding a very
considerable interest, being, on the death of Mr. Eusden, disappointed
of the Laureate's place, wrote the following verses; which were no
sooner published, but the late queen sent to a bookseller for them. The
author had not at that time a friend either to get him introduced, or
his poem presented at Court; yet, such was the unspeakable goodness of
that princess, that, notwithstanding this act of ceremony was wanting,
in a few days after publication Mr. Savage received a bank-bill of