issitudes of hope and disappointment:
he now found that his friends were only companions who were willing to
share his gaiety, but not to partake of his misfortunes; and therefore
he no longer expected any assistance from them. It must, however, be
observed of one gentleman, that he offered to release him by paying
the debt, but that Mr. Savage would not consent, I suppose because he
thought he had before been too burthensome to him. He was offered
by some of his friends that a collection should be made for his
enlargement; but he "treated the proposal," and declared "he should
again treat it, with disdain. As to writing any mendicant letters, he
had too high a spirit, and determined only to write to some ministers of
state, to try to regain his pension."

He continued to complain of those that had sent him into the country,
and objected to them, that he had "lost the profits of his play, which
had been finished three years;" and in another letter declares his
resolution to publish a pamphlet, that the world might know how "he had
been used."

This pamphlet was never written; for he in a very short time recovered
his usual tranquillity, and cheerfully applied himself to more
inoffensive studies. He, indeed, steadily declared that he was promised
a yearly allowance of fifty pounds, and never received half the sum; but
he seemed to resign himself to that as well as to other misfortunes,
and lose the remembrance of it in his amusements and employments.
The cheerfulness with which he bore his confinement appears from the
following letter, which he wrote January the 30th, to one of his friends
in London:

"I now write to you from my confinement in Newgate, where I have been
ever since Monday last was se'nnight, and where I enjoy myself with much
more tranquillity than I have known for upwards of a twelvemonth past;
having a room entirely to myself, and pursuing the amusement of my
poetical studies, uninterrupted, and agreeable to my mind. I thank the
Almighty, I am now all collected in myself; and, though my person is in
confinement, my mind can expatiate on ample and useful subjects with
all the freedom imaginable. I am now more conversant with the Nine than
ever, and if, instead of a Newgate bird, I may be allowed to be a
bird of the Muses, I assure you, sir, I sing very freely in my cage;
sometimes, indeed, in the plaintive notes of the nightingale; but at
others, in the cheerful strains of the lark."

In another let