enough to the modern reader that, if so, both of the ancient orators must have written true Johnsonese; and, in fact, the style of the true author is often as plainly marked in many of these compositions as in the Rambler or Rasselas.  For this deception, such as it was, Johnson expressed penitence at the end of his life, though he said that he had ceased to write when he found that they were taken as genuine.  He would not be “accessory to the propagation of falsehood.”

Another of Johnson’s works which appeared in 1744 requires notice both for its intrinsic merit, and its autobiographical interest.  The most remarkable of his Grub-Street companions was the Richard Savage already mentioned.  Johnson’s life of him written soon after his death is one of his most forcible performances, and the best extant illustration of the life of the struggling authors of the time.  Savage claimed to be the illegitimate son of the Countess of Macclesfield, who was divorced from her husband in the year of his birth on account of her connexion with his supposed father, Lord Rivers.  According to the story, believed by Johnson, and published without her contradiction in the mother’s lifetime, she not only disavowed her son, but cherished an unnatural hatred for him.  She told his father that he was dead, in order that he might not be benefited by the father’s will; she tried to have him kidnapped and sent to the plantations; and she did her best to prevent him from receiving a pardon when he had been sentenced to death for killing a man in a tavern brawl.  However this may be, and there are reasons for doubt, the story was generally believed, and caused much sympathy for the supposed victim.  Savage was at one time protected by the kindness of Steele, who published his story, and sometimes employed him as a literary assistant.  When Steele became disgusted with him, he received generous help from the actor Wilks and from Mrs. Oldfield, to whom he had been introduced by some dramatic efforts.  Then he was taken up by Lord Tyrconnel, but abandoned by him after a violent quarrel; he afterwards called himself a volunteer laureate, and received a pension of 50_l_. a year from Queen Caroline; on her death he was thrown into deep distress, and helped by a subscription to which Pope was the chief contributor, on condition of retiring to the country.  Ultimately he quarrelled with his last protectors, and ended by dying in a debtor’s prison.  Various poetical works, now utterly forgotten, obtained for him scanty profit.  This career sufficiently reveals the character.  Savage belonged to the very common type of men, who seem to employ their whole talents to throw away their chances in life, and to disgust every one who offers them a helping hand.  He was, however, a man of some talent, though his poems are now hopelessly unreadable, and seems to have had a singular attraction for Johnson.  The biography is curiously marked by Johnson’s constant effort