Surely we may have charity for Oldfield, when she dispensed the same virtue to those around her.  Towards none did she show it more sweetly than to that disreputable fraud and alleged man of genius, Richard Savage.  In his own feverish day Dick Savage cut a literary swath more wide than enviable, but when he is viewed from the unsympathetic light of the present he seems merely a clever vagabond.  Yet Dr. Johnson, who could be so stern towards some of his contemporaries, condescended to love the aforesaid vagabond, in a ponderous, elephantine way, and deified him by writing the life of the ingrate, or an apology therefor.  Savage had, once upon a time, led the youthful Johnson more than a few feet away from the path of rectitude, but the philosopher forgave, without forgetting, the wiles of the tempter, and treated him with a generosity by no means deserved.  In the years of his prosperity—­and the remembrance did him credit—­Johnson could never forget that Savage and himself had been poor together, and had often wandered through London with hardly a penny to show between them.

* * * * *

“It is melancholy to reflect,” says Boswell, “that Johnson and Savage were sometimes in such extreme indigence that they could not pay for a lodging; so that they have wandered together whole nights in the streets.  Yet in these almost incredible scenes of distress, we may suppose that Savage mentioned many of the anecdotes with which Johnson afterwards enriched the life of this unhappy companion, and those of other poets.

“He told Sir Joshua Reynolds, that one night in particular, when Savage and he walked round St. James’s Square for want of a lodging, they were not at all depressed by their situation; but in high spirits and brimful of patriotism, traversed the square for several hours, inveighed against the Minister, and resolved they would stand by their country.”

* * * * *

The claim of Savage that he was the illegitimate son of the Countess of Macclesfield—­a claim which he was always asserting to the point of coarseness—­seems to have been the stock-in-trade of this vagabond’s life.  There never was proof that the relationship which he thus flaunted really existed; for, although the conduct of the Countess[A] was unpardonable, the poet could never show that he had been the mysterious infant which had this lady for its mother and Lord Rivers for an unnatural father.  The child disappeared, and nothing more was ever known of its existence.

[Footnote A:  Anne Mason, wife of Charles Gerrard, first Earl of Macclesfield, was divorced from that nobleman by an Act of Parliament.  Another earl, Richard Savage, Lord Rivers, was the co-respondent.  This was the same Countess of Macclesfield who subsequently married Cibber’s friend, Colonel Brett.]