Compassion seems indeed to have been among the few good qualities possessed by Savage; he never appeared inclined to take the advantage of weakness, to attack the defenceless, or to press upon the falling:  Whoever was distressed was certain at last of his good wishes.  But when his heart was not softened by the sight of misery, he was obstinate in his resentment, and did not quickly lose the remembrance of an injury.  He always harboured the sharpest resentment against judge Page; and a short time before his death, he gratified it in a satire upon that severe magistrate.

When in conversation this unhappy subject was mentioned, Savage appeared neither to consider himself as a murderer, nor as a man wholly free from blood.  How much, and how long he regretted it, appeared in a poem published many years afterwards, which the following lines will set in a very striking light.

  Is chance a guilt, that my disast’rous heart,
  For mischief never meant, must ever smart? 
  Can self-defence be sin?—­Ah! plead no more! 
  What tho’ no purpos’d malice stain’d thee o’er;
  Had Heav’n befriended thy unhappy side,
  Thou had’st not been provok’d, or thou had’st died.

  Far be the guilt of home-shed blood from all,
  On whom, unfought, imbroiling dangers fall. 
  Still the pale dead revives and lives to me,
  To me through pity’s eye condemn’d to see. 
  Remembrance veils his rage, but swells his fate,
  Griev’d I forgive, and am grown cool too late,

  Young and unthoughtful then, who knows one day,
  What rip’ning virtues might have made their way? 
  He might, perhaps, his country’s friend have prov’d,
  Been gen’rous, happy, candid and belov’d;
  He might have sav’d some worth now doom’d to fall,
  And I, perchance, in him have murder’d all.

Savage had now obtained his liberty, but was without any settled means of support, and as he had lost all tenderness for his mother, who had thirsted for his blood, he resolved to lampoon her, to extort that pension by satire, which he knew she would never grant upon any principles of honour, or humanity.  This expedient proved successful; whether shame still survived, though compassion was extinct, or whether her relations had more delicacy than herself, and imagined that some of the darts which satire might point at her, would glance upon them:  Lord Tyrconnel, whatever were his motives, upon his promise to lay aside the design of exposing his mother, received him into his family, treated him as his equal, and engaged to allow him a pension of 200 l. a year.