Of this quarrel, lord Tyrconnel and Mr. Savage assigned very different reasons.  Lord Tyrconnel charged Savage with the most licentious behaviour, introducing company into his house, and practising with them the most irregular frolics, and committing all the outrages of drunkenness.  Lord Tyrconnel farther alledged against Savage, that the books of which he himself had made him a present, were sold or pawned by him, so that he had often the mortification to see them exposed to sale upon stalls.

Savage, it seems, was so accustomed to live by expedients, that affluence could not raise him above them.  He often went to the tavern and trusted the payment of his reckoning to the liberality of his company; and frequently of company to whom he was very little known.  This conduct indeed, seldom drew him into much inconvenience, or his conversation and address were so pleasing, that few thought the pleasure which they received from him, dearly purchased by paying for his wine.  It was his peculiar happiness that he scarcely ever found a stranger, whom he did not leave a friend; but it must likewise be added, that he had not often a friend long, without obliging him to become an enemy.

Mr. Savage on the other hand declared, that lord Tyrconnel quarrelled with him because he would not subtract from his own luxury and extravagance what he had promised to allow him; and that his resentment was only a plea for the violation of his promise:  He asserted that he had done nothing which ought to exclude him from that subsistence which he thought not so much a favour as a debt, since it was offered him upon conditions, which he had never broken; and that his only fault was, that he could not be supported upon nothing.

Savage’s passions were strong, among which his resentment was not the weakest; and as gratitude was not his constant virtue, we ought not too hastily to give credit to all his prejudice asserts against (his once praised patron) lord Tyrconnel.

During his continuance with the lord Tyrconnel, he wrote the Triumph of Health and Mirth, on the recovery of the lady Tyrconnel, from a languishing illness.  This poem is built upon a beautiful fiction.  Mirth overwhelmed with sickness for the death of a favourite, takes a flight in quest of her sister Health, whom she finds reclined upon the brow of a lofty mountain, amidst the fragrance of a perpetual spring, and the breezes of the morning sporting about her.  Being solicited by her sister Mirth, she readily promises her assistance, flies away in a cloud, and impregnates the waters of Bath with new virtues, by which the sickness of Belinda is relieved.

While Mr. Savage continued in high life, he did not let slip any opportunity to examine whether the merit of the great is magnified or diminished by the medium through which it is contemplated, and whether great men were selected for high stations, or high stations made great men.  The result of his observations is not much to the advantage of those in power.