In this manner were passed those days and nights, which nature had enabled him to have employed in elevated speculations.  On a bulk, in a cellar, or in a glass-house, among thieves and beggars, was to be found the author of The Wanderer, the man, whose remarks in life might have assisted the statesman, whose ideas of virtue might have enlightened the moralist, whose eloquence might have influenced senates, and whose delicacy might have polished courts.  His distresses, however afflictive, never dejected him.  In his lowest sphere he wanted not spirit to assert the natural dignity of wit, and was always ready to repress that insolence, which superiority of fortune incited, and to trample that reputation which rose upon any other basis, than that of merit.  He never admitted any gross familiarity, or submitted to be treated otherwise than as an equal.

Once, when he was without lodging, meat, or cloaths, one of his friends, a man indeed not remarkable for moderation in prosperity, left a message, that he desired to see him about nine in the morning.  Savage knew that his intention was to assist him, but was very much disgusted, that he should presume to prescribe the hour of his attendance; and therefore rejected his kindness.

The greatest hardships of poverty were to Savage, not the want of lodging, or of food, but the neglect and contempt it drew upon him.  He complained that as his affairs grew desperate, he found his reputation for capacity visibly decline; that his opinion in questions of criticism was no longer regarded, when his coat was out of fashion; and that those, who in the interval of his prosperity, were always encouraging him to great undertakings, by encomiums on his genius, and assurances of success, now received any mention of his designs with coldness, and, in short, allowed him to be qualified for no other performance than volunteer-laureat.  Yet even this kind of contempt never depressed him, for he always preserved a steady confidence in his own capacity, and believed nothing above his reach, which he should at any time earnestly endeavour to attain.

This life, unhappy as it may be already imagined, was yet embittered in 1738 with new distresses.  The death of the Queen deprived him of all the prospects of preferment, with which he had so long entertained his imagination.  But even against this calamity there was an expedient at hand.  He had taken a resolution of writing a second tragedy upon the story of Sir Thomas Overbury, in which he made a total alteration of the plan, added new incidents, and introduced new characters, so that it was a new tragedy, not a revival of the former.  With the profits of this scheme, when finished, he fed his imagination, but proceeded slowly in it, and, probably, only employed himself upon it, when he could find no other amusement.  Upon the Queen’s death it was expected of him, that he should honour her memory with a funeral panegyric:  He was thought culpable for omitting it; but on her birth-day, next year, he gave a proof of the power of genius and judgment.  He knew that the track of elegy had been so long beaten, that it was impossible to travel in it, without treading the footsteps of those who had gone before him, and therefore it was necessary that he might distinguish himself from the herd of encomists, to find out some new walk of funeral panegyric.