But thou since nature bids the world resign; To mount her fifty flights of ample stairs. Her mien, her shape, her temper, eyes, and tongue, Are sure to conquer-for the rogue is young; And all that's madly wild, or oddly gay, We call it only pretty Fanny's way. In the closing lines of the Epistle to Pope one couplet especially illustrates the choice simplicity that was SO congenial to Goldsmith in Parnell's poetry: This to my friend-and when a friend inspires, My silent harp its master's hand requires, Shakes off its dust, and makes these rocks resound, Far from the joys that with my soul agree, Yet here content can dwell and learned ease, At the same time it is just to add that Parnell, though he pointed the way to Goldsmith, did not always attain to the correct simplicity of his successor. In a style where the minuteness of the subject seems to demand an exact felicity in the choice of words, he often disappoints expectation by leaving his workmanship in the rough. This is especially the case in his descriptive passages, where he is satisfied with the merest convention. For example : The chirping birds from all the compass rove; His imagery is frequently indistinct : There stands a slender fern's aspiring shade, Put forth their answering boughs, and proudly rise, He uses intransitively transitive verbs, thus producing ambiguity:- and Joy to my soul! I feel the goddess nigh, But beauty gone, 'tis easier to be wise ; His metaphors do not always convey his meaning exactly for example : Her hardy face repels the tanning wind.5 The face cannot properly be said to repel the wind, though the complexion may; and he could have more correctly written either or Her hardy face defies the tanning wind, Her rosy tint repels the tanning wind. Hibernian pronunciation is often amusingly apparent in his rhymes; we find among numerous examples : Perhaps 'tis either, as the ladies please; I wave the contest, and commence the lays.6 She, proud to rule, yet strangely framed to tease, 1 Health; An Eclogue. 3 Health. 5 Health. 2 The Flies; An Eclogue. 4 An Elegy, To an Old Beauty. And, lost in thought, no more perceived Parnell's poetical characteristics are strikingly contrasted with those of Richard Savage, who was, nevertheless, indebted to him for some of his leading ideas. It is difficult to say whether this remarkable man was the author or, as he himself asserted, the victim, of the frauds with which his name is associated. According to his own account, he was identical with the infant baptized on the 18th of January 1696-97 at St. Andrew's, Holborn, under the name of Richard Smith, who was undoubtedly the son of Earl Rivers and the Countess of Macclesfield. He states that he was educated at a grammar school near St. Albans, by the care of Lady Mason (mother of Lady Macclesfield) and a Mrs. Lloyd, whom he asserted to be his godmother; that he was afterwards apprenticed by his mother to a cobbler; that on the death of his nurse, to whose charge he had been committed, and who had brought him up as her son, he discovered his true parentage when looking through her papers. He urged his claim to recognition on his mother in 1718. Against this we have to place the facts, that Savage's story rests on his own unsupported evidence; that he never claimed the legacy which he declared had been left him by Mrs. Lloyd; that the latter is not named as godmother of Richard Smith in the Registry of St. Andrew's, Holborn; that Savage made no mention of Newdigate Ousley, who was the actual godfather of Richard Smith; that Lady Mason was dead before he advanced his claim; and that no trace of Mrs. Lloyd has been discovered. On the other hand, Savage's story was published on no less than five separate occasions during Lady Macclesfield's lifetime-in Curll's Poetical Register of 1719; in Aaron Hill's Plain Dealer, 1724; in the anonymous Life of Savage, 1727; in Savage's Preface to the second edition of his Miscellanies, 1728; in Johnson's Life, 1744 1 Hymn to Contentment. VOL. V —and it remained uncontradicted. Assuming that, up to 1728, Lady Macclesfield might have shrunk from reviving the recollection of her scandalous intercourse with Lord Rivers, yet in that year the charges of hard-hearted conduct to her alleged son were put forward in a shape that should have caused her, if she could, to deny their truth. Savage had just been condemned to death for murder committed without premeditation by him in a midnight brawl; an appeal to the Queen to procure for him a pardon had, it was said, been rendered ineffectual by the intervention of the ex-Countess of Macclesfield (then Mrs. Brett); and his pardon had been finally granted only through the urgency of the Countess of Hertford, who explained to the Queen the facts of his history. On his release Savage, resolved to keep terms no longer with his unnatural parent, published his powerful satire, The Bastard, which he dedicated to his mother. The poem had the effect of raising a storm of indignation against the latter, and, supposing Savage's story to have been entirely without foundation, it should have been easy for Mrs. Brett to expose him, by tracing the history of her real child, as well as the falsehood of Savage's other allegations. Instead of taking this course, her nephew, Lord Tyrconnel, received Savage into his house, and for some years paid him an annuity of £200. With him the poet quarrelled in 1735, and was then left without any regular means of support; but, as his story was widely believed, he was seldom at a loss to obtain assistance, though this was often rendered of little avail to him in consequence of his wasteful habits. While Queen Caroline lived she paid him, without fail, £50 a year for an ode which he wrote in her honour on each of her birthdays. Mrs. Oldfield, the celebrated actress, was another of his generous supporters ; and, after the Queen's death in 1738, a number of bountiful friends, of whom the chief was Pope, combined to provide him with a competent allowance. These saw that it was necessary for him to live out of London, and with difficulty persuaded him in 1739 to retire to Swansea. Here he resided for more than a year, but then, growing weary of the place, removed to Bristol, where he was hospitably entertained by the leading inhabitants, and supported till their kindness was exhausted by his pertinacious dissipation. After about two years' forbearance one of them caused him to be arrested for debt, and he was imprisoned in the Bristol Newgate, where he wrote his satire called London and Bristol Delineated. All his benefactors had now fallen away from him, with the exception of Pope, and even he was alienated, when convinced, on what seemed to be good evidence, that Savage had repaid his generosity with a libel. The latter, being charged with this ingratitude, indignantly denied it, and is said to have taken the accusation so much to heart that he fell ill in prison and died there on the 1st of August 1743. Savage began his literary life by writing for the stage. His first play, Woman's a Riddle, though unsuccessful, procured for him the friendship of Steele and the generous interest of Wilks, the actor. His Love in a Veil was produced in 1718, and his tragedy, Sir Thomas Overbury, in 1723. Neither of these dramas succeeded, and whatever in his later work bears the stamp of his undoubted genius is contained in his two poems, The Bastard and The Wanderer, both of which depend for their main effect upon the poetical moralisation of his own character and misfortunes. The Bastard was published in 1728.1 It is a satire, powerful alike in poignancy and pathos, and is also a panegyric on the Queen. He begins with an ironic exaltation of the advantages of illegitimate birth :— What had I lost, if conjugally kind, By nature hating, yet by vows confined, He 1 Johnson's account of Savage is, in this respect, plainly erroneous. puts the composition of The Bastard some years later, and speaks as if the sole effect of it was to drive Mrs. Brett from Bath. Whereas the real effect was seen in the reception of Savage into Lord Tyrconnel's house and the payment of his annuity of £200. |