from him all knowledge of his real parents; which directions she faithfully followed, so that until her death he bore her name, and knew of his right to no other. During these years he was tenderly protected by his grandmother, Lady Mason, and by his godmother, Miss Ousely, whom he calls Mrs. Lloyd, who guarded him "as tenderly as the apple of her eye," and whom he describes as "a lady who kept her chariot, and lived accordingly. But, alas! I lost her when I was but seven years of age." By the direction of Lady Mason, he had been placed at a small grammar-school at or near St. Albans. His mother, Mrs. Brett, had made an attempt to ship him secretly off to the American plantations, but by some means failed. She then had him placed with a shoemaker in Holborn, with the purpose of apprenticing him to his trade. When about seventeen, his nurse died, and he, as her son, went to her house, opened her boxes, and examined her papers, among which he found a letter written to her by Lady Mason, which informed him of his birth, and the reason for which it was concealed; whereon he refused to be a shoemaker, claimed a share in Mrs. Brett's affluence, was repulsed and denied by her, and then took to authorship for a livelihood. As we examine this story in detail, we find how indefinite, unlikely, and, in some respects, manifestly untrue it is. Where did his nurse reside, and what was her name which he bore? Writing long afterwards in 1739, to the learned Miss Elizabeth Carter, he says: "That I did pass under another name till I was seventeen years of age is truth, but not the name of any person with whom I lived." Whilst thus backing out of an early statement, he takes care neither to give his nurse's name nor his own. Was his Richard Smith, or Lee, or Portlock? Nothing that he could leave vague did he fix. His nurse, his home, his haunts, his companions, we have not one certain word about. The grammar-school he said he attended, and the name of his master, are unknown. These are references which a man with honest claims would have given in fulness and with precision, but to which a clever pretender would avoid committing himself. We need not waste one word over the incredible correspondence of Lady Mason with the nurse, for Savage himself obliterates it in his letter of 1739 to Miss Carter, in which he declares "the mean nurse" to be "quite a fictitious character." Yet giving up the nurse is about equivalent to giving up Savage as the earl's son. He had boasted of possessing "convincing original letters " found in the boxes of his nurse; but if the nurse is a fiction, so are her boxes and the letters in them. "Convincing original letters," however obtained, Savage never produced. He was always ravenous for money to gratify his vicious propensities, and could at any time have obtained some guineas from publisher Curll for his documents; and though he wanted neither delicacy to restrain, nor spite to prompt their publication, yet never a scrap of Lady Mason's writing did he give to the world. In fact, neither by writings nor by witnesses, did Savage's claims ever receive the slightest sanction; beyond his own assertions, they never met with any support. The Miss Ousley, Savage's godmother, transformed by marriage or his fancy into Mrs. Lloyd, died, he said, when he was seven years old, leaving him a legacy of £300, of which he was defrauded by her executors. When did this fact come to his knowledge? Who were the fraudulent executors ? Savage was not used to conceal the names of his enemies; why did he hide theirs? Ousleys were a numerous and thriving family and they were surely amenable to justice. Newdigate Ousley, his godfather, did not die until 1714, and he and Lady Mason would not surely see the child wronged. But Savage appears to have been in utter ignorance of the name of the Ousleys; and yet he tells Miss Carter that, "in a letter of Mrs. Lloyd's, a copy of which I found many years after her decease," he found the comparison of her love for him as "the apple of her eye." If he was allowed to ransack his godmother's papers, he must have known the Ousleys; and if he knew them, he could scarcely have failed to plague them terribly for the £300 left to him. We fear "Mrs. Lloyd, the godmother, who kept a chariot and lived accordingly," was to Savage what Mrs. Harris was to Sairey Gamp. Savage must have been to Mrs. Brett a cruel visitation. Colonel Brett was dead; she was a widow with a daughter arrived at womanhood, and in the long years that had intervened might reasonably have hoped to have at length believed it in earnest himself. His charges against her became intensified in malignity; and he said she had interfered to prevent the king's mercy, and to have him hanged. He therefore resolved to harass her with lampoons until she allowed him a pension. In pursuance of this dastardly threat, he published his poem, entitled The Bastard, in which he versified his wretchedness and Mrs. Brett's inhumanity, which passed through five editions in the course of the year. that the memories of her earlier life were was set free on 9th March, 1728. His rage lapsing into oblivion, when Savage raked against Mrs. Brett now knew no bounds. them out, and blazoned them with aggrava- As everybody credited his story, he appears tions before the world. On such a theme and with such a man controversy was for her impossible; and she was content to oppose to his outcries a silence alike courageous and discreet. At first, his approaches were made with some attempt at wheedling. In a letter to The Plain Dealer, he writes of her as "" a mother whose fine qualities make it impossible to me not to forgive her, even while I am miserable by her means only; " and describes her as one who, "in direct opposition to the impulse of her natural compassion, upon mistaken motives of a false delicacy, shut her memory against his wants;" and again in some verses in the same magazine mentions her: "Yet has this sweet neglecter of my woes At this juncture, Lord Tyrconnel, a nephew of Mrs. Brett, interposed; whether he wished to relieve his aunt from her persecutor, or to possess a live poet for himself, he offered Savage a home in his own house, and an allowance of £200 per annum, which Savage with readiness accepted, and sung his patron's praise, and dedicated to him his verses. At last, Savage's habits wore out Tyrconnel's patience; he kept outrageous hours, turned his house into a tavern, and Tyrconnel found works he had presented to Savage on the book-stalls, sold by him to purchase drink. In 1735, he revoked his pension, and sent him adrift, whereon he was addressed and defied by Savage as a Right Honorable Brute and Booby," and told that he had cut his poet because he was hard up, and did not like paying £200 a year. 66 But Mrs. Brett was not to be beguiled by these soft speeches. Savage haunted her neighborhood. "It was his frequent practice," says Johnson, "to walk in the dark evenings for several hours before her door, in hopes of seeing her as she might come by accident to the window or cross her apartment with a candle in her hand." It was to no purpose that he wrote to her and solicited to see her; she avoided him with the greatest care, and gave orders that he Begging, drinking, brawling, Savage now should be excluded from her house by whom-led a more wretched life than ever. Moved soever he might be introduced, and what reason soever he might give for entering it. One evening, finding the street-door open, he slipped in, went up-stairs, and accosted her in the passage. She, in a very natural and feminine style, screamed " Murder," and ordered her servants to turn him out of the house. Matters came to a climax in 1728. Savage in a tavern brawl killed a man, was tried, found guilty of murder, and sentenced to be hung. Now commenced a stir indeed. Hang a poet, and an earl's son withal! A short account of his life was drawn up, telling the story of his birth, and the heartlessness and wickedness of his mother, and it circulated by thousands. The Countess of Hertford laid the piteous tale before the queen, who won from the king a pardon, and Savage with pity, some of his friends subscribed £50 a year, of which Pope contributed £20 to keep him in rural economy at Swansea. With difficulty he was got out of London in July, 1739. Unfortunately, Bristol lay in the route to Swansea, and some of its literary citizens feasted the poet, and by their gifts enabled him to renew his dissipated London habits. After wearying and disgusting them, he reached Swansea in September, 1742, which, as was to be expected, was a place not at all to his taste, and he set out for London, taking Bristol on his way. There his journey was cut short by a Mrs. Read, who had him arrested for a trifling debt; and after spending six months in the Newgate of Bristol, he died in that prison on the 31st July, 1743. In February, 1744, Johnson published his Life of Savage. The book affords a fine study of the method and temper of Johnson's own mind. He conceals nothing about Savage known to himself, and he repeats all Savage's tales about his birth and the conduct of Mrs. Brett in implicit faith. Johnson is at once credulous and truthful, and his tenderness for the comrade of his poverty shut his eyes to the utter meanness of Savage's character, and closed his ears to the despicable whine of a full-grown, ablebodied man for money and a mother! Savage's persecution of Mrs. Brett he aids and abets in a style Savage never equalled, pursuing her as an unnatural monster through page after page with all those trenchant epithets of reprobation of which he was master. Mrs. Brett, poor old lady, lived to read Johnson's curses for ten years. As Savage's story is questioned more and more closely, still further inconsistencies are revealed. From the facts already adduced, many will readily coincide with Mr. Thomas in his conclusion: "I have not, I confess, any doubt that Richard Savage was an impostor." "1652. GOD'S PROVIDENCE IS MINE IN FAMILIES WHO TRACE FROM SAXON TIMES. owner of the House is said to have carved upon -I have occasionally heard of men of the yeo- the front these words :man or farmer class, whose families have held. the same lands since the times before the Conquest, and I was told lately of an instance in Berkshire. It would be interesting to ascertain the number of them in every county, their names, the tenure by which they have continued to hold their lands, and the nature of their proofs of genuine descent. The descendants of the Norman followers of William, upstarts as they were according to Thierry in his "History of the Conquest," must yield precedence in antiquity to the old Saxon, and drop the " De," which many are so proud to prefix to their names with very little claim to the distinction. HERITANCE. 1652.'"* I remember being much struck with this quaint and interesting, but decayed old mansion, when I first visited Chester in 1851. As I read the beautiful motto carved on the crossbeam, it occurred to me that it was possibly . derived from some old version of the 16th Psalm, verse 6-"The Lord Himself is the Thou shalt portion of mine inheritance. maintain my lot." But the poor old House no longer affords a bright picture of the Providence of God, as doubtless it once did in its palmy days; it can no longer take up the next verse and say- "The lot has fallen unto me A Saxon landholder of those days, being in a fair ground; yea, I have a goodly heristripped of his property, fell into obscurity, and tage; it now looks sordid and degraded, unwas thus saved from the fate of their conquer- cared for, and gloomy,—in a word, Disinherited; ors, who suffered from the effects of many revo- and affords us a striking emblem of God's lutions among themselves, as, I believe, that ancient people Israel, in their present forlorn few, if any of the Norman chiefs left more than and outcast state. And yet it was once a stately their names to their successors after the lapse of mansion, and the armorial bearings of its orig two centuries; but on this point I am not qual-inal owner are still to be seen carved on one of ified to give an opinion, not having access to its beams. Sic transit Gloria Mundi! Ichabod! reliable authorities. The glory is departed! This might be its motto and inscription now. Charles II. is reported to have said of an old Saxon family, that they must have been fools or very wise not to have added to their property SASSENACH. nor lost it. -Notes and Queries. "GOD'S PROVIDENCE IS MINE INHERITANCE."-Everybody that has visited Chester must have seen "God's Providence House," in Water-gate Street,—one of those curious gablefronted, timber houses, for which Chester is so remarkable. I was reminded of this old house and its inscription the other day, by meeting with the following passage in Bishop Burnet's Sermon, preached Jan. 7, 1691, at the funeral of the Hon. Robert Boyle "I will say nothing of the Stem from which he sprang; that watered garden, watered with the blessings and dew of Heaven, as well as fed with the best portions of this life; that has produced so many noble plants, and has stocked the most families in these kingdonis, of any in our age; which has so signally felt the effects of their humble and Christian Motto, GOD'S PROVIDENCE IS MY INHERITANCE." When did the Boyle family assume this motto?-Notes and Queries. "Tradition avers that this house was the only one in the City that escaped the Plague which ravaged the City during the seventeenth century. In gratitude for that deliverance, the From Mr. Hughes' valuable Handbook to Chester. From The Eclectic Review. ERAY.* THE two volumes we introduce are no 1. The Four Georges: Sketches of Manners, der. 1861. 2. Lovel the Widower. By W. M. Thackeray, Elder. 1861. THE COURT OF GEORGE THE SECOND. "I read that Lady Yarmouth (my most religious and gracious king's favorite) sold a bishopric to a clergyman for £5,000. (She betted him £5,000 that he would not be made a bishop, and he lost, and paid her.) Was he the only prelate of his time led up by such hands for consecration? As I peep into George II.'s St. James's, I see crowds of cassocks rustling up the back-stairs of the ladies of the Court; stealthy clergy slipping purses into their laps; that godless old king yawning under his canopy in his Chapel Royal, as the chaplain before him is discoursing. Discoursing about what ?-about righteousness and judgment? Whilst the chaplain is preaching the king is chattering in German almost as loud as the preacher; so loud that the clergyman-it may be one Dr. Young, he who wrote Night Thoughts, and discoursed on the splendors of the stars, the glories of heaven, and utter vanities of this world-actually burst out crying in his pulpit because the defender of the faith and dispenser of bishoprics would not listen to him! No wonder that the clergy were corrupt and indifferent amidst this indifference and corruption. No wonder that sceptics multiplied and morals degenerated, so far as they depended on the influence of such a king. No wonder that Whitfield cried out in the wilderness, that Wesley quitted the insulted temple to pray on the hillside. I look with reverence on those men at that time. Which is the sublimer spectaclethe good John Wesley, surrounded by his congregation of miners at the pit's mouth, or the queen's chaplains mumbling thorugh their morning office in their ante-room, under the picture of the great Venus, with the door opened into the adjoining chamber, where the queen is dressing, talking scandal to Lord Hervey, or uttering sneers at Lady Suffolk, who is kneeling with the basin at her mistress's side? I say I am scared as I look round at this society-at this king, at these courtiers, at these politicians, at these bishops-at this flaunting vice and levity. Whereabouts in this Court is the honest man? Where is the pure person one may. like? The air stifles one with its sickly perfumes. There are some old-world follies and some absurd ceremonials about our Court of the present day, which I laugh at, but as an Englishman, contrasting it with the past, shall I not acknowledge the change of to-day? As the mistress of St. James's passes me now, I salute the sovereign, wise, moderate, exemplary of life; the good mother; the good wife; the accomplished lady; the enlightened friend of art; the tender sympathizer in her people's glories and sorrows." And here is a portrait of a courtly cler- | feat worthy of his future life. He invented gyman of the reign of George III., one of a new shoe-buckle. It was an inch long and those men who are the very gardeners and arboriculturers of infidelity, as Mr. Thackeray evidently thinks :— 66 'Selwyn has a chaplain and parasite, one Dr. Warner, than whom Plautus, or Ben Jonson, or Hogarth, never painted a better character. In letter after letter he adds fresh strokes to the portrait of himself, and completes a portrait not a little curious to look at now that the man has passed away; all the foul pleasures and gambols in which he revelled, played out; all the rouged faces into which he leered, worms and skulls; all the fine gentlemen whose shoebuckles he kissed, laid in their coffins. This worthy clergyman takes care to tell us that he does not believe in his religion, though, thank heaven, he is not so great a rogue as a lawyer. He goes on Mr. Selwyn's errands, any errands, and is proud, he says, to be that gentleman's proveditor. He waits upon the Duke of Queensbury-old Q.-and exchanges pretty stories with that aristocrat. He comes home after a hard day's christening,' as he says, and writes to his patron before sitting down to whist and partridges for supper. He revels in the thoughts of ox-cheek and burgundy, he is a boisterous, uproarious parasite, licks his master's shoes with explosions of laughter and cunning smack and gusto, and likes the taste of that blacking as much as the best claret in old Q.'s cellar. He has Rabelais and Horace at his greasy fingers' ends. He is inexpressibly mean, curiously jolly; kindly and good-natured in secret-a tender-hearted knave, not a venomous lick-spittle. Jesse says, that at his chapel in Long Acre, he attained a considerable popularity by the pleasing, manly, and eloquent style of his delivery.' Was infidelity endemic, and corruption in the air?" five inches broad." "That man's opinions about the Constitution, the India Bill, Justice to the Catholics-about any question graver than the button for a waistcoat or the sauce for a partridge-worth anything!" Here is a portrait, or what may pass for such, of our recent royal Sybarite and English Heliogabalus more at length. "The sailor king who came after George, was a man: the Duke of York was a man, big, burly, loud, jolly, cursing, courageous. But this George, what was he? I look through all his life, and recognize but a bow and a grin. I try and take him to pieces, and find silk stockings, padding, stays, a coat with frogs and a fur collar, a star and blue ribbon, a pocket-handkerchief prodigiously scented, one of Truefitt's best nutty brown wigs reeking with oil, a set of teeth and a huge black stock, underwaistcoats, more underwaistcoats, and then nothing. I know of no sentiment that he ever distinctly uttered. Documents are published under his name, but people wrote them-private letters, but people spelt them. He put a great George P. or George R. at the bottom of the page and fancied he had written the paper: some bookseller's clerk, some poor author, some man did the work; saw to the spelling, cleaned up the slovenly sentences, and gave the lax maudlin slip-slop a sort of consistency. He must have had an individuality: the dancing-master whom he emulated, nay surpassed-the wig-maker who curled his toupee for him-the tailor who cut his coats, had that. But, about George, one can get at nothing actual. That outside, I am certain, is pad and tailor's work; there may be something behind, but what? We cannot get at the character; no doubt never shall. Will men of the future have nothing better to do than to unswathe and interpret that royal old mummy? I own I once used to think it would be good sport to pursue him, fasten on him, and pull him down. But now I am ashamed to mount and lay good dogs on, to summon a full field, and then to The writer reserves the full fruition of his contempt-the subject of it does not deserve or receive the dignity of hate or scorn-for George IV. "Yon fribble, dancing in lace and spangles." "He the first gentleman in Europe! Without love, I can fancy no gen-hunt the poor game." tleman. There is no stronger satire on the proud English society of that day, than that they admired George." "Here was one who never resisted any temptation; never had a desire but he coddled and pampered it; if ever he had any nerve, frittered it away among cooks, and tailors, and barbers, and furniture-mongers, and opera-dancers." "The boy is father of the man. Our prince signalized his entrance into the world by a The following anecdotes, too, are well told, and give a fine insight to the royalties of the monarch. We present them in succession. GEORGE THE FOURTH AND THE RING. "So is another famous British institution gone to decay-the Ring: the noble practice of British boxing, which in my youth was still almost flourishing. |