Page:EB1911 - Volume 24.djvu/254

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SAUVAL—SAVAH
239

Genevan representative council, and gave much attention to public affairs. In the latter part of his life he became more of a recluse than ever, and died at Geneva on the 18th of April 1845.

When a young man Nicolas Théodore accompanied his father in his Alpine journeys and assisted him by the careful determination of many physical constants. He was attracted to chemistry by Lavoisier's brilliant conceptions, but he did not become great as an originator. He took a leading share in improving the processes of ultimate organic analysis; and he determined the composition of ethyl alcohol, ether and some other commonly occurring substances. He also studied fermentation, the conversion of starch into sugar, and many other processes of minor importance. The greater number of his 36 published papers dealt with the chemistry and physiology of plants, the nature of soils, and the conditions of vegetable life, and were republished under the title Recherches chimiques sur la végétation.

SAUVAL, HENRI (1623-1676), French historian, son of an advocate in the Parlement, was born in Paris, and baptized on the 5th of March 1623. He devoted most of his life to researches among the archives of his native city, and in 1656 even obtained a licence to print his Paris ancien et moderne; but on his death (21st March 1676) the whole work was still in manuscript. A long time afterwards it appeared, thanks to his collaborator, Claude Bernard Rousseau, under the title of Histoire et recherche des antiquités de la ville de Paris (1724), but remodelled, with the addition of long and dull dissertations which were not by Sauval. The work was not without merits, and it was re-issued in 1733 and 1750. The original manuscript first belonged to Montmerqué, and then passed into the possession of Le Roux de Lincy, who prepared an annotated edition; unfortunately this material, together with the original MS., was lost in the incendiary fires which took place under the Commune (1871). There remain, however, Le Roux de Lincy's researches, a series of articles on Sauval which appeared in the Bulletin du bibliophile et du bibliothécaire in 1862, 1866 and 1868. See also the Bibliographie de Paris avant 1789, by the Abbé Valentin Dufour (1882).

SAVAGE, MINOT JUDSON (1841-), American Unitarian minister and author, was born in Norridgewock, Maine, on the 10th of June 1841. He graduated at the Bangor Theological Seminary in 1864, and for nine years was in the Congregational ministry, being a home missionary at San Mateo and Grass Valley, California, until 1867, and holding pastorates at Framingham, Mass. (1867-1869), and Hannibal, Missouri (1869-1873). He then became a Unitarian, and was pastor of the Third Unitarian Church of Chicago in 1873-1874, of the Church of the Unity in Boston in 1874-1896, and of the Church of the Messiah in New York City in 1896-1906.

He wrote many books, including Christianity, the Science of Manhood (1873), The Religion of Evolution (1876), The Morals of Evolution (1880), The Religious Life (1885), My Creed (1887), The Evolution of Christianity (1892), Our Unitarian Gospel (1898), The Passing and the Permanent in Religion (1901), Life Beyond Death (1901), Can Telepathy Explain? (1902), Life's Dark Problems (1905), and, besides other volumes in verse, America to England (1905).

SAVAGE, RICHARD (d. 1743), English poet, was born about 1697, probably of humble parentage. A romantic account of his origin and early life, for which he at any rate supplied the material, appeared in Curll's Poetical Register in 1719. On this and other information provided by Savage, Samuel Johnson founded his Life of Savage, one of the most elaborate of the Lives. It was printed anonymously in 1744, and has made the poet the object of an interest which would be hardly justified by his writings. In 1698 Charles Gerrard, 2nd earl of Macclesfield, obtained a divorce from his wife, Anna, daughter of Sir Richard Mason, who shortly afterwards married Colonel Henry Brett. Lady Macclesfield had two children by Richard Savage, 4th earl Rivers, the second of whom was born at Fox Court, Holborn, on the 16th of January 1697, and christened two days later at St Andrews, Holborn, as Richard Smith. Six months later the child was placed with Anne Portlock in Covent Garden; nothing more is positively known of him. In 1718 Richard Savage claimed to be this child. He stated that he had been cared for by Lady Mason, his grandmother, who had put him to school near St Albans, and by his godmother, Mrs Lloyd. He said he had been pursued by the relentless hostility of his mother, Mrs Brett, who had prevented Lord Rivers from leaving £6000 to him and had tried to have him kidnapped for the West Indies. His statements are not corroborated by the depositions of the witnesses in the Macclesfield divorce case, and Mrs Brett always maintained that he was an impostor. He was wrong in the date of his birth; moreover, the godmother of Lady Macclesfield's son was Dorothea Ousley (afterwards Mrs Delgardno), not Mrs Lloyd. There is nothing to show that Mrs Brett was the cruel and vindictive woman he describes her to be, but abundant evidence that she provided for her illegitimate children. Discrepancies in Savage's story made Boswell suspicious, but the matter was thoroughly investigated for the first time by W. Moy Thomas, who published the results of his researches in Notes and Queries (second series, vol. vi., 1858). Savage, impostor or not, blackmailed Mrs Brett and her family with some success, for after the publication of The Bastard (1728) her nephew, John Brownlow, Viscount Tyrconnel, purchased his silence by taking him into his house and allowing him a pension of £200 a year. Savage's first certain work was a poem satirizing Bishop Hoadly, entitled The Convocation, or The Battle of Pamphlets (1717), which he afterwards tried to suppress. He adapted from the Spanish a comedy, Love in a Veil (acted 1718, printed 1719), which gained him the friendship of Sir Richard Steele and of Robert Wilks. With Steele, however, he soon quarrelled. In 1723 he played without success in the title role of his tragedy, Sir Thomas Overbury (pr. 1724), and his Miscellaneous Poems were published by subscription in 1726. In 1727 he was arrested for the murder of James Sinclair in a drunken quarrel, and only escaped the death penalty by the intercession of Frances, countess of Hertford (d. 1754).

Savage was at his best as a satirist, and in The Author to be Let he published a quantity of scandal about his fellow-scribblers. Proud as he was, he was servile enough to supply Pope with petty gossip about the authors attacked in the Dunciad. His most considerable poem, The Wanderer (1729), shows the influence of Thomson's Seasons, part of which had already appeared. Savage tried without success to obtain patronage from Walpole, and hoped in vain to be made poet-laureate. Johnson states that he received a small income from Mrs Oldfield, but this seems to be fiction. In 1732 Queen Caroline settled on him a pension of £50 a year. Meanwhile he had quarrelled with Lord Tyrconnel, and at the queen's death was reduced to absolute poverty. Pope had been the most faithful of his friends, and had made him a small regular allowance. With others he now raised money to send him out of reach of his creditors. Savage went to Swansea, but he resented bitterly the conditions imposed by his patrons, and removed to Bristol, where he was imprisoned for debt. All his friends had ceased to help him except Pope, and in 1743 he, too, wrote to break off the connexion. Savage died in prison on the 1st of August 1743.

See Johnson's Life of Savage, and Notes and Queries as already quoted. He is the subject of a novel, Richard Savage (1842), by Charles Whitehead, illustrated by John Leech. Richard Savage, a play in four acts by J. M. Barrie and H. B. Marriott-Watson, was presented at an afternoon performance at the Criterion theatre, London, in 1891. The dramatists took considerable liberties with the facts of Savage's career. See also S. V. Makower, Richard Savage, a Mystery in Biography (1909).

SAVAGE, a word by derivation meaning belonging to the wilds or forests (O. Fr. salvage, mod. sauvage, Late Lat. silvaticus, silva, wood, forest), hence wild, uncultivated, barbarian, and so used of races in an uncivilized or barbarous condition, or of animals or human beings generally, untamed, ferocious.

SAVAH, a small province of central Persia, north of Irak and south-west of Teheran, comprising the districts of Savah, Khalejistan (inhabited by the Turkish Khalej tribe), Zerend and Karaghan. It pays a yearly revenue of about £5000. The capital is the ancient city of Savah, which has a population of about 7000, and is 72 m. S.W. of Teheran, at an elevation of 3380 ft., in 35° 4' N., 50° 30' E. The soil is very fertile, is well watered, and produces much wheat, barley and rice. It is occasionally joined to the province of Teheran to facilitate the governor's arrangements for supplying the capital of Persia with grain.