��Essay on
��contracted in company with Savage. However that may be, their connection was not of long duration. In the year 1738, Savage was reduced to the last distress. Mr. Pope, in a letter to him, expressed his concern for ' the miserable withdrawing of his pension after the death of the Queen * ; ' and gave him hopes that, 'in a short time, he should find himself supplied with a competence, without any dependance on those little creatures, whom we are pleased to call the Great 2 .' The scheme proposed to him was, that he should retire to Swansea in Wales, and receive an allowance of fifty pounds a year, to be raised by subscription ; Pope was to pay twenty pounds 3 . This plan, though finally established, took more than a year before it was carried into execution. In the mean time, the intended retreat of Savage called to Johnson's mind the third satire of Juvenal, in which that poet takes leave of a friend, who was withdrawing himself from all the vices of Rome. Struck with this idea, he wrote that well-known Poem, called London. The first lines manifestly point to Savage 4 .
Though grief and fondness in my breast rebel,
When injured Thales bids the town farewell ;
Yet still my calmer thoughts his choice commend;
I praise the hermit, but regret the friend.
Resolv'd at length from Vice and London far,
To breathe in distant fields a purer air ;
And, fix'd on Cambria's solitary shore,
Give to St. David one true Briton more.
��1 ' Savage,' said Adam Smith, 'was but a worthless fellow; his pension of fifty pounds never lasted him above a few days. As a sample of his economy you may take a circum stance that Johnson himself told me. It was, at that period, fashionable to wear scarlet cloaks trimmed with gold lace : the Doctor met him one day, just after he had received his pension, with one of these cloaks upon his back, while, at the same time, his naked toes were peeping through his shoes.' Buchan MSS. quoted in Croker's Boswell, x. 122.
2 This letter, I think, is not extant. The passages quoted in the text are
��given, without Pope's name, in John son's Works, viii. 169.
3 Ib. viii. 318.
4 Boswell denies this. In a note I have examined the question. Life, i. 125, n. 4.
Mr. Hussey (Life, iii. 369), in a MS. note in the Life, says : ' John son told me that London was written many years before he was acquainted with Savage, and that it was even published before he knew him of which I informed Mr. Boswell, who did not think proper to believe me. Johnson also said that by Thales he did not mean any particular person.'
Johnson
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