Towards none did she show it more sweetly than to that disreputable fraud and alleged man of genius, Richard Savage.

In his own feverish day Dick Savage cut a literary swath more wide than enviable, but when he is viewed from the unsympathetic light of the present he seems merely a clever vagabond.

Yet Dr.Johnson, who could be so stern towards some of his contemporaries, condescended to love the aforesaid vagabond, in a ponderous, elephantine way, and deified him by writing the life of the ingrate, or an apology therefor.

Savage had, once upon a time, led the youthful Johnson more than a few feet away from the path of rectitude, but the philosopher forgave, without forgetting, the wiles of the tempter, and treated him with a generosity by no means deserved.

In the years of his prosperity--and the remembrance did him credit--Johnson could never forget that Savage and himself had been poor together, and had often wandered through London with hardly a penny to show between them.
* * * * * "It is melancholy to reflect," says Boswell, "that Johnson and Savage were sometimes in such extreme indigence that they could not pay for a lodging; so that they have wandered together whole nights in the streets.