must always be produced in a vigorous mind by an absolute freedom from all pressing or domestick engagements.’
This Life of Savage stands alone among the Lives. It was written some five-and-thirty years before the others, and was based largely on personal acquaintance. Johnson’s prose had not yet run clear when he wrote it, yet for delicacy and power it is one of the few great Lives in English. It is an apology for the poetic temperament—the truest and most humane apology that has ever been written or conceived. A French critic says that it is the best possible lesson on the danger of having to do with poets—on their utter lack of principle and morals. ‘If the author,’ he goes on, ‘had intended to satirize his hero, the work would have been delicious; unfortunately, it is written in good faith.’ Johnson is so faithful in his record, and so generous in his verdict, that the breadth of his treatment bewilders a smaller mind. His understanding of ordinary human situations is well exampled in his account of the relations of Savage with Steele. Savage was warmly befriended by Steele, who told him, in language very characteristic, that ‘the inhumanity of his mother had given him a right to find every good man his father.’ Steele even proposed to settle him in life by marrying him to a natural daughter, on whom, when he could find the money, he intended to bestow a thousand pounds. In the meantime Savage was much at his house, and, it seems, was unable to forbear some ridicule of his amiable foibles. This, by the diligence of friends, was brought to Steele’s notice, and he banished Savage from his house. On these facts Johnson comments in a passage extraordinary for its temperance and justice: ‘It is not indeed unlikely that
