earls, the other by starving pamphleteers and index makers.
Among Johnson's associates at this time may be mentioned Boyse,
who, when his shirts were pledged, scrawled Latin verses sitting
up in bed with his arms through two holes in his blanket; who
composed very respectable sacred poetry when he was sober; and
who was at last run over by a hackney coach when he was drunk:
Hoole, surnamed the metaphysical tailor, who, instead of
attending to his measures, used to trace geometrical diagrams on
the board where he sate cross-legged; and the penitent impostor,
George Psalmanazar, who, after poring all day, in a humble
lodging, on the folios of Jewish rabbis and Christian fathers,
indulged himself at night with literary and theological
conversation at an alehouse in the city. But the most remarkable
of the persons with whom at this time Johnson consorted was
Richard Savage, an earl's son, a shoemaker's apprentice, who had
seen life in all its forms, who had feasted among blue ribands in
Saint James's Square, and had lain with fifty-pounds' weight of
iron on his legs in the condemned ward of Newgate. This man had,
after many vicissitudes of fortune, sunk at last into abject and
hopeless poverty. His pen had failed him. His patrons had been
taken away by death, or estranged by the riotous profusion with
which he squandered their bounty, and the ungrateful insolence
with which he rejected their advice. He now lived by begging.
He dined on venison and champagne whenever he had been so
fortunate as to borrow a guinea. If his questing had been
unsuccessful, he appeased the rage of hunger with some scraps of
broken meat, and lay down to rest under the Piazza of Covent
Garden in warm weather, and, in cold weather, as near as he could
get to the furnace of a glass house. Yet, in his misery, he was
still an agreeable companion. He had an inexhaustible store of