Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 1.djvu/11

 11 S. I. JAX. 1, 1910.]

NOTES AND QUERIES.

not conclusively favourable to his bona fides. But MR. THOMAS, in his illegitimate use of two out of the four contemporary accounts as documents on which to convict Savage of dishonesty, exposes himself to a charge of inaccuracy as great as, if not greater than, any proved against Savage.

And the more we examine the inaccuracy of MR. THOMAS in detail, the more damning becomes the exposure, as in the particular of Savage's alleged godmother Mrs. Lloyd. The phrase " Mrs. Lloyd his godmother n occurs both in Curll and in the anonymous Life of 1727. In Savage's own accounts he makes no allusion to his godmother ; and in his letter to Mrs. Carter he speaks of Mrs. Lloyd, not as his godmother, but as " the person who took care of me. n MR. MOY THOMAS discovered that the name of the godmother to the Countess of Macclesfield's baby boy was Ousley. He hastened to point out the grave discrepancy between the names of Ousley and Lloyd (the alleged name of Savage's godmother in the two accounts not Savage's). At this stage the importance of fathering the Life of 1727 upon Savage became red hot for the constructive critic, and he wrote (27 November) : " Who can doubt that the original version of this story [i.e., of the death of Savage's nurse and the discovery among her papers of his origin] in the ' Life ' was from Savage ? n Again the answer is short and decisive. Every dispassionate inquirer will doubt it in the absence of all evidence to prove it.

Savage never wrote that Mrs. Lloyd was his godmother, but he did write of Mrs. Lloyd. The other accounts of Savage did write of Mrs. Lloyd as his godmother. In order to establish the connexion necessary to his indictment MR. THOMAS confuses the autobiographical with the biographical accounts, and thus obtains an opportunity for a brilliant disquisition on the impossibility of supposing Lloyd and Ousley to be the same jxT.son, so as to remove all possibility of supposing an identity between their respec- tive godsons. This is to raise to a fine art the simple practice of putting in unauthentic documents to secure a conviction.

It is not my intention here to indicate all t hr steps by which MR. MOY THOMAS came to his conclusions. I care not even to deny that the main conclusion may be true ; for one may come to a right assumption by a wrong course of reasoning. But it must be clearly understood that the result is nothing more th.-ui M.II assumption.

With one further consideration I shall conclude these notes.

As if to add still greater confusion to his reckless treatment of the four contemporary accounts as all proceeding directly from Savage, MR. MOY THOMAS refers frequently throughout his examination to the state- ments made in Samuel Johnson's Life of Savage, which was written and published after Savage's death. He has no difficulty, of course, in assuming that Johnson put down what Savage had told him in addition to what could be gleaned from the four con- temporary accounts. Well, Johnson pro- bably tried to put down as much as he remembered of what Savage told him ; he clearly believed in his friend's veracity ; he certainly erred in accepting too much of the contemporary accounts as authentic. The subordinate service done by MR. MOY THOMAS'S articles is indeed indestructible : he showed that Johnson's narrative con- tained grave inaccuracies. But in seeking to account for the way in which these in- accuracies were begotten, he erred, and misled the superficial commentators who followed him. Accurate biography is in the most favourable circumstances a difficult business ; none knew better than Johnson, how difficult. But the blunders and the inconsistencies in Savage's story, as it has come down to us in a variety of accounts,, are after all intelligible on grounds other than those which necessitate the belief (however fascinating) that Savage deliber- ately maintained a claim which he knew to be spurious. To regard Johnson's inaccuracy as additional proof of Savage's dishonesty is to heap confusion upon confusion.

Four years after MR. MOY THOMAS had written, an article signed W. G. S. appeared in Bentley's Miscellany for November, 1862. It sought to re-establish the perfect equi- librium set in Boswell's verdict of " not proven." But it was ignored. The ninth edition of ' The Encyclopaedia Britannica ' found it an easy matter to settle in a phrase : " The conclusion which Boswell hinted at, but was prevented by his reverence for Johnson" what a charge to level at Bozzy ! " from expressing, that Savage was an impostor, is irresistible " (' Encyc. Brit.,'' 9th ed., sub ' Savage, Richard '). The ' Dictionary of National Biography * attempts a summary of the arguments for and against Savage's claim ; but the radical blunder about Mrs. Lloyd imported into the case by MR. MOY THOMAS is perpetuated, and the balance is suffered to appear against Savage : " The falsity of his tale seems demonstrated.'' His tale !