ate
rejection, have been likely, in pursuit of no legal rights, to have
alarmed her by threatening letters and intrusions, for no purpose but
one _confessedly_ of pecuniary extortion? From the very mode of pursuing
his claim it is plain that Savage felt it to be a false one. It seems,
also, to be forgotten by most readers, that at this day real sons--not
denied to be such--are continually banished, nay, ejected forcibly by
policemen, from the paternal roof in requital of just such profligate
conduct as Savage displayed; so that, grant his improbable story, still
he was a disorderly reprobate, who in these days would have been
consigned to the treadmill. But the whole was a hoax.

Savage, however, is but a single case, in relation to which Dr. Johnson
stood in a special position, that diseased his judgment. But look at
Pope's life, at Swift's, at Young's--at all the lives of men
contemporary with himself: they are overrun with defamatory stories, or
traits of that order which would most have stung them, had they returned
to life. But it was an accident most beneficial to Dr. Johnson that
nearly all these men left no near relatives behind to call him to
account. The public were amused, as they always are by exhibitions of
infirmity or folly in one whom otherwise they were compelled to admire;
that was a sort of revenge for them to set off against a painful
perpetuity of homage. Thus far the libels served only as jests, and,
fortunately for Dr. Johnson, there arose no after-reckoning. One period,
in fact, of thirty years had intervened between the last of these men
and the publication of the Lives; it was amongst the latest works of Dr.
Johnson: thus, and because most of them left no descendants, he escaped.
Had the ordinary proportion of these men been married, the result would
have been different; and whatever might have been thought of any
individual case amongst the complaints, most undoubtedly, from the great
number to which the Doctor had exposed himself, amongst which many were
not of a nature to be evaded by any vouchers whatsoever, a fatal effect
would have settled on the Doctor's moral reputation. He would have been
passed down to posterity as a dealer in wholesale scandal, who cared
nothing for the wounded feelings of relatives. It is a trifle after that
to add that he would frequently have been cudgelled.

This public judgment upon Dr. Johnson and these cudgellings would have
been too severe a chastisement for