ns, and a tragedy, _The Siege of Damascus_, which was
well received, and kept its place on the stage for some years. He died
on the first night's performance of the play. Several articles in the
_Tatler_ and _Spectator_ are from his pen. In 1715 he published an
edition of Spenser in six volumes. Hughes received warm praise from
Steele, and enjoyed also the friendship of Addison.

CONYERS MIDDLETON (1683-1750) is now chiefly known for an extravagantly
eulogistic life of _Cicero_ (1741), in which, as Macaulay observes, he
'resorted to the most disingenuous shifts, to unpardonable distortions
and suppressions of facts.' The book is written in a forcible and lively
style. A man of considerable learning, Middleton was a violent
controversialist, who liked better to attack and to defend than to dwell
in the serene atmosphere of literature or of practical divinity. He
assailed the famous Richard Bentley with such rancour that he had to
apologize and was fined L50 by the Court of King's Bench. Middleton was
a doctor of divinity, but his controversial works, while never directly
attacking the chief tenets of the religion he professed, lean far more
to the side of the Deists than to the orthodox creed, and, indeed, it
would not be uncharitable to class him among them. He appears, like
Swift, to have chiefly regarded the Christian religion as an institution
of service to the stability of the State. Of the _Miscellaneous Works_
which were published after his death in five volumes, the most elaborate
and the most provocative of disputation is _A Free Inquiry into the
Miraculous Powers which are supposed to have subsisted in the Christian
Church through several successive centuries_ (1749). Middleton was
educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and in 1734 was elected
librarian of the University.

RICHARD SAVAGE (1698-1743), whose fate is one of the most melancholy in
the annals of versemen, lives in the admirable though neither impartial
nor wholly accurate biography of Dr. Johnson. In 1719 he produced _Love
in a Veil_, a comedy from the Spanish; and in 1723 his tragedy _Sir
Thomas Overbury_ was acted, but with little success. In the same year he
published _The Bastard_, a poem which is said to have driven his mother
out of society. _The Wanderer_, in five cantos, appeared in 1729, and
was regarded by the author as his masterpiece. It has some vigorous
lines and several descriptive passages that are not conventional. Savage
died in