command, and dangerous and oppressive by those who support it.

Mr. Savage was likewise very far from believing that the letters annexed
to each species of bad poets in the Bathos were, as he was directed
to assert, "set down at random;" for when he was charged by one of his
friends with putting his name to such an improbability, he had no other
answer to make than that "he did not think of it;" and his friend had
too much tenderness to reply, that next to the crime of writing contrary
to what he thought was that of writing without thinking.

After having remarked what is false in this dedication, it is proper
that I observe the impartiality which I recommend, by declaring what
Savage asserted--that the account of the circumstances which attended
the publication of the "Dunciad," however strange and improbable, was
exactly true.

The publication of this piece at this time raised Mr. Savage a great
number of enemies among those that were attacked by Mr. Pope, with whom
he was considered as a kind of confederate, and whom he was suspected
of supplying with private intelligence and secret incidents; so that the
ignominy of an informer was added to the terror of a satirist. That he
was not altogether free from literary hypocrisy, and that he sometimes
spoke one thing and wrote another, cannot be denied, because he himself
confessed that, when he lived with great familiarity with Dennis, he
wrote an epigram against him.

Mr. Savage, however, set all the malice of all the pigmy writers at
defiance, and thought the friendship of Mr. Pope cheaply purchased by
being exposed to their censure and their hatred; nor had he any
reason to repent of the preference, for he found Mr. Pope a steady and
unalienable friend almost to the end of his life.

About this time, notwithstanding his avowed neutrality with regard to
party, he published a panegyric on Sir Robert Walpole, for which he was
rewarded by him with twenty guineas, a sum not very large, if either
the excellence of the performance or the affluence of the patron be
considered; but greater than he afterwards obtained from a person of yet
higher rank, and more desirous in appearance of being distinguished as a
patron of literature.

As he was very far from approving the conduct of Sir Robert Walpole,
and in conversation mentioned him sometimes with acrimony, and generally
with contempt, as he was one of those who were always zealous in their
assertions of the justice of th