But we were considering the past, not the present. Robert Heron, author, scholar, teacher, who wrote much that will live in literature, died in hopeless poverty. His "History of Scotland" and his "Universal Geography" are still among our best books of reference. He says of himself in a paper written just before he died: "The tenor of my life has been temperate, laborious, humble, and quiet, and, to the utmost of my power, beneficent. For these last three months I have been brought to the very extremity of bodily and pecuniary distress, and I shudder at the thought of perishing in jail." Yet such was his fate; he died in Newgate. Thomas Decker, the English author, and collaborator with Ford and Rowley in the production of popular dramas, died in a debtor's prison. Christopher Smart, the personal friend of Dr. Johnson, produced his principal poem while confined in a mad-house. Richard Savage, the English poet, experienced a life which reads like fiction.[110] The natural son of an English earl and countess, he was abandoned by his mother to the care of a nurse who brought him up in ignorance of his parentage. Before he was thirty years of age he was tried and condemned for murder; and, though finally pardoned, he died in jail. During a considerable portion of the time that Savage was engaged upon his tragedy of "Sir Thomas Overbury," he was without lodgings and often without meat; nor had he any other convenience for study and composition than the open fields or the public streets. Having formed his sentences and speeches in his mind, he would step into a shop, ask for pen and ink, and write down what he had composed upon such scraps of paper as he had picked up by chance, often from the street gutters. Thomas Hood, the famous English humorist, began at first as a clerk in a store, then became apprentice to an engraver; but his genius soon led him to seek literary occupation as a regular means of support. He was endowed with an unlimited fund of wit and comic power. His "Song of the Shirt" showed that he had also great tenderness and pathos in his nature. He edited various magazines and weekly papers, and published two or three humorous books; but his career was far from a success in any light. His life was occupied in incessant brain-work, aggravated by ill-health and the many uncertainties of authorship. He finally died poor in his forty-seventh year, leaving a dependent family.