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 prison at Bristol, a city which recalls the equally painful story of Chatterton. LEWIS THEOBALD (1688-1744), the original hero of the _Dunciad_, was a dramatist and translator, but is chiefly known as the author of _Shakespeare Restored; or specimens of blunders committed or unamended in Pope's edition of the poet_ (1726). This was followed two years later by _Proposals for Publishing Emendations and Remarks on Shakespeare_, and in 1733 by his edition of the dramatist in seven volumes. 'Theobald as an editor,' say the editors of the _Cambridge Shakespeare_, 'is incomparably superior to his predecessors and to his immediate successor Warburton, although the latter had the advantage of working on his materials. He was the first to recall a multitude of readings of the first Folio unquestionably right, but unnoticed by previous editors. Many most brilliant emendations ... are due to him.' WILLIAM WALSH (1663-1708) has chronologically little claim to be noticed here, for his poems were published before the beginning of the century, but he is to be remembered as the early friend and wise counsellor of Pope, and also as the author, I believe, of the only English sonnet between Milton's in 1658, and Gray's, on Richard West, in 1742. ANNE FINCH, Countess of Winchelsea (1660-1720), published a volume of verse in 1713 under the title of _Miscellany Poems on Several Occasions, Written by a Lady_. The book contains a _Nocturnal Reverie_, which has some lines showing a close and faithful observation of rural sounds and sights, as for example: 'When the loosed horse, now as his pasture leads, Comes slowly grazing through the adjoining meads, Whose stealing pace and lengthened shade we fear, Till torn-up forage in his teeth we hear; When nibbling sheep at large pursue their food, And unmolested kine rechew the cud; When curlews cry beneath the village walls, And to her straggling brood the partridge calls.'