Such, Polly, are your sex - part truth, part fiction; - Some thought, much whim and all a contradiction.

Pope had been the most faithful of his friends and had made him a small regular allowance. Brett was the cruel and vindictive woman he describes her to be but there is abundant evidence that Richard Savage provided for her illegitimate children. In 1718 Richard Savage claimed to be this child.

See also S. He is best known as the subject of Samuel Johnson's Life of Savage (1744) on which is based one of the most elaborate of Johnson's Lives of the English Poets. Savage impostor or not blackmailed Mrs Brett and her family with some success for after the publication of The Bastard (1728) her nephew John Brownlow 1st Viscount Tyrconnel bought his silence by taking him into his house and allowing him a pension of £200 a year.