their liberty generally dedicated their fetters to him. SATURNALIA, in Roman antiquity, a festival observed about the middle of December, in honor of the god Saturn, whom Lucian introduces giving an account of the ceremonies observed on this occasion, thus:- During my whole reign, which lasts but for one week, no public business is done: there is nothing but drinking, singing, playing, creating imaginary kings, placing servants with their masters at table, &c. There shall be no disputes, reproaches, &c., but the rich and poor, masters and slaves, shall be equal,' &c. On this festival the Romans sacrificed bare-headed, contrary to their custom at other sacrifices. During its continuance no business or profession was allowed to be carried on except cookery; all distinctions of rank ceased; and slaves could say what they pleased to their masters with impunity. SATURNIA, a name of Juno as the daughter of Saturn. SATURNINUS (P. Sempronius), a Roman general under Valerian, who was proclaimed emperor by the troops against his inclination. He was afterwards murdered by them, for attempting to restore the ancient discipline, in his forty-third year, A. D. 262. See ROME. SATURNINUS (Sextus Julius, or Junius), another Roman general, a native of Gaul, who was compelled by the soldiers to assume the title of emperor. See ROME. He was in favor with Aurelian. SATYAVRATA, or MENU, in Indian mytholygy, is believed by the Hindoos to have reigned over the whole world in the earliest age of their chronology, and to have resided in the country of Dravira on the coast of the eastern Indian peninsula. His patronymic name was Vaivaswata, or child of the sun. In the Bhagavat we are informed that the Lord of the universe, intending to preserve him from the sea of destruction caused by the depravity of the age, thus told him how he was to act:-In seven days from the present time, O thoa tamer of enemies, the three worlds will be plunged in an ocean of death; but, in the midst of the destroying waves, a large vessel, sent by me for thy use, shall stand before thee. Then shalt thou take all medicinal herbs, all the variety of seeds; and, accompanied by seven saints, encircled by pairs of all brute animals, thou shalt enter the spacious ark and continue in it, secure from the flood, on one immense ocean without light, except the radiance of thy holy companions, When the ship shall be agitated by an impetuous wind, thou shalt fasten it with a large sea serpent on my horn; for I will be near thee: drawing the vessel, with thee and thy attendants, I will remain on the ocean, O chief of men, until a night of Brahma shall be completely ended. Thou shalt then know my true greatness, rightly named the supreme Godhead; by my favor all thy questions shall be answered, and thy mind abundantly instructed.' This story is evidently that of Noah disguised by Asiatic fiction and allegory. Saturs, as Pliny testifies, were found in time past in the eastern mountains of India. Peacham. If the chyle be very plentiful, it breeds a satyriasis, or an abundance of seminal lympha. Floyer on the Humours. The heathen lawgivers of ancient days, Names almost worthy of a Christian's praise, Would drive them forth from the resort of men, And shut up every satyr in his den. Couper. SATYRS, in ancient mythology, a species of demi-gods who dwelt in the woods. They are represented as monsters, half men and half goats; having horns on their heads, a hairy body, with the feet and tail of a goat. They are generally in the train that follows Bacchus. As the poets supposed that they were remarkable for piercing eyes and keen raillery, they have placed them in the same pictures with the Graces, Muses, and even with Venus herself. It seems probable that some large species of monkey or baboon seen in demi-gods. Pliny evidently points out some the woods gave the first occasion to feign these sort of ape under the name of Satyr. He says they are nimble, running sometimes upon all satyrs are found in some mountains of India; four, sometimes erect like men, and they are so swift that it is difficult to overtake them except they are old or sick. To this we may add, that shepherds covered with goat skins, and still more often priests of Bacchus, counterfeited satyrs, to have the true explication of the fable. seduce the innocent shepherdesses; and thus we Hence the opinion spread that the woods were full of trembled for their honor, and the shepherds for these mischievous divinities. The shepherdesses their flocks; for which reason they sought to appease them by sacrifices, and by the offerings of the firstlings of their flocks. SATYRIASIS. See MEDICINE. dria order, and gynandria class of plants; natu- Fr. sauvage: Ital. selvaggio. Wild; uncultivated; un taught a man untaught or uncivilised: to make barbarous (a barbarism of Thomson's): the adcorresponding; and the noun substantives verb see below. This is the bloodiest shame, The wildest savag`ry, the vilest stroke, That ever wall-eyed wrath, or staring rage, Presented to the tears of soft remorse. Shakspeare. Thus people lived altogether a savage life, 'till Saturn, arriving on those coasts, devised laws to govern them by. Raleigh. Long after these times were they but sarages. Id. SATYR, n. s. Lat. satirus. A sylvan The seditious lived by rapine and ruin of all the SATYRIASIS.god; supposed among the country, omitting nothing of that which satare, ancients to be rude and lecherous: a diverse de-enaged in the height of their unruly behaviour, do fined below. commit. Hayward. I see the savagest of all creatures, lions, tigers, bears, by an instinct from God, come to seek the ark (as we see swine foreseeing a storm run home crying for shelter), men I see not; reason once debauched is worse than brutishness. The savage clamour drowned, Both harp and voice. Bp. Hall. Milton. Cornels, and savage berries of the wood, A herd of wild beasts on the mountains, or a savage drove of men in caves, might be so disor- To deprive us of metals is to make us mere savages; to change our corn for the old Arcadian diet, our houses and cities for dens and caves, and our cloathing for skins of beasts: 'tis to bereave us of all arts and sciences, nay, of revealed religion. Bentley. Tyrants no more their savage nature kept, Broome. Thomson. Friends, relations, love himself, Savaged by woe, forget the tender tie. SAVAGE (Richard), the poet, was the son of Anne countess of Macclesfield by the earl of Rivers, according to her own confession; and was born in 1698. This confession of adultery was made to procure a separation from her husband, the earl of Macclesfield: yet, having obtained this end, no sooner was her spurious offspring brought into the world, than she resolved to disown him; and, as long as he lived, treated him with the most unnatural cruelty. She endeavoured to send him secretly to the plantations; but, this plan being frustrated, she placed him apprentice with a shoemaker. In this situation, however, he did not long continue; for his nurse dying he discovered his real mother, and therefore applied to her, and tried every art to attract her regard. But in vain did he solicit this unnatural parent; she avoided him with the utmost precaution, and took measures to prevent his ever entering her house. Mean time, having a strong taste for poetry, he wrote two plays, Woman's a Riddle and Love in a Veil: by the second of which he acquired the acquaintance of Sir Richard Steele and Mr. Wilks, by whom he was pitied, caressed, and relieved. But the kindness of his friends not affording him a constant supply, he wrote the tragedy of Sir Thomas Overbury, which brought him in £200. He soon after published a volume of Miscellanies, to which he wrote a preface, in which he gives an account of his mother's cruelty. The profits of his tragedy and his Miscellanies somewhat raised him both in circumstances and credit; so that the world began to behold him with a more favorable eye, when both his fame and life were endangered by a most unhappy event. A drunken frolic in which he one night engaged ended in a fray, and, swords having been drawn on both sides, Savage unfortunately killed a man, for which he was condemned to be 1.anged. But the countess of Hertford at length laid his whole case before queen Caroline, and Savage obtained a pardon. Savage now lost that affection for his mother which the whole series of her cruelty had not before been able wholly to repress; and considering her as an implacable enemy, whom nothing but his blood could satisfy, threatened to harass her with lampoons, and to publish a copious narrative of her conduct, unless she consented to allow him a pension. This expedient proved successful; and lord Tyrconnel, upon his promise of laying aside his design of exposing his mother's cruelty, took him into his family, treated him as an equal, and engaged to allow him a pension of £200 ayear. This was the happy period of Savage's life. He was courted by all who wished to be thought men of genius and taste. At this time he published the Temple of Health and Mirth, on and the Wanderer, a moral poem, which he dethe recovery of lady Tyrconnel from a long illness; dicated to lord Tyrconnel, in strains of the highest panegyric: but these praises he soon was inclined to retract, being discarded by the man on whom they were bestowed. Of this quarrel lord Tyrconnel and Mr. Savage gave very different accounts. But our author's conduct was ever such as made all his friends, sooner or later, grow weary of him, and even forced most of them to become his enemies. Being thus once more turned adrift upon the world, Savage, whose passions were very strong and whose gratitude was very small, exposed the faults of lord Tyrconnel. He also took revenge upon his mother, by publishing The Bastard. Some time after this, Savage formed the resolution of applying to the queen; who having once given him life, he hoped she might extend he goodness to him, by enabling him to support i' With this view, he published a poem on hu birth-day, which he entitled The Volunteer Lau reat; for which she was pleased to send him £50 with an intimation that he might annually expect the same bounty. But this annual allowance was nothing to a man of his strange and singular extravagance. His usual custom was, as soon as he had received his pension, to disappear with it, and secrete himself from his most intimate friends, till every shilling of it was spent; which done he again appeared, pennyless as before; but he would never inform any person where he had been, nor in what manner his money had been dissipated.-From the reports, however, of some who penetrated his haunts, he expended both his time and his cash in the most sordid and despicable sensuality; particu larly in eating and drinking, in which he would indulge in the most unsocial manner, sitting whole days and nights by himself, in obscure houses of entertainment, over his bottle and trencher, immersed in filth and sloth, with scarcely decent apparel; generally wrapped up in a horseman's great coat. His wit and talents, however, still raised him new friends as fast as his misbehaviour lost him his old ones. Yet such was his conduct, that occasional relief only furnished the means of occasional excess; and he defeated all the attempts made by his friends to fix him in a decent way. Yet, amidst all his penury and wretchedness, this man had so much pride, and so high an opinion of his own merit, that he was always ready to repress. with scorn and contempt, the least appearance of any slight towards himself, in the behaviour of his acquaintance; among whom he looked upon none as his superior. He would be treated as an equal, even by persons of the highest rank. He once refused to wait upon a gentleman who was desirous of relieving him when in the lowest distress, only because the message signified the gentleman's desire to see him at nine in the morning. This life was rendered still more unhappy by the death of the queen, in 1738, when his pension was discontinued. His distress now became so notorious that a scheme was at length concerted for procuring him a permanent relief. It was proposed that he should retire into Wales, with an allowance of £50 a year, on which he was to live privately, in a cheap place, for ever quitting his town haunts, and resigning all farther pretensions to fame. This offer he seemed gladly to accept. In 1739 he set out for Swansey, in the Bristol stage-coach, and was furnished with fifteen guineas to bear the expense of his journey. But, on the fourteenth day after his departure, his friends and benefactors, the principal of whom was Mr. Pope, who expected to hear of his arrival in Wales, were surprised with a letter from Savage, informing them that he was yet upon the road, and could not proceed for want of money. There was no other remedy than a remittance; which was sent him, and by the help of which he was enabled to reach Bristol, whence he was to proceed to Swansey by water. At Bristol, however, he found an embargo laid upon the shipping; so that he could not immediately obtain a passage. Here, therefore, being obliged to stay for some time, he so ingratiated himself with the principal inhabitants, that he was often invited to their houses, distinguished at their public entertainments, and treated with a regard that highly gratified his vanity. At length, with great reluctance, he proceeled to Swansey; where he lived about a year, very much dissatisfied with the diminution of his salary; for he had, in his letters, treated his contributors so insolently that most of them withdrew their subscriptions. Here he finished a tragedy, and resolved to return with it to London; which was strenuously opposed by his constant friend Mr. Pope; who proposed that Saage should put this play into the hands of Mr. homson and Mr. Mallet, that they might fit it or the stage, that his friends should receive the rofits it might bring in, and that the author ould receive the produce by way of annuity. his kind and prudent scheme was rejected by wage with contempt.-He declared he would ot submit his works to any one's correction : and that he would no longer be kept in leadingstrings. Accordingly he soon returned to Bristol, in his way to London; but at Bristol, meeting with a repetition of the same kind treatment he had before found there, he was tempted to make a second stay in that opulent city for some time. Here he was again not only caressed and Treated, but the sum of £30 was raised for him, with which it had been happy if he had immediately departed for London. But he never considered that a frequent repetition of such kindness was not to be expected. In short, he remained here till his company was no longer welcome. Necessity came upon him before he was aware; his money was spent, his clothes were worn out, his appearance was shabby; he now began to find every man from home at whose house he called; and he found it difficult to obtain a dinner. Thus reduced, it would have been prudent in him to have withdrawn from the place; but the mistress of a coffee house, to whom he owed about £8, arrested Inn for the debt. Ile remained for some time at a great expense, in the house of the sheriff's officer, in hope of procuring bail; which expense he was enabled to defray by a present from Mr. Nash at Bath. No bail, however, was to be found; so that poor Savage was at last lodged in Newgate, a prison in Bristol. But it was the fortune of this extraordinary mortal always to find more friends than he deserved. The keeper of the prison took compassion on him, and greatly softened the rigors of his confinement by every kind of indulgence. While he remained here his ingratitude again broke out, in a bitter satire on the city of Bristol; to which he certainly owed great obligations, notwithstanding his ar rest. This satire is entitled London and Bristol delineated; and in it he abused the inhabitants of the latter, with such a spirit of resentment, that the reader would imagine he had never received any other than the worst of treatment in that city. In about six months after his arrest he was seized with a disorder, which at first was not suspected to be dangerous; but, growing daily more languid and dejected, at last a fever seized him; and he died on the 1st of August 1743, in the forty-sixth year of his age. works of this original writer, after having long lain dispersed in magazines and fugitive publications, were collected and published in an elegant edition, in 2 vols. 8vo.; to which are prefixed, the admirable Memoirs of Savage, by Dr. Samuel Johnson. The SAVAGE ISLAND, an island in the south Pacific Ocean, about thirty-three miles in circumfer ence, discovered by captain Cook, in the year 1774. The name was given on account of the rude behaviour of the inhabitants. Captain Cook says the island is of a round form, and good height; and has deep waters close to its shores. All the sea coast, and as far inland as he could see, was covered with trees, shrubs, &c., among which were some cocoa-nut trees. The inhabitants seemed to be stout and well made. They fish with lights by night, called tomais, made from the bark of the cocoa-nut tree. They form a decoy for fish. The island is in long. 169° 37′ W., and lat. 19° 1' S. SAVAGISM, a word of modern adoption, designed to express that ignorant and barbarous state of mankind, which most ancient philosophers, and some modern authors of eminence, suppose to have been the original state of all mankind. A numerous sect of ancient philosophers maintamed that man literally sprung at first from the earth; that he was without ideas and without speech; and that many ages elapsed before the race acquired the use of language, or attained to greater knowledge than the beasts. Other sects again, with the vulgar, and almost all the poets, maintained that the first mortals were wiser and happier, and more powerful, than any of their offspring; that mankind, instead of being originally savages, and rising to the state of civilisation by their own gradual and progressive exertions, were created in a high degree of perfection; that, however, they degenerated from that state, and that all nature degenerated with them. Hence the various ages of the world have almost every where been compared to gold, silver, brass, and iron, the golden having always been supposed to be the first age. See AGE. Since the revival of letters in Europe, and especially during the last century, the same question has been agitated both in France and the England. Such of the ancients as held that man was originally a savage were countenanced by the atheistic cosmogony of the Phoenicians, and by the early history of their own nations; the moderns build their system upon what they suppose to be the constitution of the human mind, and upon the late improvements in arts and sciences. As the question must finally be decided by historical evidence, before we make our appeal to facts, we may remark, upon the supposition that all mankind were originally savages, destitute of the use of speech, and, in the strictest sense of the words, mutum et turpe pecus, the great difficulty is to conceive how they could emerge from that state, and become at last enlightened and civilised: but the modern advocates for the universality of the savage state remove this difficulty by a number of instincts or internal senses, with which they suppose the human mind endowed, and by which the savage is, without reflection, not only enabled to distinguish between right and wrong, and prompted to do every thing necessary to the preservation of his existence and the continuance of the species, but also led to the discovery of what will contribute, in the first instance, to the ease and accommodations of life. These instincts, they think, brought mankind together when the reasoning faculty, which had hitherto been dormant, being now roused by the collisions of society, made its observations upon the consequences of their different actions, taught them to avoid such as experience showed to be pernicious, and to improve upon those which they found beneficial; and thus was the progress of civilisation begun. But this theory seems opposed by unanswerable objections. In the preliminary discourse to Sketches of the History of Man, lord Kames would infer, from some facts which he states, that many pairs of the human race were at first created, of very different forms and natures, but all depending entirely on their own natural talents. But to this statement he rightly observes that the Mosaic account of the creation opposes objections. 'Whence then,' says his lordship, the degeneracy of all men into the savage state? To account for that dismal catastrophe, mankind must have suffered some dreadful convulsion.' Now this is taking for granted the very thing to be proved. We deny that at any period since the creation, all men were sunk into the state of savages; and, that they were, no proof has yet been brought, nor do we know of any that can be brought, unless our fashionable philosophers choose to prop their theories by the buttress of Sanchoniatho's Phonician cosmogony. His lordship, however, says, or rather supposes, that the confusion at Babel, &c., was this dreadful convulsion: For, says he, by confounding the language of men, and scattering them abroad upon the face of all the earth, they were rendered savages. Here again we have a positive assertion without the least shadow of proof; for it does not at all appear that the confusion of languages, and the scattering abroad of the people, was a circumstance such as could induce universal savagism. There is no reason to think that all the men then alive were engaged in building the tower of Babel; nor does it appear from the Hebrew original that the language of those who were engaged in it was so much changed as the reader is apt to infer from our English version. That the builders were scattered is indeed certain; and if any of them were driven, in very small tribes, to a great distance from their brethren, they would in process of time inevitably become savages. But it is evident, from the Scripture account of the peopling of the earth, that the descendants of Shem and Japheth were not scattered over the face of all the earth, and that therefore they could not be rendered savage by the catastrophe at Babel. In the chapter which relates that wonderful event the generations of Shem are given in orders down to Abraham; but there is no indication that they had suffered with the builders of the tower, or that any of them had degenerated into the state of savages. On the contrary, they appear to have possessed a considerable degree of knowledge; and if any credit be due to the tradition which represents the father of Abraham as a statuary, and himself as skilled in the science of astronomy, they must have been far advanced in the arts of refinement. Even such of the posterity of Ham as either emigrated or were driven from the plain of Shinar in large bodies, so far from sinking into savagism, retained all the acquirements of their antediluvian ancestors, and became afterwards the instructors of the Greeks and Romans. This is evident from the history of the Egyptians and other eastern nations, who in the days of Abraham were powerful and highly civilised. And that for many ages they did not degenerate into barbarism is apparent from its having been thought to exalt the character of Moses, that he was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and from the wisdom of Solomon having been said to excel all the wisdom of the east country and of Egypt. Thus decided are the Scriptures of the Old Testament against the universal prevalence of savagism in that period of the world; nor are the most authentic Pagan writers of antiquity of a different opinion. Mochus the Phoenician (Strabo, lib. 17), Democritus, and Epicurus, appear to be the first champions of the savage state, and they are followed by a mumerous body of poets and rhapsodists, among the Greeks and Romans, who were unquestionably devoted to fable and fiction. The account which they have given of the origin of man, the reader will find in other parts of this work. But we hardly think that he will employ it in support of the fashionable doctrine of original savagism. Against the wild reveries of this school might be quoted all the leaders of the other sects, |