Note 179 — COMMENCEMENT OF OUTDOOR PREACHING.

This remarkable man, after a life of strange vicissitudes, was arrested for debt, on January 10, 1743, and put into Newgate prison, Bristol, where he remained until his death on the 31st of July next ensuing. Dr. Johnson writes: "He was treated by Mr. Dagge, the keeper of the prison, with great humanity; was supported by him at his own table without any certainty of recompence; had a room to himself, to which he could at any time retire from all disturbance; was allowed to stand at the door of the prison, and was sometimes taken out into the fields; so that he suffered fewer hardships in prison than he had been accustomed to undergo in the greatest part of his life. During the whole time of his imprisonment, the keeper continued to treat him with the utmost tenderness and civility. Virtue is undoubtedly most laudable in that state which makes it most difficult, and therefore the humanity of a gaoler certainly deserves this public attestation; and the man whose heart has not been hardened by such an employment may be justly proposed as a pattern of benevolence. If an inscription was once engraved 'to the honest toll-gatherer,' less honours ought not to be paid 'to the tender gaoler.'" It ought to be added, to the honour of Dagge, Whitefield's friend and admirer, that he defrayed the expense of burying Savage in the churchyard of St. Peter's.