There is so much to say about Savage. Firsst of all, he's the classic Age of Walpole secular patronage poet--the Volunteer Laureate, the author of the Epistle to Walpole and the dedicator to the Prince of Wales. Plus the private shakedowns to Mrs. Brett and Lord and Lady Tyrconnel. But there's also the appeal to his gentility and bend-sinistered aristocratic lineage--I wonder if Horace Walpole included him in his compendium of aristocratic poets.
Gerrard's cagy DNB entry implies that Sansom was a demi-mondaine avant la lettre, attacked by Eliza Haywood for her immorality. She was the daughter of a Catholic gentry family, and it's unclear what she did in her twenties before marrying Arthur Sansom. Perhaps the poetry would say more--she reminds me a bit of Pilkington (also reminiscent of Pilkington is that there she seems to live on as a scandal figure in the posthumous Clio (1752)).
Robert Samber was born to a surgeon family, and was brought up catholic though his older brother was raised protestant. After some study at the English college in Rome, he worked in London as a writer and translator, with an output that ranged from the devotional to the pornographic. The DNB emphasizes that he combined writing for trade publication with writing of dedications and occasional poems for patrons. This spreadsheet rather understates his output because it omits translations.
In the words of the DNB, "Dorset was a dissolute and extravagant man of fashion." He lived the public life of an 18c aristocrat--from Westminster to Christ Church to the Grand Tour to Whig politics, with a healthy dose of arts patronage, mistresses, a financially prudent marriage, and death in his late fifties. And then there's a single piece of cynical pastoral (the shepherds praise their mistresses only to learn that each mistress has slept with the other shepherd) attributed to him in the 1734 GM. Authorized? Unauthorized?
A career suggesting a poor man's Pope--deprived of clerical office for non-juring, Russel became a prolific professional writer and translator. Though the two didn't know each other, their names were often associated because of their similar politics and shared enemies (Cibber, e.g.). According to DNB the Grub-Street Journal is Russel's major achievement. His later years were less happy: "Russel's manuscript copies of the original letters reveal his last years to have been marked by unrelenting Jacobitism, worries over money, and urinary disease."
No family records survive of Rudd, who enters the historical record as a dissenting, Baptist preacher in the 1710s. After moving between various dissenting churches, and encountering some doubts about Calvinism, he conformed in 1742. His poetic/homiletic output skews bizarrely towards funeral elegies and funeral sermons, usually dedicated to family survivors or to congregations who have lost a minister.
Rowe received a strong domestic education, and she began contributing verse to miscellanies and pious collections in her late teens. She published very widely in periodicals, and had a range of friendships with figures of the first importance (Prior, Watts). Her works, esp. Friendship in Death, were reprinted many many times in the 18 and 19c. A paradigmatic example of the pious gentlewoman poet, not shy of publication but independently secure financially.
Rolli exemplifies the hybrid career of the London professional man of letters/scholar who also draws on aristocratic patronage. He came from Italy to England at the invitation of one or more earls, and created numerous libretti for a series of opera companies--in other words, creating a dramatic entertainment for an elite audience, who would have bought the libretti with translations in printed form at the playhouse. But he also translated Milton into Italian, published Italian language-learning books, as well as editing Italian poetry and literature for an English audience.
Roderick seems to be a minor scholarly figure (a port-drowsing Cambridge fellow?) who wrote a few poems, contributed some notes to 18c Shakespeare scholarship, and had an otherwise uneventful life. Illustrates, perhaps, the role of poetry as part of an academic career, and how that turns at midcentury to publication in printed anthologies like Dodsley's.
Fascinating: Robertson's life is straight out of Scott: he lived as head of his clan taking hundreds of fighting men out in '88, '15, and '45 (though in this last, aet 75, he did not fight directly), refusing to build roads back to his estate lest duns get in, and drinking huge quantities of whiskey and brandy. He spent long periods of time in exile in France and Italy, fighting in the French army, and as a semi-outlaw in England.