h all profound humility, your Grace's most dutiful
servant,

"E. SETTLE."

In the latter part of his life Settle dropped still lower, and became
the poet of a booth at Bartholomew Fair, and composed drolls, for
which the rival of Dryden, it seems, had a genius!--but it was little
respected--for two great personages, "Mrs. Mynns and her daughter,
Mrs. Leigh," approving of their great poet's happy invention in one of
his own drolls, "St. George for England," of a green dragon, as large
as life, insisted, as the tyrant of old did to the inventor of the
brazen bull, that the first experiment should be made on the artist
himself, and Settle was tried in his own dragon; he crept in with all
his genius, and did "act the dragon, enclosed in a case of green
leather of his own invention." The circumstance is recorded in the
lively verse of Young, in his "Epistle to Pope concerning the authors
of the age."

Poor Elkanah, all other changes past,
For bread in Smithfield dragons hiss'd at last,
Spit streams of fire to make the butchers gape,
And found his manners suited to his shape;
Such is the fate of talents misapplied,
So lived your prototype, and so he died.

FOOTNOTES:

[137] An elegant poet of our times alludes, with due feeling, to these
personal sacrifices. Addressing Poetry, he exclaims--

"In devotion to thy heavenly charms,
I clasp'd thy altar with my infant arms;
For thee neglected the wide field of wealth;
The toils of interest, and the sports of health."

How often may we lament that poets are too apt "to clasp the
altar with infant arms." Goldsmith was near forty when he
published his popular poems--and the greater number of the
most valued poems were produced in mature life. When the poet
begins in "infancy," he too often contracts a habit of writing
verses, and sometimes, in all his life, never reaches poetry.

[138] Vol. ii. p. 355.

[139] My old favourite cynic, with all his rough honesty and acute
discrimination, Anthony Wood, engraved a sketch of Stockdale
when he etched with his aqua-fortis the personage of a
brother:--"This Edward Waterhouse wrote a rhapsodical,
indigested, whimsical work; and not in the least to be taken
into the hand of any sober scholar, unless it be to make him
laugh or wonder at the simplicity of some people