“Sir,—Nothing but the greatness of the subject could encourage my presumption in laying the enclosed Essay at your Grace’s feet, being, with 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.”
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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. |
QUARRELS OF AUTHORS;
OR,
SOME MEMOIRS FOR OUR LITERARY HISTORY.
“The use and end of this Work I do not so much design for curiosity, or satisfaction of those that are the lovers of learning, but chiefly for a more grave and serious purpose: which is, that it will make learned men wise in the use and administration of learning.”—Lord Bacon, “Of Learning.”