e, never out nor in;
Free from all meaning, whether good or bad,
And, in one word, heroically mad.
He was too warm on picking-work to dwell,
But faggoted his notions as they fell,
And, if they rhymed and rattled, all was well."

Ere we take leave of Settle, it is impossible to omit mentioning his
lamentable conclusion; a tale often told and moralised upon, and in
truth a piece of very tragical mirth. Elkanah, we have seen, was at this
period a zealous Whig; nay, he was so far in the confidence of
Shaftesbury that, under his direction, and with his materials, he had
been intrusted to compose a noted libel against the Duke of York,
entitled, "The Character of a Popish Successor." Having a genius for
mechanics, he was also exalted to be manager of a procession for burning
the Pope; which the Whigs celebrated with great pomp, as one of many
artifices to inflame the minds of the people.[26] To this, and to the
fireworks which attended its solemnisation, Dryden alludes in the lines
to which Elkanah's subsequent disasters gave an air of prophecy:--

"In fireworks give him leave to vent his spite,
Those are the only servants he can write;
The height of his ambition is, we know,
But to be master of a puppet-show;
On that one stage his works may yet appear,
And a month's harvest keeps him all the year."

Notwithstanding the rank he held among the Whig authors,[27] Settle,
perceiving the cause of his patron Shaftesbury was gradually becoming
weaker, fairly abandoned him to his fate, and read a solemn recantation
of his political errors in a narrative published in 1683. The truth
seems to be, that honest Doeg was poet-laureate to the city, and earned
some emolument by composing verses for pageants and other occasions of
civic festivity; so that when the Tory interest resumed its ascendency
among the magistrates, he had probably no alternative but to relinquish
his principles or his post, and Elkanah, like many greater men, held the
former the easier sacrifice. Like all converts, he became outrageous in
his new faith, wrote a libel on Lord Russell a few days after his
execution; indited a panegyric on Judge Jefferies; and, being _tam Marte
quam Mercurio_, actually joined as a trooper the army which King James
encamped upon Hounslow Heath. After the Revolution, he is enumerated,
with our author and Tate, among those poets whose strains had been
stifled by that great event.[28] He continued, however, to be t