1797, at midnight, and in a severe storm. On my arrival in town, my poem was advertised, printed, and published with great expedition. It was printed for Clarke in New Bond-street. For several days the sale was very promising; and my bookseller as well as myself entertained sanguine hopes; but the demand for the poem relaxed gradually! From this last of many literary misfortunes, I inferred that prejudice and malignity, in my fate as an author, seemed, indeed, to be invincible." The catastrophe of the poet is much better told than anything in the poem, which had not merit enough to support that interest which the temporary subject had excited.

Let the fate of Stockdale instruct some, and he will not have written in vain the "Memoirs of his Life and Writings." I have only turned the literary feature to our eye; it was combined with others, equally striking, from the same mould in which that was cast. Stockdale imagined he possessed an intuitive knowledge of human nature. He says, "everything that constituted my nature, my acquirements, my habits, and my fortune, conspired to let in upon me a complete knowledge of human nature." A most striking proof of this knowledge is his parallel, after the manner of Plutarch, between Charles XII. and Himself! He frankly confesses there were some points in which he and the Swedish monarch did not exactly resemble each other. He thinks, for instance, that the King of Sweden had a somewhat more fervid and original genius than himself, and was likewise a little more robust in his person-but, subjoins Stockdale,

"Of our reciprocal fortune, achievements and conduct, some parts will be to his advantage, and some to mine."

Yet in regard to Fame, the main object between him and Charles XII., Stockdale imagined that his own

"Will not probably take its fixed and immovable station, and shine with its expanded and permanent splendour, till it consecrates his ashes, till it illumines his tomb !"

POPE hesitated at deciding on the durability of his poetry. PRIOR Congratulates himself that he had not devoted all his days to rhymes. STOCKDALE imagines his fame is to commence at the very point (the tomb) where genius trembles its own may nearly terminate!

To close this article, I could wish to regale the poetical Stockdales with a delectable morsel of fraternal biography; such would be the life and its memorable close of ELKANAH SETTLE, who imagined himself to be a great poet, when he was

placed on a level with Dryden by the town-wits, gentle spirits! to vex genius.

Settle's play of "The Empress of Morocco" was the very first "adorned with sculptures." However, in due time, the Whigs despising his rhymes, Settle tried his prose for the Tories; but he was a magician whose enchantments never charmed. He at length obtained the office of the city poet, when lord mayors were proud enough to have laureates in their annual pageants.

When Elkanah Settle published any party-poem, he sent copies round to the chiefs of the party, accompanied with addresses, to extort pecuniary presents. He had latterly one standard Elegy and Epithalamium printed off with blanks, which by the ingenious contrivance of filling up with the names of any considerable person, who died or was married, no one who was going out of life or entering it, could pass scot-free from the tar levied by his hacknied muse. The following letter accompanied his presentation copy to the Duke of Somerset, on a poem, in Latin and English, on the Hanover succession, when Elkanah wrote for the Whigs, as he had for the Tories :— "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. Minns, 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."