there is a contempt in Dryden’s satire which approaches almost to good-humour, and plainly shows how far our poet was now from entertaining those apprehensions of rivalship, which certainly dictated his portion of the “Remarks on the Empress of Morocco.”  Settle had now found his level, and Dryden no longer regarded him with a mixture of rage and apprehension, but with more appropriate feelings of utter contempt.  This poor wight had acquired by practice, and perhaps from nature, more of a poetical ear than most of his contemporaries were gifted with.  His “blundering melody,” as Dryden terms it, is far sweeter to the ear than the flat and ineffectual couplets of Tate; nor are his verses always destitute of something approaching to poetic fancy and spirit.  He certainly, in his transposition of “Absalom and Achitophel,” mimicked the harmony of his original with more success than was attained by Shadwell, Buckingham or Pordage.[25] But in this facility of versification all his merit began and ended; in our author’s phrase,

  “Doeg, though without knowing how or why,
  Made still a blundering kind of melody;
  Spurred boldly on, and dashed though thick and thin,
  Through sense and nonsense, 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.”