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 the city-laureate;[29] but, in despite of that provision, was reduced by want to write plays, like Ben Jonson’s Littlewit, for the profane motions, or puppet-shows, of Smithfield and Bartholomew fairs.  Nay, having proceeded thus far in exhibiting the truth of Dryden’s prediction, he actually mounted the stage in person among these wooden performers, and combated St. George for England in a green dragon of his own proper device.  Settle was admitted into the Charterhouse in his old age, and died there in 1723.  The lines of Pope on poor Elkanah’s fate are familiar to every poetical reader:—­

  “In Lud’s old walls though long I ruled, renowned
  Far as loud Bow’s stupendous bells resound;
  Though my own aldermen conferred the bays,
  To me committing their eternal praise,
  Their full-fed heroes, their pacific mayors,
  Their annual trophies and their monthly wars;
  Though long my party built on me their hopes,
  For writing pamphlets, and for roasting popes;
  Yet lo! in me what authors have to brag on! 
  Reduced at last to hiss in my own dragon. 
  Avert it, heaven! that thou, or Cibber, e’er
  Should wag a serpent-tail in Smithfield fair! 
  Like the vile straw that’s blown about the streets,
  The needy poet sticks to all he meets;
  Coached, carted, trod upon, now loose, now fast,
  And carried off in some dog’s tail at last.”

As Dryden was probably more apprehensive of Shadwell, who, though a worse poet than Settle, has excelled even Dryden in the lower walks of comedy, he has treated him with sterner severity.  His person, his morals, his manners and his politics, all that had escaped or been but slightly touched upon in “Mac-Flecknoe,” are bitterly reviewed in the character of Og; and there probably never existed another poet, who, at the distance of a month, which intervened between the publication of the two poems, could resume an exhausted theme with an energy which gave it all the charms of novelty.  Shadwell did not remain silent beneath the lash; but his clamorous exclamations only tended to make his castigation more ludicrous.[30]