But Amiel[434] had, alas! the fate to hear An angry poet play his chronicler; A poet raised above Oblivion's shade, By his recorded verse immortal made. But, sir, his livelier figure to engrave, With branches added to the _bays_ you gave, No muse could more heroic feats rehearse; Had with an equal all-applauding verse, Great David's sceptre, and Saul's javelin, praised, A pyramid to his saint, Interest, raised: For which, religiously, no change he mist, } From commonwealth's man up to royalist; } Nay, would have been his own loathed thing, called priest; } Priest, which with so much gall he does describe, 'Cause once unworthy thought of Levi's tribe. Near those bright towers, where Art has wonders done, } And at his feet proud Jordan's waters run, } Where David's sight glads the blest summer's sun, } A cell there stands, by pious founders raised, Both for its wealth and learned rabbins praised; To this did an ambitious bard aspire. To be no less than lord of that blest choir; Till wisdom deemed so sacred a command A prize too great for his unhallowed hand. Besides, lewd Fame had told his plighted vow To Laura's cooing love, perched on a drooping bough; Laura, in faithful constancy confined To Ethiop's envoy, and to all mankind; Laura, though rotten, yet of mould divine, He had all her ----, and she had all his coin; Her wit so far his purse and sense could drain. Till every ---- was sweetened to a strain; And if at last his nature can reform, As weary grown of love's tumultuous storm. 'Tis age's fault, not his, of power bereft,-- He left not whoring, but of that was left. Settle's end was utterly inglorious. In 1683, he deserted the cause of the Whigs, and returned to that of the Tories; for whom he wrote several periodical tracts, in one of which, entitled, "A Narrative," he accused his old patron Shaftesbury of correcting the famous "Character of a Popish Successor;" and objecting, that it did not speak favourably enough of rebellion.[435] Whether compelled by poverty, or through zeal for the royal cause, he became a trooper in King James's army, when it was encamped on Hounslow-Heath.[436] Finally, he took the prophetic hint conveyed in Dryden's lines, and became, not indeed the master, but the assistant, to a puppet-show, kept by a Mrs Minns, in Bartholomew-fair. Thus, the expression, which Dryden had chiefly used in contemptuous allusion to the share which Settle had in directing the Pope-burning, and the fire-works which accompanied it, was literally fulfilled.[437] Nay, poor Elkanah, in his old age, was at length obliged not only to write for the puppet-show, but to appear in it as a performer, inclosed in a case representing a green dragon of his own proper device. There are few readers, who need to be reminded of Pope's famous lines,--