CITY POET OF LONDON

Waipa Post, Volume 52, Issue 3705, 10 January 1936, Page 9

CITY POET OF LONDON

As the Crown lias for centuries possessed its laureate, so the city of London had its poet, who filled an office that lasted as late as Queen Anne. Elkanah Settle, the Restoration playwright, was the last of the line. Settle, who wrote heroic tragedies, the scenes discreetly laid in Persia or Morocco, set his mediocre talents in verse and drama against the great Dryden, and suffered in the clash. Dryden wrote of him as one

“ Free from all meaning, whether good or bad, And, in one word, heroically mad.”

Settle was born in the year before King Charles I.’s execution, and lived till 1724. Such fame as he enjoyed fell away in his later years, and the poet descended to writing for the booths in Bartholomew lair, Smithfield. At one of the shows there he is said in his penury to have played a dragon in green leather. The writing of love letters for maid servants and of ballads for Pye-corner helped him to eke out a living, till these resources, too, failed. The last of the city poets died a poor brother in Charterhouse. —W.8., in the London Daily Telegraph.