or walked the streets all night shelterless!
How many times he refected his famished
sides at a St. Giles's cook-shop, or fancied he
could choke, like Otway, with a penny roll, if
he only had a penny to purchase a roll to
choke himself withal. Did he ever enact
griffins, ships, or Towers of Babel, at the
"motion" plays at Bartholomew Fair, like
that other poet, the unhappy Elkanah Settle?
Was he ever one of Swift's Little Britain
translators that lay three in a bed? Was he
one of the historians that Mr. Curll kept at
the public house in Holborn, and fed on tripe
and strong waters? He lived somehow this
poor non-juring mediocre man; for, he lived
to be tutor to the Earl of Orrery, the
renowned translator of Pliny, and afterwards
to be master of the charity school at Seven
Oaks in Kent, which situation he quitted in
seventeen hundred and ten, through the
persuasion of Mr. St. John, afterwards Lord
Bolingbroke, who made him promises of a
more honourable and profitable employment.

"In process of time," I quote his biographer
here, "as he became more and more attached
to the muses, whom he had courted from early
life, he became more moderate in his political
opinions; for though a non-juror he was
lavish in his eulogiums on Queen Anne, and
extolled the name of Marlborough beyond
the very echo of applause." Poor Fenton!
was he not getting hungry? Was it not
natural for the poetical non-juror, condemned
to teach the charity-school boys of Seven
Oaks, and to dance the young Earl of Orrery
like a bear through his humanities—Ah! if
the truth were known, I will be bound that
honest Elijah had more to do with Pliny
anglicised than the renowned translator cared to
admit—to yearn a little after the loaves and
fishes? Though Queen Anne occupied the
throne of King James, is it not natural that
an empty stomach of years' standing should
at last thaw the Jacobite ice into a stream of
lavish eulogiums, and tune the High Tory
harp to extol the name of the Whig Marlborough
beyond the very echo of applause?
Even more than this did Elijah do. He
testified his regard for the Churchill family, in
Florelio, an elegiac pastoral on the death of
the great captain's son, the Marquis of Blandford;
in which Doctor Johnson observes, "he
could be prompted only by respect or kindness,
for neither the Duke nor Dutchess desired
the praise, or liked the cost of patronage."
I am sorry to say that I am at issue
with Bolt Court upon this point. John
Churchill, the great Duke of Marlborough,
could swallow anything. Blue ribbons,
garters, places, pensions, coronets, palaces,
parliamentary grants, pilferings from the soldiers'
pay, and profits upon their shirts and firelocks;
his great avarice had stomach for them
all. He was more bespattered with praise
(as, afterwards with obloquy), than any man
of his age; and it is to be presumed that he
liked as much to be praised as to be
Generalissimo of the allied forces, and proprietor of
Blenheim. And his Duchess "Old Sarah,"
is the Doctor to assert that she
disliked praise? Was she not a woman—was
she not a Duchess—a Duchess, living in the
days when Duchesses were estimated by
poets (at so many gold pieces per line) as
something very little short of divinities!
It might have been the Duchess of Marlborough's
chaplain (for reverend Praisers were
multiplied exceedingly in those days), who,
preaching a funeral sermon over a deceased
Peeress, took occasion to inform his congregation
that "he had no doubt that her Grace was
at that moment occupying that, distinguished
position in Heaven to which her exalted rank,
and shining virtues entitled her!" Close-fisted,
moreover, as Duchess Sarah may have been,
she would scarcely have grudged a meal of
victuals in the kitchen of Marlborough House,
and half a score of broad pieces to the author
of Florelio.

In seventeen hundred and nine, Elijah
Fenton acquired the esteem of the literati.
He also acquired the esteem of Southerne,
and lastly the friendship of a little crooked
catholic gentleman, who lived in a little house
with a grotto at Twickenham, from whence,
now and then, he rode to town in a little
coach—and who was called Alexander Pope.
The little waspish, spiteful, kind-hearted bard
was the first to patronise and pat on the back
the forlorn Elijah. They must have been a
curious couple. Fenton was a tall, bulky,
gross, lazy man, on whom his landlady's
criticism was, "that he would lie a-bed, and be
fed with a spoon." His clothes were not
good; his wig was probably uncombed, his
shoes down at heel, his buckles rusty, his
steenkirk unbleached. He was "very sluggish
and sedentary," says the biographer, "rose
late, and when he once had sat down to his
books, would not get up again." He must
have been a sort of dull, heavy book, this
Elijah, in unreadable type, that went down to
oblivion with most of its leaves uncut.

Elijah was not tired, poor fellow, of dedications
yet. To a collection of poems called
the Oxford and Cambridge Verses he prefixed
a very elegant dedication to Lionel, Earl of
Dorset and Middlesex; and in seventeen
hundred and sixteen he produced his Ode to
Lord Gower. Mr. Pope hastened to show
his friendship on the occasion, by stamping
the poem with his approbation. He
pronounced it to be the next ode in the English
language to Dryden's Alexander's Feast.
Here are a few of Elijah's lines, taken at
random from the Ode:—

        From Volga's banks th' imperious Czar
        Leads forth his puny troops to war,
        Fond of the softer southern sky:
        The Soldan galls th' Illyrian coast,
        But soon the miscreant mooney host
        Before the victor cross shall fly.

Humph! Miscreant mooney host. Again: