Stillingfleet is a fascinating figure: he's the grandson of Bishop Stillingfleet; his father alienated his grandfather for Jacobitism and imprudence, and so Benjamin grew up in the classic poet's position of high social capital (he was admitted to Trinity because Bentley had been tutor to his grandfather) but low economic capital. He was a tutor to his second cousin, and lived as a tutor and then later pensioner of the Windham family for the thirty central years of his life.

Writing in Gaelic (and in exile in France), Stewart is an example of the intersection of Jacobite politics with the Celtic bard tradition, both placing him outside the London publication/bookselling milieu that would lead to entries in the ESTC

The Maryland colonial connection adds a twist to a pleasinly representative clerical/belletristic career--Sterling attends TCD, writes verse tragedy for the Dublin stage, takes orders after his actress wife dies, and then writes another play as well as some sanguinary jingoistic sermons and some collected verse. Dedications to colonial politicians and the Prince of Wales complete the picture. Again, we have poetry as an almost bureacratic genre within Hanoverian church and government (poem as grant proposal)?

Chesterfield was near the apex of English society--born to high rank, rich, and serving a series of politically important roles and positions in both govt. and opposition. As far as I can tell from the DNB and from the spotty record of his authorship in the ESTC, he did not use poetry as an aristocratic attainment in its own right on the Spenserian/Sidneyan Renaissance model (did anyone in the mid 18-c?

I'm not entirely sure what to make of Spence. He clearly falls into the clerical man of letters paradigm--obvious points of comparison would be Warburton (who also used criticism to enter into the Pope circle) as well as Warton and Young. He is similar but more skilful than Young in his ability to profit from patronage relationships with aristocrats and from selling subscriptions and copyrights to booksellers. Indeed, Spence was freakishly competent in acquiring ecclesiastical patroange, and he was further a patron himself, of Duck, Robert Hill, and Blacklock.

Speed is notable as someone who published no known poetry in his lifetime but left behind "about thirty unpublished and voluminous poems, plays, and treatises on subjects as varied as Pyrrhus, king of Sicily, Anglo-Saxon grammar, mushrooms, Methodism, the revolution of 1688, and Chaucer's Miller's Tale." (DNB). Some of his prose antiquarian writings seem, in the DNB's telling, to be of historiographical significance; no word on the quality of the poetry.

"Southerne, almost alone among Restoration dramatists, made playwriting pay." DNB. His writing career was focused exclusively on drama, and his two blockbusters, Oroonoko and The Fatal Marriage, made him rich.

Somervile is an interesting case study because while he didn't need money from poetry, because he was a landed gentleman and country squire, he did need money in general, because his hunting lifestyle, easygoing ways with his tenants, and miscellaneous improvidence and prodigality meant that he was an epically indebted country squire. Really no poetry short of a coup like Pope's Homer could have saved him.

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Smith exemplifies the 18c role of the cleric as scholar, in his case classical scholar and translator. But he also seems, unlike e.g. Joseph Warton, to have been a seriously pious Anglican as well. Certainly the poems published posthumously in a short (53 p) volume have at least some overtly pious content. Poetry seems to have been a tertiary adjunct both to sermon-writing and translating Longinus, Thucydides, and Xenophon.