a market town of England, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, near the left bank of the Ribble, at the foot of a lofty limestone rock called Castleberg, rising in the midst of a fertile valley 54 miles W.N.W. of York. It is substantially built, and has one principal, and several smaller streets, and a market-place, in which stands a fine Elizabethan edifice for public purposes. The parish church stands on the other side of the river; but there is another established place of worship in the town, besides those belonging to the Wesleyan and Primitive Methodists, Independents, and Quakers. Settle contains cotton factories, worked by water-power, ropeworks, and paper-mills. Weekly markets and annual fairs are held here. Pop. 1976.

ELKANAH, an English poet, who owes his reputation entirely to the ridicule which Dryden and Pope have heaped upon him, was born at Dunstable in 1648. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, as a commoner, in 1666, where, although passing the university without a degree, he seems to have gained some sort of notoriety as a versifier. Dennis, Welstead, and Milbourn combine in placing Settle above Dryden during his college days; but the notoriety gained by youth is not always an earnest of after fame. Settle came up to London as a literary adventurer, and what with his university repute and the patronage of the profligate Rochester, he succeeded for a time in lording it over Dryden, who had then just entered upon his literary career. Cambyse, a tragedy, did not lower his reputation in the eyes of his professed admirers. His Empress of Morocco, printed in a style of unparalleled splendour, was acted by the lords and ladies of Whitehall, was applauded for a month at the theatre, and was sold at double its published price. The foolish author, quite intoxicated by his success, triumphantly ran a-muck of Dryden in a vaunting preface. Dryden, who could ill brook the taunts of an upstart adventurer, combined with Shadwell and Crowe in writing scurrilous notes to the Empress. The indignant author answered them after his fashion; but his fame had unfortunately now reached its culmination. He published a lame burlesque of Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel, entitled Absalom Senior, or Absalom and Achitophel Transposed, which had the effect of rousing the fierce wrath of the great poet, who, in the second part of his Absalom and Achitophel, impaled Settle and Shadwell under the names of Doeg and Og, and has rendered them quite an unenviable immortality.

"He satirizes, as only Dryden could, Settle's blundering..." melody; his rude bombast, and his poverty of thought, and has left what, after all allowance has been made for the essential spirit of unfairness in which the poem is conceived, will be regarded by all readers as one of the most amusing pieces of poetical criticism on record. Pope has likewise once and again stumbled on poor unfortunate Settle in his *Dunciad* (Books i., 90, 146; iii., 37, 283), where he alludes in the most caustic terms to his glory as city poet and as Whig pamphleteer to Shaftesbury. Settle had the gratification of burning the Pope in effigy, to the no small delight of the London mob, in November 17, 1680; but afterwards he suddenly changed his party, and recanted his political heresies in 1683. The revolution extinguished him for ever, and he was compelled, as Dryden mockingly prophesied of him, to aspire to become "the master of a puppet-show." He kept a booth at Bartholomew fair, where in his old age he is said to have played the part of the dragon in green leather, in *St George for England*, with great effect! He was subsequently taken into the Charterhouse, where he died in 1723.