Born at Dunstable, went from Oxford to London to make a living by his pen. In 1671 he made a hit by his tragedy of “Cambyses.” To annoy Dryden, Rochester got his “Empress of Morocco” played at Whitehall by the court lords and ladies. In “Absalom and Achitophel” Dryden scourged “Doeg” with his scorn, and Settle speedily relapsed into obscurity. In 1718 he was admitted to the Charterhouse.
| Doeg, though without knowing how or why, | |
| Made still a blundering kind of melody; | |
| Spurred boldly on, and dashed through thick and thin, | |
| Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in; | |
| Free from all meaning, whether good or bad, | |
| And, in one word, heroically mad, | |
| He was too warm on picking-work to dwell, | |
| But faggoted his notions as they fell, | |
| And, if they rhymed and rattled, all was well. | |
| Spiteful he is not, though he wrote a satire, | |
| For still there goes some thinking to ill-nature; | |
| He needs no more than birds and beasts to think, | |
| All his occasions are to eat and drink. | |
| If he call rogue and rascal from a garret, | |
| He means you no more mischief than a parrot; | |
| The words for friend and foe alike were made, | |
| To fetter them in verse is all his trade. | |
| For almonds he’ll cry whore to his own mother | |
| And call young Absalom King David’s brother. |
If Settle was capable of these mean compliances of writing for, or against a party, as he was hired, he must have possessed a very sordid mind, and been totally devoid of all the principles of honour; but as there is no other authority for it than Wood, who is enthusiastic in his temper, and often writes of things, not as they were, but as he would wish them to be, the reader may give what credit he pleases to the report.
Elkanah Settle was so systematically visited with damnation, that he was at last compelled to bring out his plays under fictitious names, and during the long vacation, lest when the town was full, some enemy should discover him.
General
An Author now living, whose Muse is chiefly addicted to Tragedy; and has been tragically dealt withal by a Tyranical Laureat; which has somewhat eclips’d the glory he at first appeared in: But Time has her vicissitudes; and he has lived to see his Enemy humbled, if not justly punished; for this Reason, I shall not afresh animadvert upon his fault, but rather bury them in Oblivion; and without any Reflections on his Poetry, give a succinct Account of those Plays, which he has published, being Nine in Number.
Settle, in his Anti-Achitophel, was assisted by Matthew Clifford, Sprat, and several of the best hands of those times.
“The Empress of Morocco, a Tragedy;” acted at the Duke of York’s Theatre. This play was likewise acted at court, as appears by the two Prologues prefixed, which were both spoken by the Lady Elizabeth Howard; the first Prologue was written by the Earl of Mulgrave, the other by Lord Rochester, when it was performed at court, the Lords and Ladies of the Bedchamber played in it. Mr. Dryden, Mr. Shadwell, and Mr. Crowne, wrote against it, which began a famous controversy betwixt the wits of the town, wherein, says Jacob, Mr. Dryden was roughly handled, particularly by the lord Rochester, and the duke of Buckingham, and Settle got the laugh on his side.
Elkanah Settle, who had answered “Absalom,” appeared with equal courage in opposition to “The Medal,” and published an answer called “The Medal reversed,” with so much success in both encounters, that he left the palm doubtful, and divided the suffrages of the nation. Such are the revolutions of fame, or such is the prevalence of fashion, that the man whose works have not yet been thought to deserve the care of collecting them, who died forgotten in an hospital, and whose latter years were spent in contriving shews for fairs, and carrying an elegy or epithalamium, of which the beginning and end were occasionally varied, but the intermediate parts were always the same, to every house where there was a funeral or a wedding, might with truth have had inscribed upon his stone,
| Here lies the Rival and Antagonist of Dryden. |
This poor wight had acquired by practice, and perhaps from nature, more of a poetical ear than most of his contemporaries were gifted with.
In 1676 was performed his “Ibrahim, the Illustrious Bassa,” of which I can give an account at first hand, and which is interesting as founded on Madeleine de Scudéry’s “Ibrahim, ou l’Illustre Bassa,” which her brother Georges had reproduced as a play. It must in candour be allowed that Settle’s tragedy furnishes a fair example of a heroic play on a French love-story of the accepted type, written in rime, devoid of any trace of poetic afflatus, but on the whole (though exceptions might no doubt be here and there noted) free from rant. In spite of the accumulation of deaths in the last act, and of the pathetically conceived character of the self-sacrificing Asteria, the whole, however, leaves but a tame and commonplace impression behind it. The result is due above all to the flooding of both action and characters by the resistless waters of “heroic love,” which take every trace of distinctive colour or complexion out of Turk and Persian, Mussulman Roxana and Christian Isabella, alike.
Settle’s character was beneath contempt, and his works are of a piece with his character; the first was a compound of flighty imbecility and grotesque presumption, and the second are a compound of sordid scurrility and soaring nonsense.
Elkanah Settle was one of Rochester’s innumerable led-poets, and was too utterly beneath contempt to deserve even Rochester’s spite. The character of Doeg, ten years later, did Settle complete justice. He had a “blundering kind of melody” about him but absolutely nothing else. However, a heroic play of his, the “Empress of Morocco,” had considerable vogue for some incomprehensible reason.
Settle was a smaller foe than Shadwell, although as a dramatist he had gained fame enough to make Dryden envious. The quarrel between them was pitiful enough, and Dryden lowered himself to Settle’s level. He could not well have sunk lower; but the marvel is, that when these poets were living the gulf that separates them was by no means so evident as it is to us. Settle, in some of his writings, divided with Dryden, as Johnson observes, the suffrages of the nation; yet he was both a mean poet and a mean man.
This absurd creature lives embalmed in the anger of Dryden, but he had a moment of not illegitimate success…. For a moment Settle was at the top of the fashion, but he had neither talent nor principle, and he soon sank into contempt.
Miserable as his lampoons are, a line here and there is not destitute of piquancy; and if his “Empress of Morocco” (1673) has no literary pretensions, it is important in literary history for having so moved the wrath of Dryden, and in the history of the drama for having been issued with plates which contribute greatly to our knowledge of the internal arrangements of the Restoration Theatre. By a singular irony of fortune, his fate bears some analogy to that of his mighty antagonist. Settle lost caste by changing his politics at the wrong time, as Dryden his religion; but while Dryden bore up against the storm of adversity, Settle sunk into obscurity, and ultimately into the Charter House. Of his twenty plays none but “The Empress of Morocco” is now ever mentioned, unless an exception be made in favour of “Ibrahim, the Illustrious Bassa.”
Settle was not deficient in promise as scholar, rhymester, and wit; but he wrecked his career by his tergiversation and by his inept efforts to measure his mediocre capacity against the genius of Dryden. He soon became a butt for caricature as a voluminous and reckless dunce. “Recanting Settle,” wrote a critic, when his tragedies and libels could no more yield him penny loaves and ale, “bids our youth by his example fly, the Love of Politics and Poetry.”
