A Letter to Mr. Settle, occasioned by his Late Famous Recanting and Plot-ridiculing Narrative.

Pamphlet uncut as issued with wide margins. Leaves are generally clean with the odd stain and mark. Please see the slideshow on our website in order to gain a better appreciation of the contents and condition.

Per Wikipedia: Elkanah Settle’s mastery of scenic effect and the violence of his protestantism led to his unanimous election as organiser-in-chief of the pope-burning procession on Queen Elizabeth’s birthday (17 Nov. 1680); and Roger L’Estrange, in ‘Heraclitus Ridens’ (No. 50), described him as poet-laureate and master of ordnance to the whig party, who would vindicate Lucifer’s first rebellion for a few guineas. Next year he wrote, at Shaftesbury’s instance, his ‘Character of a Popish Successor’ (1681), which evoked a storm of remonstrance. Settle accentuated his remarks in a revised edition, which he afterwards alleged that Shaftesbury, dissatisfied by its moderation of tone, had retouched. His personal attacks upon the Duke of York are said to have involved him in a duel with Thomas Otway. Of these passages in his life he wrote: ‘I now grew weary of my little talent for Dramaticks, and forsooth must be rambling into politics … and much have I got by it’ (pref. to Distressed Innocence). Determined, at least, not to lose by politics, Settle, upon the dissolution of the Oxford parliament, promptly recanted, and wrote ‘A Narrative of the Popish Plot,’ 1683, fol., exposing the perjuries of ‘Doctor’ Oates, and covering with abuse Shaftesbury and his old associates at the ‘Green Ribbon Club.’ Written with a clever assumption of fairness, the ‘Narrative’ evoked a cloud of answers and letters, and a heated ‘Vindication of Titus Oats.’ Settle was undeterred from publishing hostile ‘animadversions’ upon the dying speeches of William, lord Russell, and Algernon Sidney, and he went so far as to issue ‘A Panegyrick on Sir George Jefferies’ (1683) on his elevation to the chief-justiceship, Jeffreys having been conspicuous as ‘Shimei’ in his satire of ‘Achitophel Transpros’d.’ His tory enthusiasm reached its climax in 1685, when he published an adulatory ‘Heroick Poem on the Coronation of the High and Mighty Monarch, James II’ (London, 4to), and shortly afterwards entered himself as a trooper in James’s army on Hounslow Heath. He is said, moreover, to have published a weekly sheet in support of the administration.