ELSASS (French ALSACE), a German territory on the left bank of the Rhine, traversed by the Vosges Mountains; taken from the French in 1870-71.

ELSINORE, a seaport on the island of Zeeland, in Denmark, 20 m.  N. of Copenhagen; has a good harbour; the scene of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”

ELSWICK (53), a town in the vicinity of Newcastle, noted for the great engineering and ordnance works of Sir W. G. (now Lord) Armstrong.

ELTON, a salt lake of SE.  Russia, in the government of Astrakhan; has an area of about 65 sq. m., but is very shallow; yields annually some 90,000 or 95,000 tons of salt, which is shipped off via the Volga.

ELTON, CHARLES ISAAC, jurist and ethnologist, born in Somerset; held a Fellowship in Queen’s College, Oxford; called to the bar in 1865, and in 1884 was returned to Parliament as a Conservative; his first works were juridical treatises on the tenure of land, but in 1882 he produced a learned book on the origins of English history; b. 1839.

ELVAS, a strongly fortified town in Portugal, in the province of Alemtejo, 12 m.  W. of Badajoz; is a bishop’s see; has a Moorish aqueduct 31/2 m. long and 250 ft. high.

ELY (8), a celebrated cathedral city, in the fen-land of Cambridgeshire, on the Ouse, 30 m.  SE. of Peterborough; noted as the scene of Hereward’s heroic stand against William the Conqueror in 1071; the cathedral, founded in 1083, is unique as containing specimens of the various Gothic styles incorporated during the course of 400 years.

ELY, ISLE OF, a name given to the N. portion of Cambridgeshire on account of its having been at one time insulated by marshes; being included in the region of the Fens, has been drained, and is now fertile land.

ELYOT, SIR THOMAS, author and ambassador, born in Wiltshire; ambassador to the court of Charles V.; celebrated as the author of “The Governour,” the first English work on moral philosophy, and also of the first Latin-English dictionary (1490-1546).

ELYSIUM the abode of the shades of the virtuous dead in the nether world as conceived of by the poets of Greece and Rome, where the inhabitants live a life of passive blessedness, which, however, is to such a man as Achilles a place of woe rather and unrest, where he would fain exchange places with the meanest hind that breathes in the upper world.

ELZE, FREDERICK CARL, a German Shakespearian scholar, born at Dessau; early devoted himself to the study of English literature; lived some time in England and Scotland; in 1875 became professor of English Literature at Halle; his various publications on Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists are full of excellent criticisms; also wrote Lives of Scott and Byron (1821-1889).

ELZEVIR, the name of an eminent family of printers residing in Amsterdam and Leyden, Louis the first of them, who started in Leyden; their publications date from 1594 to 1680.