EBENEZER ELLIOTT.

THE

HE recent abolition of the laws which gave our landed proprietors a monopoly in the supply of food for the teeming millions of these islands is not a subject to which we would willingly allude in the language of exultation. The event is past, and let it go: all of us, we suppose, would now gladly bury the remembrance of the struggle in oblivion. And yet the subject of the late corn-laws cannot be so tossed aside; for if they did nothing else, they gave birth to sentiments which survive in the literature of the nation, and will not soon be forgotten. The bread-tax, as it was emphatically called, had many expositors among the middle classes; beginning of course cautiously and reverently, walking gingerly among the ' vested interests' of the aristocracy, and professing much respect for a monopoly, which they wished to curtail only so far as would enable the people to live and work. But among the people themselves it commenced with a man whose part it was not to expound, but to feel-not to reason, but to sing. The prophetess Poetry is ever sure to make her appearance in troublous times; and her voice is ever heard the richest and wildest amid the clash of arms. Her words are truth: for a feeling is a fact, and her direct action is upon the heart, moving through that the mind and the will. Her knowledge is intuitive, her convictions inspirations, and she will therefore hear of no compromise: caution with her is a coward, and expediency a knave. The people had not by this time begun to submit to other influences. The winged ministers of civilisation had not yet commenced their flight, scattering a cheap and wholesome literature, like vivifying dew, throughout the land. Lecturers were few, mechanics' institutions none; and the sons of poverty and toil would not have comprehended any other than the voice which spoke to them, as of old, in songs and ballads. But the voice came: it always comes when wanted. It is born of nature and necessity; for it is a cry from a stricken breast-so true it is that men (whether they understand the cause of the befalling evil or not)— 'Are cradled into poetry by wrong,

And learn in suffering what they teach in song.'

It was the voice of Ebenezer Elliott, an individual who was specially born and bred for the occasion. If in another class of society, he would have been heard with suspicion; if possessing more refinement, he would have been unintelligible. Coarse in the external coarseness of his degree, wrathful, bitter, presumptuous, intolerant, and unreasoning, he was exactly the man to

be listened to by the working-classes of his own generation; but soft, gentle, and kindly-because a poet-in everything without the pale of political warfare, elevated by noble aspirings and humanising sympathies, and full of the taste of nature and the fire of genius, his rhymes will now command a wider audience. The life of this person has no interest in its events -not even the interest arising from the struggles of abject poverty and seemingly hopeless ignorance. He is merely a Voice crying in the wilderness of the undistinguished world—a Light rising in the obscurities of society, and throwing illumination upon everything but its own source. Yet, in obedience to what seems a natural craving of humanity, we must try to draw from the scanty materials that come in our way some portraiture or outline of the individual man, and ascertain, if possible, by what process of circumstances he was shaped into a poet of the people. We are enabled to do this chiefly by an autobiographic sketch of the earlier part of his life, which Elliott placed in the hands of Mr William Tait, the bookseller of Edinburgh; embodying the substance of a series of letters addressed by the Rhymer to his friend Dr Holland, expressly with the view of their serving as the basis of a posthumous memoir in the event of such being wanted.*

Ebenezer Elliott was born on the 17th March 1781 at the New Foundry, Masborough, in the parish of Rotherham, where he was probably baptized by a tinker of Barnesly, a co-religionist of his father, who belonged to the Berean denomination. This father was a brave man, come of a line, as the poet loved to believe, of stout Border thieves, although he was himself apprenticed, with a premium of £50, to the house of Landell and Chambers, wholesale ironmongers of Newcastle-on-Tyne. The grandsire who provided so well for his son was a tinsmith, married to a Scotchwoman of the peaceful and pastoral name of Sheepshanks-a person of vigorous and selfwilled character, but yet whom her husband lamented with tears long after her death, and even until his own-' especially when he was drunk.' Miss Sheepshanks appears in history as the first of her race; for her ancestry never could be ascertained-a circumstance which the poet regretted, his great difficulty in drawing up the memoir being a want of materials. When his father left Landell and Chambers, he became a clerk at Masborough, where he first saw his destined wife, one of the daughters of a yeoman at Ozzins, near Penistone, where his ancestors had lived time out of mind on their fifty or sixty acres of land. 'I think, then,' quoth the autobiographer, 'I have made out my descent, if not from very fine folks, certainly from respectables, as (getting every day comparatively scarcer) they are called in these days of ten dogs to one bone.'

Ebenezer was first sent to a dame's school, and then to the Hollis School, where he learned little more than to write, partly, it would seem, owing to the nervous temperament and constitutional awkwardness he derived from his mother. The life of this poor woman was a continuous disease, although she reared eight out of her eleven children to adult age. The father, however, is a more interesting character, and he conferred upon

*This sketch has been printed in the Athenæum,' but only partially, the editor omitting (and generally with good taste) such passages as the critic would require to condemn, but which furnish pregnant materials for the biographer.

that of his son a tone which, working upon the maternal timidity, made him eventually a poet and a politician. In the memoir he makes his first appearance in a vision related to her son by the mother, who was a firstrate dreamer, and a firm believer in dreams. 'I had placed under my pillow,' she said, 'a shank-bone of mutton to dream upon; and I dreamed that I saw a little, broad-set, dark, ill-favoured man, with black hair, black eyes, thick stob nose, and tup shins: it was thy father.' This father was a fanatic in religion and politics, but a brave, strong-minded man. In bathing his children in the canal, he made it a rule to duck them three times, and to keep them the third time some seconds under the water, which produced in Ebenezer a horror of suffocation that only increased with his years. To avoid this infliction, the boy bathed without his father's assistance, and in consequence was on one occasion nearly drowned 'the more the pity, I have often said since.' His father, he tells us, had much humorous and satiric power, and would have made a good comic actor; yet his political sagacity was such that he was popularly known as 'Devil Elliott.'

The family changed their abode at Masborough, Mr Elliott having obtained a clerkship in the employment of Messrs Walker of the New Foundry, with a salary of £60 or £70 a year, and house, candles, and coal. 'Well do I remember some of those days of affluence and pit-coal fires-for glorious fires we had no fear of coal bills in those days. There, at the New Foundry, under the room where I was born, in a little parlour like the cabin of a ship, yearly painted green, and blessed with a beautiful thoroughfare of light-for there was no window-tax in those days-he used to preach every fourth Sunday to persons who came from distances of twelve and fourteen miles to hear his tremendous doctrines of ultraCalvinism (he called himself a Berean), and hell hung round with span-long children! On other days, pointing to the aquatint pictures on the walls, he delighted to declaim on the virtues of slandered Cromwell, and of Washington the rebel; or, shaking his sides with laughter, explained the glories of "The glorious victory of His Majesty's forces over the Rebels at Bunker's Hill!" Here the reader has a key which will unlock all my future politics.' Mr Elliott became eventually nominal proprietor of the foundry, the partners having sold him their shares on credit; but the new dignity was far from being attended by pecuniary advantage.

Touching the bravery' of Elliott senior an absurd story is told, in which he is represented as thrashing a cavalry officer with a stick, his antagonist being at the time on horseback, sword in hand! After receiving his chastisement, the officer took to flight, and never afterwards met the victor without touching his hat, and saying, 'How do you do, Mr Elliott ?' The affairs of the stout iron-founder, however, went wrong, and he died in poverty, yet self-sustained, and not in distress.

During his father's scene with the dragoon, Ebenezer, then in his fifteenth year, was 'terribly frightened,' although he must have been sufficiently familiar with such disturbances, it being the custom of the cavalry to back their horses so as to break the windows of the Jacobin's shop. 'But I, alas!' says he,' am the son of my mother; yet on emergencies, and in the hour of calamity, the single drop of northern blood which my father put into my heart has more than once befriended me.'

His poetical education, however, commenced long before this, and perhaps was not uninfluenced by the results of the smallpox, which he had in his sixth year, and which left him frightfully disfigured. In a year or two after we find him constructing in the foundry-yard an imitation of the natural scenery on which poets feed. This he contrived by sinking in a stone heap in the midst of a little wilderness of magwort and wormwood a shallow iron vessel, which he filled with water. This served as a fountain, in which the solitary child saw the reflection of the sky and clouds, and of the surrounding weeds, and which he seldom failed to visit at noon when the sun was over it. In a few years more came of course the Egeria of the place, a young woman 'to whom I never spoke a word in my life, and the sound of whose voice, to this day, I have never heard; yet if I thought she saw me as I passed her father's house, I felt as if weights were fastened to my feet.'

He had another taste, however, of a less pleasing kind. He not only loved to look upon fountains and sweet faces, but felt a horrible impulse to gaze upon the features of those who had met a violent death-why, he knew not, for they made his life a burthen, following him wherever he went, sleeping with him, and haunting him in his dreams. The sight of a dead body which had been six weeks in the canal cured him of this monomania by its surpassing horror: it never left him for months, sleeping or waking, and ever after he shrunk with terror from spectacles he had before sought as an indulgence. At this time he was alone, even in a neighbourhood swarming with children. He had no companions, and was not only considered to be somewhat wanting in intellect, but might have really been deficient in his stock of ideas from his holding no intercommunication with other children. He was, however, a capital kite-maker and ship-builder; and he constructed, while still a boy, a model of an eighteen-gun ship, which passed into the possession of the present Earl Fitzwilliam.

Then came one of those escapades by which the headlong spirit of boyhood so frequently seeks to anticipate the adventures of life. His father having constructed a pan weighing several tons for his brother at Thurlestone, Ebenezer considered that it would be a convenient vehicle in which to visit the world. He accordingly crept into it unperceived, after it had been hoisted on a truck, and hiding himself under some hay which it contained, set out soon after sunset; and travelling all night beneath the solemn stars, arrived at his destination on the following morning. 'It is remarkable,' says he, 'that I never in after-life succeeded in any plan which I did not accomplish in a similar way: if I ask advice, either the plan is never executed, or it is unsuccessful.' At Thurlestone he was soon home-sick; but it was a difficult thing to attempt to retrace a route which he had passed in the night-time, having merely to place himself in a moving machine, and allow himself to be carried wherever the fates willed. He made no effort to get back to his mother, for whom he pined; but on returning from the school, to which his uncle sent him, he used to spend his evenings in looking from the back of the house in the direction where he was told Masborough lay; and when the sun went down, he turned indignantly away, feeling himself to be the victim of some great wrong. In this exile he spent a year and a-half, when at length he was taken home by his father; and so ended his first irruption into the great world. 'Is it

not strange,' says he, moralising on this event in his history, 'that a man who from his childhood has dreamed of visiting foreign countries, and yet at the age of sixty believes that he shall see the Falls of Niagara, has never been twenty miles out of England, and has yet to see for the first time the beautiful scenery of Cumberland, Wales, and Scotland?'

He was again sent to Hollis School, but with no better result than before-employing, as he did, a comrade to do his tasks for him in the simpler rules of arithmetic, and thus arriving at the Rule of Three while still profoundly ignorant of multiplication, addition, subtraction, and division. His parents, growing desperate at his apparent stupidity, transferred him to Dalton School, at two miles' distance; and although his memory did not serve him for letters, he recollected distinctly half a century afterwards the kingfisher shooting along the Don, as he traversed the Aldwark meadows on his way. The schoolmaster was one of the best of living creatures—a sad-looking, half-starved angel without wings,' who probably never suspected that the dunce who stood for hours beside his desk, with the tears running down his face, had never learnt the preliminary rules. Ebenezer, in fact, did not know that these were necessary, and he 'looked on a boy who could do a sum in vulgar fractions as a sort of magician.' During the summer months of the second year he played truant, roaming, vagabond-like, about the neighbourhood, and on one occasion stealing duck-eggs in mistake for the eggs of wild birds. This was a miserable time, for the sense of his indolence preyed upon him like guilt, and he was terrified to meet his father's eye. The father, however, set him to work in the foundry, as a punishment either for his stupidity or stubbornness; but this, so far from acting as it was intended, restored the culprit to his self-respect, by proving that he was as capable as other lads of at least manual labour. Then came the other weaknesses of an idle and truant disposition, brought into everyday contact with vulgar spirits; and the attractions of the village alehouse rivalled those of the woods and fields, of the birds and flowers.

But they did not outbalance them. The impression was laid. The beauty of nature had entered the soul of the future poet; and his thoughts and his footsteps often wandered away from the coarse enjoyments of the alehouse to the banks of the canal, which were golden with the 'yellow ladies' bed-straw.' His religious impressions likewise contributed to keep pure his inner soul, notwithstanding the crust of vulgarity that had gathered on the surface; and he seldom missed attending chapel, sometimes under the ministry of a Dominie Sampson, and sometimes of 'one of the most eloquent and dignified of men.'

It was probably at this time that the political tendencies of Ebenezer Elliott were developed, under the united influences of ale, poetry, and religion. 'When I look back,' says he, 'on the days of rabid Toryism through which I have passed, and consider the then almost universal tendency to worship the powers that be and their worst mistakes, I feel astonished that a nerve-shaken man, whose affrighted imagination in boyhood and youth slept with dead men's faces-a man whose first sensation on standing up to address a public meeting is that of his knees giving way under him—should have been able to retain his political integrity without abjuring one article of his fearless father's creed!' The rationale of this creed is a little obscure, since