Such was the picture that met habitually the eyes of the Rhymer. But to comprehend it fully, you must people these murky forges with the 'red sons of the furnace,' and these rushing mills with the desperate grinders, spurning with wild gaiety the means of life, mingling the groans of pain and the cough of oppressed lungs with Bacchanalian songs, and meeting deliberately the death to which they had deliberately sold themselves. Such was the pabulum of Elliott's poetic genius; and it is no wonder that it should have been impressed with a wild and swarthy character, solemnising his gentlest thoughts, and taming his most fervent hopes-all save the hopes which point to that world where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.

We may be thought to have passed over his political songs too lightly; but in an estimate of his character as a poet, they are in reality of little importance, while they are absolute contradictions to his character as a man. At the same time we are by no means insensible to the influence they exercised in that great question which still stirs in the minds of men, as the sea continues to heave after the storm is laid. Elliott was the pioneer of the Corn-Law League. For seven years before the organisation of that remarkable body, he saturated the people with his songs and diatribes, provoking everywhere scorn, anger, fury-but still discussion. He after all roused but a portion of the toiling classes, amongst whom some other objects became paramount to the exclusion of this grand question; and it was in the middle classes, who were not readers of corn-law rhymes, that the war against monopoly raised its first effective cries. The Rhymer lived to see the early dream of his life accomplished, but he did not live to see the results his poetical enthusiasm had predicted. The bread-tax repealed was not his bread-tax: it was only one devil cast forth out of a legion! There is no regenerating society by wholesale: nay, if all our political wrongs together were set right, it would do nothing more than prepare a clear stage for reform to begin.

This reform must come from within. Good men must and will have good institutions; but good institutions bestowed upon the mean, the ignorant, and the depraved, are of little worth. To refine and elevate this meanness, to enlighten this ignorance, and to amend this depravity, are a far higher task than that of the Corn-Law League; and Elliott's delightful poetical lessons to the mechanics will thrill through their hearts and ennoble their natures long after his political rhymes are forgotten. And these simple lessons will not be confined to their simplicity; for through this preparation his true and lofty poetry will steal into their souls—a consolation, a hope, and a joy for ever.

Elliott's publications, so far as they are known to the reading world, are as follows:-I. Corn-Law Rhymes. II. Love, a poem. III. The Village Patriarch, a poem. IV. Poetical Works. V. More Verse and Prose by the Corn-Law Rhymer, in two volumes. The last, though prepared by the poet himself, is a posthumous publication, and exhibits the prevailing merits as well as defects of the other volumes. In the 'Year of Seeds,' more especially, there are passages not surpassed in his best works.

We have now, in the confined space allotted to us, shown something of the consanguinity between the poet and the man—almost as it is painted by himself in the subjoined epitaph. It was for that we have thus dis

quieted thee to bring thee up. And now, stout Elliott! brave Ebenezer! return to your rest, and may the flowers you loved in life perfume your grave !

A POET'S EPITAPH.

Stop, Mortal! Here thy brother lies,
The Poet of the Poor.

His books were rivers, woods, and skies,
The meadow and the moor;

His teachers were the torn hearts' wail,
The tyrant, and the slave,

The street, the factory, the jail,
The palace and the grave!

The meanest thing, earth's feeblest worm,
He feared to scorn or hate;
And honoured in a peasant's form
The equal of the great.

But if he loved the rich who make
The poor man's little more,

Ill could he praise the rich who take
From plundered labour's store.
A hand to do, a head to plan,

A heart to feel and dare

Tell man's worst foes, here lies the man
Who drew them as they are.

LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU.

IT is now fully a century and a half since Lady Mary Wortley Montagu first flashed before the admiring eyes of her contemporaries, adorning with her beauty, and enlivening with her most rare wit, the very highest platform of English aristocratic society.

In looking back through this long vista of years, thronged though it be with many graceful forms of the good and the gifted, that social luminary seems to suffer no eclipse. We see her, in conjunction with all the notabilities of her day, almost worshipped in foreign countries, and the object of universal interest in her own. We hear her conversing sagaciously with statesmen and philosophers; or addressing a bon mot, sparkling as the glances of her bright eye, to some admiring poet or wit of her train; or we readily conjure up that peculiar smile, at once playful and recklessly mischievous, with which she is detailing, in one of her matchless letters, some new bit of scandal, or satire, or double-entendre, so racy, and sharp, and sparkling, that it must undoubtedly have too often dyed the cheeks of the alarmed yet amused correspondent. But whatever the circumstance, mood, attitude, or occupation, in it we are at once able to recognise her as she stands prominently out in the high relief of her singular individuality. And we are as little apt to confound her, in the intellectual beauty of her prime, with the Eastern houris of Constantinople, as we are with anybody else in the world, while we picture her in her old age and mysterious exile, expatiating with the keen epicurean relish which never deserts her among her violets and nightingales, her bees and her silkworms, her fifteen bowers, with different views, and dining-room of verdure; at the same time that she tells us she has not glanced into a looking-glass for eleven years, because the last look was not a pleasant one.

It will not, therefore, be matter of wonder, that much should have been both spoken and written about so remarkable a personage. Several notices of her life have been long before the world. In 1803 Dr Dallaway published, from original documents, her correspondence, poems, and essays, prefaced by a memoir, in five volumes. In 1836 her great-grandson, the late Lord Wharncliffe, republished the works in a much more complete form, in three large octavo volumes, still prefixing Dr Dallaway's memoir, but with notes in explanation and correction, and supplying the interesting addition of an ample introduction in the form of biographical anecdotes, well known to be from the pen of Lady Louisa Stuart, the only surviving

daughter of Lord and Lady Bute. This lady, though only five years old at the death of her celebrated grandmother, could remember having seen her; having had many conversations about her with Lady Bute; and having been shewn by her part of a journal kept by Lady Mary throughout her whole life, but which delicacy towards people still alive, and probably a prudent regard for her mother's reputation, induced the scrupulous Lady Bute to destroy before her death.

Lady Mary was too satirical and formidable a person not to have made many and bitter enemies among her contemporaries. It is to be feared, moreover, that there are passages in her life ill calculated to stand the test of a very severe scrutiny. Lord Wharncliffe's work revived much discussion of her character by the periodical press of the day; and singularly candid and impartial as the biography was on all sides allowed to be, as a whole, some of the statements were controverted and cavilled at; while others were maliciously perverted, and held as admissions in corroboration of the most scandalous of the stories circulated against her.

Without pretending to fathom the depths of all the vexed questions involving the reputation of Lady Mary, it is the purpose of this Paper to give, from the most authentic sources, as fuil a sketch of her life, writings, and character, as its limits will allow-drawing chiefly upon Lord Wharncliffe's book, and the notices to which it gave rise, for the materials of the memoir-and being guided in our estimate of her character by the indications of it that appear in her own works, and the testimony of numerous contemporary writers-making due allowance always for the boldness and freedom which universally characterised the modes of expression in her day. No one who has been endowed by the Creator with large faculties, whether they have been used for evil or for good, will be found, when properly viewed, to have lived altogether in vain. His outward manifestation may only arrest the eye, as a beacon to deter; or it may sound gratefully on the ear like a friendly cheer from the gained shore, reviving the sinking heart of the still tossed mariner; but of such a one it may be confidently affirmed, that he has fulfilled his destiny in the ever-progressing development of the species. It cannot, then, be either an uninteresting or an uninstructive task for our readers to glance briefly with us over the life and conversation of one who played so important a part in the great world-drama of her own day; who, besides leaving behind her in her writings many monuments of her genius, has a strong claim on the gra titude of posterity for having saved the lives of thousands by the introduction into England of the Turkish method of modifying the dreadful scourge of smallpox-shewing both moral and maternal courage in trying the experiment on her own son; of one, above all, who was so strong, and yet so weak; so flattered, and so reviled; so beloved, and so hated.

Lady Mary Pierrepont, eldest daughter of Evelyn, first Duke of Kingston, by the Lady Mary Fielding, daughter of William, Earl of Denbigh, was born at Thoresby in Nottinghamshire in the year 1690. She had two sisters by the same parents (for the duke had two more daughters by a second wife), and an only brother, who died of smallpox during his father's lifetime, and whose son became the second and last Duke of Kingston. The elder of her two sisters, Lady Frances-to whom some of

her best letters were addressed-was married to John Erskine, Earl of Mar; and the other, Lady Evelyn, to John, Earl of Gower.

It is interesting to note that, both by father's and mother's side, Lady Mary came of an active and energetic race. The Fieldings, as well as the Pierreponts, were deeply engaged in the civil war, and apparently from individual convictions-two brothers among the latter, and a father and son among the former, having chosen different sides. Lady Mary, in one of her letters, boasts of her great-grandfather having earned by his sagacity and prudence the surname of Wise William; and Leigh Hunt tells us these were not the highest qualities to which she might have laid claim by inheritance. Genius and wit had also manifested themselves in the family before her day-George Villiers, the witty Duke of Buckingham, having been her great-uncle; and Beaumont, the dramatist, also her relation, his mother being a Pierrepont of the same stock.

Lady Mary, to her great misfortune, lost her mother at the early age of four years; and though she speaks highly of her grandmother, the CountessDowager of Denbigh and Desmond, as having had a superior understanding, and having retained it to an extraordinarily advanced age, that lady appears to have done but little towards supplying to her the important maternal duties. Indeed the want of a certain delicacy of mind and feminine selfrestraint, the usual results of careful training, caused in all probability much of the suffering which embittered her afterlife.

Though Lady Kingston died so early, her husband continued a widower till all his children were grown up and married. Lady Mary gives us the character of both her parents in one sentence, when she says that Richardson, without knowing it, drew their portraits in Sir Thomas and Lady Grandison. But though probably too much a man of pleasure to disturb himself with any overanxious concern for the best interests of his children, a little incident which Lady Mary loved to recall, proves that she was, at least in her childhood, the object of Lord Kingston's pride and fondness. As the scene is at once characteristic of the times and of the dramatis personce, we shall give it entire in Lady Louisa Stuart's lively words, on whom, as Lord Wharncliffe justly remarks, 'a ray of Lady Mary's talent seems to have fallen: '

‘As a leader of the fashionable world, and a strenuous Whig in party, he (Lord Kingston) belonged to the Kit-cat Club. One day, at a meeting to choose toasts for the year, a whim seized him to nominate her, then not eight years old, a candidate, alleging that she was far prettier than any lady on their list. The other members demurred, because the rules of the club forbade them to select a beauty whom they had never seen. "Then you shall see her," cried he; and in the gaiety of the moment sent orders to have her finely dressed, and brought to him at the tavern, where she was received with acclamations, her claim unanimously allowed, her health drunk by every one present, and her name engraved in due form upon a drinking-glass. The company consisting of some of the most eminent men in England, she went from the lap of one poet, or patriot, or statesman, to the arms of another; was feasted with sweetmeats, overwhelmed with caresses, and, what perhaps already pleased her better than either, heard her wit and beauty loudly extolled on every side. Pleasure, she said, was too poor a word to express her sensations-they amounted to ecstasy: