and such must there be till genius respect itself, and cause the public to respect it; till it reflect that it is a heavenly endowment, and not a trade stock.

Among the more fortunate men of genius,—among those who by strength of pinion, and by various resources of prose, poetry, and music, have soared above the poet's ordinary path, beset with ropes, poison, throat-cutting, razors, pistols, and drowning holes,—is the gay and genial Thomas Moore. Moore was born, as I have said, in Dublin. His father kept a shop in Aungier-street, and was a respectable grocer and spirit dealer. The shop continues exactly as it was to the present day, is employed for the same trade, and over it is the little drawing-room in which Mr. Moore himself tells us, that he used to compose his songs, and with his sister and some young friends, act plays as a boy.

He was first educated by Mr. Samuel Whyte, to whom in his fourteenth year he addressed a sonnet, which was published in a Dublin magazine, called the Anthologia. This Mr. Whyte was fond of dramatic representation, and is mentioned by Moore as having superintended private theatricals at different gentlemen's and noblemen's houses, as at the Duke of Leinster's, at Marly, the seat of the Latouches, etc., where he supplied prologues. Sheridan had been a pupil of Whyte's, and it is further stated by Mr. Moore, that many parents were alarmed at the danger of his instilling a love for these things into his scholars. Can there be a doubt that he did so with Sheridan and Moore?

He was sent to the university in Dublin, where the unfortunate Robert Emmet was at the time. Moore soon formed an acquaintance with him, and became a member of a debating society, at which Emmet and other young patriots assembled to prepare themselves for public life. On the approach of the frightful explosion of 1798, the university was visited by Lord Clare, its vice-chancellor, with a rigorous examination, government having become aware of the students being deeply engaged in the organization of the Irish union. Among those found to be thus implicated, were Emmet, John Brown, and others. They became marked men. Moore himself underwent examination, but came clear off. From these connections and early impressions, however, we may date his steady adherence to liberal and patriotic sentiments.

At the university his poetic genius early displaying itself, he soon found his way over to England, where his wit, his songs, and his conversational brilliancy, introduced him to the first circles of fashionable life, and to government patronage. He was appointed to the situation of Registrar to the Admiralty Court at the Bermudas. This appointment turned out unfortunately for him, but it enabled him to extend his knowledge of the world. He published on his return a collection of odes, epistles, and fugitive poems, illustrative of the scenery and life of that island; and he made a tour in the United States, from which he indited a series of most caustic and satirical epistles. From the hour that he settled down again in England, notwithstanding the time which he must have devoted to society, into which his peculiar powers of pleasing have continually drawn him, he has displayed an extraordinary industry. The catalogue of his writings from first to last is enormous. The Odes of Anacreon translated. A Candid Appeal to Public Confidence, or Considerations on the dangers of the Present Crisis, 1803. Corruption and Intolerance, two poems. Epistles, Odes, and other Poems, 1806. Little's Poems, 1808. A Letter to the Roman Catholics of Dublin, 1810. M.P., or the Blue Stocking; a comic opera, in three acts, performed at the Lyceum, 1811. Intercepted Letters, or the Twopenny Post Bag, by Thomas Browne the younger, 1812: this has gone through upward of fourteen editions. Irish Melodies. Arthur Murphy's Translation of Sallust completed. The Skeptic, a philosophical Satire. Lalla Rookh, 1817. The Fudge Family in Paris, 1818. Ballads, Songs, etc. Tom Crib's Memorial to Congress, in verse. Trifles Reprinted, in verse. Loves of the Angels. Rhymes on the Road. Miscellaneous Poems by Members of the Procurante Society. Fables for the Holy Alliance. Ballads, Songs, Miscellaneous Poems, etc. Memoirs of Captain Rock. Life of Sheridan. The Epicurean. Odes on Cash, Corn, Catholics, etc. Evenings in Greece. Life and Letters of Lord Byron, in 17 vols. History of Ireland, etc., etc., etc.

If Mr. Moore has been a gay man, it can not be said that he has been an indolent one. He was born in May, 1780, and is, consequently, now only sixty-six. It would appear that, on coming to England, he destined himself for the bar, as he entered himself of the Middle Temple, in 1799. But instead of legal studies, poetical ones seem to have occupied him in his chambers; for in the course of 1800, and before he had completed his twentieth year, he published his translation of the Odes of Anacreon. This seems to have decided his fate for literature. In 1801 out came Little's Poems, many of which, I am persuaded, the author would give a great portion of his fame to be able to cancel forever; and, indeed, in his late edition, in one volume, I am glad to see that the most exceptionable are excluded. In 1803 he set sail to take possession of his office in the West Indies; on which occasion he was absent something more than a year. To pursue a rapid outline of his life;—on his return to England he married a Miss Dyke, said to be a lady of great personal beauty, most amiable disposition, and accomplished manners. I believe she has always shown herself a woman of much energy of character and tact of judgment, and that the poet has found great cause to rely on her opinion in matters of daily life. His great poem, Lalla Rookh, appeared in 1817; and in the summer of that year Moore visited Paris, where he collected the materials for that humorous production, The Fudge Family in Paris. In the following year he made a visit to Ireland, where he was received with the highest enthusiasm and public honor. In 1822 he again visited Paris, where great respect was shown him by the French literati, and a public dinner was given to him by the English nobility and gentry resident there. In one of his prefaces to his different volumes, which, in fact, contain his literary life, we learn, that he was compelled to live in France at this time, in consequence of the responsibilities under which he had fallen from the conduct of his deputy in the Bermudas. He was, indeed, liable to demands of at least six thousand pounds, and it was not safe for him to remain in England till this matter was arranged; which was at length done by his friends, and the sum reduced to one thousand; of which the deputy's uncle paid three hundred. Two summers Moore states himself and family to have lived in a cottage of some Spanish friends, near their seat. La Butte Coaslin. He says that it conjured up an apparition of Sloperton, which by a happy quotation from Pope he defines—

Here he used to wander in the noble park of St. Cloud, with his pocket-book and pencil, composing verses, and pondering on the Epicurean; and closing the evening by practicing duets with the lady of his Spanish friend, or listening to her guitar. King, the dramatic writer, lived near them, and Washington Irving visited him there. In 1823 he published The Loves of the Angels; and since then, beside the Life of Sheridan, and various other productions, the Life and Letters of Lord Byron.

Perhaps the most important event connected with his later life was the destruction of the Memoirs of Lord Byron, which had been intrusted to him for publication after his death. These Memoirs had been given to Mr. Moore, and Mr. Moore had sold the copyright of them to Mr. Murray, for two thousand guineas. Lord Byron being dead, and the time for publication come, the relatives of Lord Byron took alarm, and implored Mr. Moore to allow them to be destroyed. To this Mr. Moore was weak enough to consent. That he did so from a sense of the most delicate honor, there could be no question; even had he not proved that by the sacrifice of two thousand guineas and interest, which he repaid to Mr. Murray, though he had to borrow it of Messrs. Longman. But if honor to Lord Byron's relatives was preserved, it was neither so to Lord Byron nor the public. It was a sacred trust of the one for the gratification of the other, and had Mr. Moore had any scruples on the subject of publication, he should have returned the MS. to Lord Byron while living. When dead, there was no such way out; there was no alternative, without a betrayal of the most sacred trust that could be reposed in man, but to allow the noble donor's intention to be faithfully carried out. There has been much controversy on this topic, but this still continues, and will continue to be, the result of public opinion.

One of the secrets of Mr. Moore's successful industry, perhaps, may be found in the fact of his having, spite of his social disposition, and of all the fascinations of society for a man of his fame, wit, and accomplishments, lived the greater part of his life since his marriage in the country. Among the various places of his abode, two only have been residences of much duration. These are Mayfield cottage, near Ashbourne, in Derbyshire, and Sloperton cottage, near Devizes, in Wiltshire.

At Mayfield he lived several years, and here he wrote Lalla Rookh. This village is not particularly picturesque, nor is the immediate neighborhood striking; but it lies in a fine country, and within a short distance of it are Dovedale, and other beautiful scenes in Derbyshire and Staffordshire. The recommendations of Mayfield have been thus enumerated by a cotemporary writer in a periodical. "Moore's cottage is in a secluded part of Mayfield, a village on the Staffordshire side of the river Dove, about two miles from Ashbourne. It is a spot not often alluded to in literature, though the neighborhood has been peculiarly honored by literary men. Three miles from Mayfield is Wootton-hall, where Rousseau lived several years; where he botanized, and where he wrote his Confessions. One mile from Mayfield, on the other side of the Dove, lived a great, and perhaps, a much better man than Rousseau, but who will not attain an equal renown—Michael Thomas Sadler. At Oakover, one mile from Mayfield, is the residence of the late Mr. Ward, author of Tremaine. Two miles farther up the river, in the loveliest of all villages, a grotto is still preserved in which Congreve wrote his first drama. A ten minutes' walk affords a view of the grand entrance to Dovedale, immortalized by old Izaak Walton. At Tissington, another most exquisite village, like the former without work-house or ale-house, lived Greaves, the author of the Spiritual Quixote. Dr. Taylor, one of Dr. Johnson's most esteemed friends, was an inhabitant of Ashbourne. The great lexicographer was a visitor of this neighborhood, and some of his most amusing conversations and peculiarities are recorded by Boswell while staying in this quiet town. Mayfield cottage bears now some claim to the notice of the lovers of literature, from its being the residence of Mr. Alfred Butler, the clever author of the novels of Elphinstone and The Herberts."

It was not, however, the attractions enumerated in the above passage which determined the settlement of Moore there. His wife and himself were traveling along from a scene of great aristocratic splendor, of which they had become so weary, that they sighed for the utmost simplicity, retirement, and repose, and vowed that they would take the very first place of such a character that they found vacant. Mayfield cottage was the one. "It was a poor place," said Moore to myself, "little better than a barn, but we at once took it, and set about making it habitable."

It is no doubt from some such remark on the part of the poet that a paragraph originated which I have lately seen going the round of the newspapers, that he wrote Lalla Rookh in a barn. That barn was, in fact, Mayfield cottage. The right-hand front window is pointed out as belonging to Moore's little parlor; the window at the side belonged to his not very extensive library, and the trees visible above the roof are part of the orchard, his favorite study, in which some of his choicest lyrics were composed.

The warm-hearted poet, though it is many years since he quitted Mayfield, speaks with pleasure of the enjoyment he experienced there. The country around, both in Derbyshire and Staffordshire, has many charms for a poetic eye. There are, too, many persons of taste and intelligence living in it, from whom he and his family received every cordial attention. He was zealously engaged in working out what he deemed was to be the crowning work of his fame, Lalla Rookh, and he regarded the cottage at Mayfield, and the scene immediately surrounding it, peculiarly favorable for this purpose. "It was indeed," he observes, in the preface to his eighth volume, "to the secluded life I led during the years 1813-1816, in a lone cottage in the fields of Derbyshire, that I owed the inspiration, whatever may have been its value, of some of the best and most popular portions of Lalla Rookh. It was amid the snows of two or three Derbyshire winters that I found myself enabled, by that concentration of thought which retirement alone gives, to call up around me some of the sunniest of those Eastern scenes which have since been welcomed in India itself as almost native to its clime." It is, he says, a peculiarity of his imagination that it is easily broken in upon and diverted by striking external objects. "I am," said he to me, "at once very imaginative, and very matter-of-fact. The matter-of-fact can at any moment put to flight all the operations of the imagination. It was, therefore, necessary for me to exclude matter-of-fact, and all very striking or attractive objects, and to concenter all my imagination on the objects I wished to portray. My story lay in the East, and I must imbue and saturate my imagination entirely with Eastern ideas, and Eastern imagery. I must create, and place, and keep before me a peculiar world, with all its people and characteristics. No place could be more favorable for this than Mayfield, because it had nothing prominent or seducing enough to rush through and force itself into the world which I had evoked, created, and was walking and working in. The result was most complete. Never having been into the East myself, yet every one who has been there declares that nothing can be more perfect than my representations of it, its people, and life, in Lalla Rookh."

But though living in the country, Moore was always in the pretty regular habit of visiting town during the season. Here he was the charm of the circles of the Whig nobility, especially at Lansdowne and Holland houses. At these places, and especially the latter, he met all the distinguished men of the time. Byron, Jeffrey, Sidney Smith, Campbell, Brougham, and the like. Even in the country he has lived much at times in the houses of his great friends. In particular he records his visit at Chatsworth, and at Donnington-park, the seat of Lord Moira, where he describes himself as passing whole weeks in the library there, even when the family was absent, "indulging in all the freest airy castle-building of authorship." Here he met, oddly enough, with the rival princes of France, poor Charles X. and his brother, the Duc de Montpensier, and the Comte Beaujolais, at the same time with the Duke of Orleans, the present Louis Philippe, who in the library at the same house would be deep in a volume of Clarendon, "unconsciously preparing himself by such studies for the high and arduous destiny which not only the good genius of France, but his own sagacious and intrepid spirit had early marked out for him." Rogers and Moore have been for many years very intimate friends, and of course Moore has for years been much at home in the classic abode of the latter poet. During Byron's residence in Italy, Moore visited him there, and received the unlucky gift of the Memoirs, out of which, and his two thousand guineas, he was so shamefully wheedled by those who could so very well afford to pay the price of that burnt offering, to him a serious sacrifice.

But Lord Lansdowne was anxious to get the wit and poet down into his own neighborhood, and pressed him to come and live near Bowood. "Tommy, who dearly loves a lord," was the designation given to Moore by his dear friend, Lord Byron. As he obliged the relatives of Byron by burning the horror-creating Memoirs, so he was willing to oblige Lord Lansdowne by living near him. His lordship sent him word that there was a house just the thing for him, at Bromham, not far from Bowood. Moore went to it, but found it far too large and expensive for a poet's income. He, however, told Mrs. Moore on his return that he had seen a cottage on the road that was every thing that he desired, with a most delicious garden, and in a sweet situation. With her usual energy, Mrs. Moore at once took coach, hastened to the cottage, liked it as well as her husband did, and took it at once. This was Sloperton cottage, and here they have resided nearly thirty years.

It is Sloperton cottage which hereafter will be regarded with the chief interest as the residence of the poet. It stands in the midst of a delightful country, and though itself buried, as it were, in an ordinary thickly wooded lane, branching off to the left from the high-road, about two miles from Devizes, on the way to Chippenham, yet from its upper windows, as well as from its garden, enjoys peeps through the trees into lovely scenes. Down southward from the far end of the house opens the broad and noble vale toward Trowbridge; in front to the right, across a little valley, stands on a fine mount, amid nobly grown trees, the village of Bromham, with a gentleman's house standing, boldly backed and flanked by the masses of wood, and the church spire peering above it. More to the left, in front, you look across some miles of country, and see the historical foreland of Roundaway hill, the termination of the chalk-hills of the White-house-vale, proudly overlooking Devizes. This hill, my driver gravely assured me, was Roundaway hill, where King John signed the charter! Behind the cottage, across some rich fields, are the wooded slopes of Spy-park, once the property of Sir Andrew Baynton.

At a few hundred yards' distance, on the left-hand side of the lane as you advance from the Devizes road, there stands the old manor-house of Nonsuch, which has gone through many hands, and has, I believe, lately been sold, and is now refitting for a modern mansion. A narrow foot-lane descends past its grounds down through the valley, between tall hedges and embowering alders, to the village of Bromham, which gives you a view of the ancient knolls of the parklike environs of Nonsuch. Old sturdy oaks are standing here and there on these knolls, and every thing presents an air of great antiquity. A footpath runs through these grounds, by which you are admitted to loiter at your leisure amid the retired slopes and woodland hollows of this old English scenery. The footway which, I have said, leads also down past it, to Bromham, is peculiarly rural. It is paved, as the bottom abounds in water, where a beautiful spring gushes up from the foot of the ascent toward the village; and in passing along it, you feel yourself to be shrouded amid a luxuriant growth of water-loving trees, and surrounded by the quietness of woodland banks, and rustic farm lands. The village is purely agricultural, and has a fine church, with a singularly richly ornamented battlement.

Such is the immediate situation of Moore's cottage. Views of it every one has seen; but it is only when you stand actually before it, see it covered with clematis, its two porches hung with roses, and the lawn and garden which surround it kept in the most exquisite order, and fragrant with every flower of the season, that you are fully sensible of what a genuine poet's nest it is.

The house was originally quite a common cottage. This part forms still the end next to the Devizes road, which road, however, is three quarters of a mile distant; but fresh erections have been added, so that now it is not a very large, but a very goodly and commodious dwelling. The old entrance has been left, as well as a new one made in the new part, so that no unnecessary interruption may be occasioned to the family by visitors. The old entrance leads to the little drawing-room, the newer one to the family sitting-room. The poet's study is up stairs. In the garden there is a raised walk running its whole length, bounded by a hedge of laurel. This gives you the view over the fields of Spy-park, and its finely wooded slopes. This is a favorite walk of the poet; and it was, indeed, the fascination of this garden which originally took his fancy, and occasioned him to think of securing it.

At present Thomas Moore is suffering one of the afflictions to which all men are liable, but which press, perhaps, most sensibly on the poetic temperament—the loss of a son, an officer in foreign service. What is worthy of remark, and is an evidence of his independent and unselfish disposition, is that, I believe, with the exception of his Bermuda appointment, which turned out a loss, through the dishonesty of an agent, he has never received any other appointment, or any pension, though he has been so thoroughly identified with, and caressed by the Whigs. He can say, and does say, with a just pride,—What I am, I have made myself—what I have, I have won by my own hand. He has been careful to tell us himself, in his preface to his third volume, the actual amount of royal patronage which he had been said to have received, and unworthily repaid, by quizzing the modern Heliogabalus. It is this, and is worth reading: "Luckily, the list of benefits showered upon me from that high quarter may be dispatched in a few sentences. At the request of the Earl of Moira, one of my earliest and best friends, his royal highness graciously permitted me to dedicate to him my Translation of the Odes of Anacreon. I was twice, I think, admitted to the honor of dining at Carlton-house; and when the prince, on his being made regent, in 1811, gave his memorable fête, I was one of the envied—about fifteen hundred, I believe, in number—who enjoyed the privilege of being his guests on the occasion." The obligation was certainly not overpowering, especially when the country had to pay for it. Moore adds, that history has now pretty well settled the character of this royal patron. The obligation to nobility is not much more onerous. This, to the poet himself, is highly honorable; but to the party, and the noblemen of that party—the Lansdownes, Hollands, and Russells—what is it? The cause of these men the warm and patriotic pen of the Irish poet has essentially served. His wit, in songs and squibs in the morning papers, and through various vehicles, has been to them a sharp and glittering cimiter, lopping off the heads of whole hosts of heavy arguments and accusations. Around their tables he has cast a radiance and a merriment that would else have been sought for in vain. To them he has been a genuine and a daily benefactor. They have had the honor of his countenance, while they probably thought that they were gracing him with theirs. How posterity laughs at all such aristocratic self-delusions! How it reduces things to their real dimensions! What may be the ideas of Thomas Moore, on this subject, I do not know. I speak merely according to the impressions which the contemplation of his peculiar career leaves upon me; and these are, that his aristocratic friends have had a very good friend in him, and he a very indifferent one in them. While, on all occasions, they have been filling their families and ordinary hangers-on with wealth, the ablest man of their party has been rewarded with a shake of the hand and invitations to dinners, because he was too proud to ask for any thing better. If he has dearly loved a lord, it must be confessed that it has been with a very disinterested affection. Lord Byron was the most generous to him of his class; but Lord Byron's friends robbed him of that solitary benefit. And so, at the age of sixty-six, the champion of the Whigs, the poet of the loves, the merry wit, and the pungent satirist, the friend of the richest men in England, still sits at his desk, and works for honest bread. Long may he enjoy it!

  EBENEZER ELLIOTT.

The manufacturing town, as well as the country, has found its Burns. As Burns grew and lived amid the open fields, inhaling their free winds, catching views of the majestic mountains as he trod the furrowed field, and making acquaintance with the lowliest flower and the lowliest creatures of the earth, as he toiled on in solitude; so Elliott grew and lived amid the noisy wilderness of dingy houses, inhaling smoke from a thousand furnaces, forges, and engine chimneys, and making acquaintance with misery in its humblest shapes, as he toiled on in the solitude of neglect. The local circumstances were diametrically different, to show that the spirit in both was the same. They were men of the same stamp, and destined for the same great work; and, therefore, however different were their immediate environments, the same operating causes penetrated through them, and stirred within them the spirit of the prophet. They were both of that chosen class who are disciplined in pain, that they may learn that it is a prevailing evil, and are stimulated to free not only themselves, but their whole cotemporary kindred. Of poets, says Shelley:

"They learn in suffering what they teach in song;"

and the names of Milton, Chatterton, Byron, and of Shelley himself, remind us how true as well as melancholy is the assertion. Burns and Elliott were to be great teachers, and they both had their appointed baptisms. The same quick and ardent passions; the same quivering sensibility; the same fiery indignation against tyranny and oppression; the same lofty spirit of independence, and power of flinging their feelings into song, strong, piercing, and yet most melodious, belong to them. They are both of the people—their sworn brethren and champions. For their sakes they defy all favor of the great; they make war to the death on the humbug of aristocratic imposition; to them humanity is alone great, and by that they stand unmoved by menace, unabashed by scorn, unseduced by flatterers. As messengers of God, they honor God in man; and if they show a preference, it is for man in his misery. They are drawn by a divine sympathy to the injured and afflicted. The world knows its own, and they know it, and leave the world to worship according to its worldly instinct. For them the gaudy revel goes on, the chariot of swelling property rolls by, the palace and the castle receive or pour out their glittering throngs, unmarked save by a passing glance of contempt; for they are on their way to the cabins of wretchedness, where they have their Father's work to do. In their eyes, "the whole need not a physician, but those that are sick." They leave the dead to bury their dead, and have enough to do to soothe the agonies of the living; of those who live only to suffer, the martyr mass of mankind who groan in rags, and filth, and destitution, under the second great curse—not that of earning their bread by the sweat of their brow, but of not being able to do it.

England owes a debt of thanks to a good Providence, who, affluent in his gifts of honor and beneficence, has raised up great men in every class and every location on her bosom, where they were most needed. In that magnificent work which England has assuredly to do in the earth—that of spreading freedom, knowledge, arts, and Christianity over every distant land and age, gross errors have been committed, and malignant powers have been developed, like pestilential diseases in her constitution; but these have not been suffered to stop, though they may have retarded her career. New infusions of health have been made, new strength has been manifested; out of the pressure of wretchedness new comfort has sprung; and when hope seemed almost extinct, new voices have been heard above the wailing crowd, that have startled the despairing into courage, and shed dismay into the soul of tyranny. As the population has assumed new forms and acquired new interests, out of the bosom of the multitude have arisen the poets who have borne those forms, and have been made familiar with those interests from their birth. Byron and Shelley, from the regions of aristocracy, denounced, in unsparing terms, its arrogant assumptions; Burns, beholding the progressing work of monopoly and selfishness, uttered his contempt of the spirit that was thrusting down the multitude to the condition of serfs, and haughtily returning glance for glance with pride of rank and pride of purse, exclaimed—

"A man's a man for a' that!"

But the work of evil went on. While war scourged the earth in the defense of the doting despotism of kingship, and monopoly shut out the food of this nation in defense of the domestic despotism of aristocracy, millions and millions of men were born to insufferable misery, to hunger, nakedness, and crime, the result of maddened ignorance; and that in a land teeming with corn and cattle, and the wealth that could purchase them; and in a land, too, that sent out clothing for a world. The work of selfishness had proceeded, but had not prospered; wealth had been accumulated, but poverty had been accumulated too, a thousandfold; rents had been maintained, but ruin looked over the wall; there was universal activity, but its wages were famine; there was a thunder of machinery, and a din of never ceasing hammers; but amid the chaos of sounds there were heard—not songs, but groans. It was then that Elliott was born, and there that he grew, in the very thick of this swarming, busy, laborious, yet miserable generation. He saw with astonishment that all that prodigious industry produced no happiness; there was pomp and pauperism; toil and starvation; Christianity preached to unbelieving ears, because there were no evidences of its operation on hearts that had the power to bless; and thus famine, ignorance, and irritation were converting the crowd into a mass of ravenous and dehumanized monsters. There needed a new orator of the patriot spirit. There needed a Burns of the manufacturing district, and he was there in the shape of Elliott. Had Burns been born again there, and under those circumstances, he would have manifested himself exactly as Elliott has done. He would have attacked manfully this monstrous bread-tax, which had thus disorganized society, disputing the passage of God's blessings to the many, and stamping a horrible character on the few. He would have vindicated the rights of man and his labors, and have sung down with fiery numbers all the crowding bugbears that armed monopoly had gathered round the people to scare them into quiet. Elliott has done that exactly; done that and no less. In the unpresuming character of "A Corn-Law Rhymer," of "The Poet of the Rabble," he sent out, right and left, songs, sarcasms, curses, and battle-cries, among the people. His words, never ceasing, fell like serpents among the multitude deadened by long slavery, and stung them into life. His voice once raised, never faltered, never paused; wherever the multitude met they heard it; wherever they turned they saw it embodied in largest handwriting on the wall. "Up! bread-taxed slave! Up! our bread is taxed—arise!" It was Elliott who sounded from day to day, and month to month, these ominous words in the nation's ears. He took the very form of Burns's patriot song, and instead of "Scots, wha ha' wi' Wallace bled," exclaimed—

These brave words were not uttered in vain. The Burns of Sheffield did not speak to the dead. The fire which he scattered was electric. It spread rapidly, it kindled in millions of hearts, it became the soul of the sinking multitude. It was slower to seize on the moist and comfortable spirits of the middle classes and master-manufacturers; but the progress of foreign competition soon drove even them into action against the landlord's monopoly. The League arose. The prose-men took up the cry of the poet, and with material and ground prepared by him, went on from year to year advancing, by force of arguments and force of money, the great cause, till at this moment it may be said to be won. The prime minister of England pronounced the doom of the Corn-Law, and fixed the date of its extinction. All honor to every man who fought in the good fight, but what honor should be shown to him who began it? To the man who blew, on the fiery trumpet of a contagious zeal, defiance to the hostile power in the pride of its strength, and called the people together to the great contest? In that contest the very name of Ebenezer Elliott has of late ceased to be heard. Others have prolonged the war-cry, and the voice of him who first raised it seems to be forgotten; but not the less did he raise it. Not the less does that cause owe to him its earliest and amplest thanks. Not the less is it he who dared to clear the field, to defy the enemy, to array the host, to animate them to the combat, and proclaim to them a certain and glorious victory. And when the clamor of triumph shall have ceased, and a grateful people sit down to think, in their hours of evening or of holyday ease, of the past, they will remember the thrilling songs of their poet, and pay him a long and grateful homage.

In comparing Ebenezer Elliott to Robert Burns, I do not mean to say that their poetry is at all points to be compared. On the contrary, in many particulars they are very different, but the great spirit and principles of them are the same. In the felicitous power of throwing a popular sentiment into a popular song, Elliott can not come near Burns; nay, in the lyrical portion of his composition, we do not find the full stature and strength of Elliott; it is in his larger poems that he more completely presents himself, and no one can read them without feeling that he is not only a true but a great poet.

There are many people who have read only his corn-law effusions in newspapers and periodicals, who are at a loss to find the warrant for the high character assigned by others to his writings. These give them an idea of a fierce, savage, and often coarse demagogue. And when they add to the expression of these compositions that of the only portraits hitherto published of him, they are perfectly confirmed in the idea that he is a stern, hard-souled, impetuous, and terrible man of iron. Such are the false judgments derived from a one-sided knowledge, and the cruel calumnies of bad artists! Ebenezer Elliott is one of the gentlest, most tender-hearted of men; and, however strange it may seem, it is this very character, this compassion for the unhappy, this lively and soft sympathy for human suffering, that has roused him to his loftiest pitch of anger, and put into his mouth his most terrible words. It is the noble and feeling soul, which creates the patriot, the savior, and champion of men. It was Christ, who died for the world, and prayed for his enemies, and taught us to pray for ours, that uttered those awful and scarifying denunciations—"Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" It is impossible that it should be otherwise. It is impossible that a feeling soul, endowed with power as well as feeling, should not rise into the battle attitude at the sight of oppression, and with the sledge-hammer of a great indignation demolish the gates of cruelty, when the poor are crying within. But it must never be forgotten, that it is out of the excess of love that springs this excess of zeal. It is this that marks the great distinction between the tyrant and the savior; the one is inspired by cruelty, the other by mercy.

Whoever sees Ebenezer Elliott, having first only seen the portrait prefixed to some of his works—a vile caricature—and having read only his Corn-law Rhymes, will see with wonder a man of gentle manners, and in all his tones, the expression of a tender and compassionate feeling. But those who have read the whole of his poetry, will not be surprised at this. It is what they will expect. Elliott, though born in a manufacturing town, and having lived there most of his life, displays, like Burns, the most passionate attachment to nature, and what is more, a most intimate acquaintance with her. He possesses a singular power of landscape painting; and what he paints, possesses all the beauty of Claude, and the wild magnificence of a Salvator Rosa, with the finest and most subtile touches of a Dutch artist. In his landscapes you are not the more amazed by the sublimity of the tempest on the dark and crag-strewn moorland mountains of the Peak, than you are by the perfect accuracy of his most minute details. In the woodland, on the vernal bank, and in the cottage garden, you find nothing which should not be there; nothing out of place, or out of season; and the simplest plant or flower is exactly what you will find; not nicknamed as the poor children of nature so often are by our writers. There is one instance of Ebenezer Elliott's taste that meets you everywhere, and marks most expressively the peculiar, delicate, and poetic affection of his feelings. It is his preeminent love for spring, and its flowers and imagery. The primrose, the snow-drop, "the woe-marked cowslips," the blossom of the hawthorn and the elm, how constantly do they recur. In what favorite scene has he not introduced the wind-flower? Thus, in this admirable picture of a mechanic's garden—

Or in this passage, as remarkable for the sweet music of its versification as for its suggestive power, winging the imagination into the far-off woodland with the plover's cry—

These are beautiful; but Elliott can be strong as beautiful, and sublime as strong; and the great charm of all his poetry is, that he makes his description subservient to the display of human life and passion, human joys, and sorrows, and struggles, and wrongs. He deals, as the poet of the people, with the life of the people. The thronged manufacturing town,—thronged with men, and misery, and crime, but not destitute of domestic virtues, nor precious domestic affections,—lives nowhere as it does in Elliott's pages. The village and the cottage, with its gardens, and their inhabitants, all come before us with their beloved characteristics, and also with their tales of trial and death.

Elliott has been said to have copied from Crabbe and Wordsworth, and heaven knows who. Every page of his tells that he has read and loved them, and been deeply impressed with their compositions; but he is no copyist. Like a fine landscape, he is tinted by the colors and harmonies of the sky, the sun, the season, and the hour; but like that, his features and lasting beauties are his own. In his earlier poems, he often reminds you, by the tone and rhythm of his verse, of Campbell and Rogers; but anon, and he has molded his own style into its peculiar and native beauty, and like a river for a while obstructed by rocks and mounds, he at length finds his way into the open plain, and in his full growth and strength goes on his way vigorous, majestic, and with a character all his own. He delights in the heroic measure, varying and alternating the rhymes at his pleasure; and in this versification he exhibits a singular breadth of scope, and pours forth a harmony grand, melancholy, and thrilling. Beautifully as he clothes his themes with the pathos and the hues of poetry, they are yet the stern themes of real and of unhappy life. They are, as he tells us, and as we feel and know from our own experience, all drawn from actual knowledge. He finds his fellow-men oppressed by the false growth of society, and he boldly and vehemently lays bare their calamities. He draws things as they are, and with the pencil of a giant. The misery that springs out of the corn-laws, and other measures of monopoly and unjust legislation, he denounces and deplores with unceasing zeal. He assaults and wrestles with the monster growth of injustice with undying and unappeasable hatred. He limns England as it was, and as it is; and asks the aristocratic and the millocrat if they are not ashamed of their deeds? If they do not blush at their philosophy; if they do not recoil from these scenes of woe, and crime, and ferocity, that they have created?

In every form and disguise, injustice and inhumanity—

"Man's inhumanity to man"

that

"Makes countless thousands mourn,"

are the monster serpents that he seeks to crush beneath his relentless heel, and to fling forth from the dwellings of men. In delineating the consequences of crime, Ebenezer Elliott has few equals for masterly command of language. Byron never recorded the agonies of sin and passion with more awful vigor, nor the woes of parting spirits with more absorbing pathos. In the Exile, where two lovers meet in America—in the days when our settlements there were called the plantations, and they were penal colonies,—the woman as a convict, and that through her lover's errors and desertion, nothing can be more vividly sketched than the mental sufferings of both parties, or finer than the scene where the unhappy woman dies in her lover's arms on a night of awful tempest.

Among the largest and best poems of Ebenezer Elliott, perhaps the Village Patriarch, the Splendid Village, and the Ranter, will always be the greatest favorites; not because they possess more passion or poetry than the vigorous drama, of Bothwell and Kerhonah, but because they depict England as it has become in our day, and awaken our love for both country and people, while they make us weep for the desolation which aristocratic legislation has everywhere diffused. The Splendid Village, unlike the Deserted Village of Goldsmith, has not become released of its inhabitants by the change of times, but has become the scene of heartless wealth, of fine houses, where humble cottages stood, and of purse-proud cits and lawyers, who leave the work-house, or the jail, as the only refuges of the once happy poor. The surly "Constable, publican and warrener," "Broad Jim the poacher," and in the Village Patriarch, the poor old Hannah Wray, whose cottage is unroofed by Mr. Ezra White, the farmer, and who is hanged for killing the savage with a stone, in the act, though it was really done by her half-sharp daughter, are sketches too sadly full of that lamentable life which has, of late years, distorted the fair rural face of England. They are things which can not be too well pondered on by every man who desires the return of better days to this country. But we turn for the present to the more attractive society of blind Enoch Wray.

In Enoch Wray, blind, and one hundred years old, Elliott has drawn one of those venerable village patriarchs, that every one can remember something of in his younger days. Men of hale and well developed powers, who, in a calm life, not devoid of its cares, yet leaving leisure for thought, have cherished the love of nature and the spirit of a pure wisdom in them, worthy of man's highest estate. Such men, who that has spent his youth in the country, has not known, and has not loved? Enoch Wray is one of these, old and blind, yet with a heart full as that of a child of the tenderness for nature, and the spirit of heaven. The author describes his strolls with him into the hills; and we will take our last extracts from these, because they are fine specimens of landscape painting, and show what a fresh charm the poet confers on his compositions, by the very names of the places he introduces. In this there is a striking difference between him and James Montgomery, Sheffield's other eminent poet, whose writings, beautiful as they are, and full as they are of the love of nature, might have been written anywhere. They do not localize themselves.