"Trust in force!-So tyrants trust!
Words shall crush ye into dust;
Yet we fight, if fight we must-

Thou didst, Man of Huntingdon!"

"Heirs of Pym! can ye be base?
Locke! shall Frenchmen scorn a race
Born in Hampden's dwelling place?
Blush to write it, Infamy!
"What we are our fathers were;
What they dared their sons can dare:
Vulgar tyrants! hush! beware!

Bring not down the avalanche.

"By the death which Hampden died!
By oppression mind-defied!

Despots, we will tame your pride-
Stormily, or tranquilly!"

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 it was won. The Prime Minister of England pronounced the doom of the Corn-law, and fixed the date of its extinction. All honour to every man who fought in the good fight, but what honour 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, however, ceased to be heard. Others had prolonged the war-cry, and the voice of him who first raised it seemed 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 was 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 clamour of triumph shall have ceased, and a grateful people sit down to think, in their hours of evening or of holiday 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 cannot 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

* One Oliver Cromwell, a brewer.

can read them without feeling that he is not only a true but a great poet. Yet, in some of his lyrics there is a wonderful strength, united with a pathos as profound as is to be met with in the language. The deep melancholy tone of the following stanzas from The Plaint, will be felt by every one :—

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 portraits generally published of him, they are perfectly confirmed in the idea that he was 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 was one of the gentlest, most tender-hearted of men. We are told that his father was a passionate, energetic man, fond of controversy; his mother a woman of the tenderest spirit and most sensitive nerves. In the blending of these qualities you have the precise temperament of Elliott. However strange it may seem, it was this very character, this compassion for the unhappy, this lively and soft sympathy for human suffering, that 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 saviour, and champion of men. It was Christ, who died for the world, and prayed for his enemies, and taught us to pray for ours, who uttered those awful and scarifying denunciations-"Wo 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 saviour; the one is inspired by cruelty, the other by mercy.

Whoever saw 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, would see with wonder a man of gentle manners, and in all his tones the expression of a tender and compas sionate feeling. But those who had read the whole of his poetry, would not be surprised at this. It was what they would expect. Elliott, though born in a manufacturing town, and having lived there most of his life, displayed, like Burns, the most passionate attachment to Nature, and what is more, a most intimate acquaintance with her. He possessed a singular power of landscape-painting; and what he painted possessed all the beauty of Claude, and the wild magnificence of a Salvator Rosa, with the finest and most subtle 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 would 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 pre-eminent love for spring, and its flowers and imagery. The primrose, the snowdrop, "the woe-marked cowslips," the blossom of the hawthorn and the elm, how constantly do they recur. In what favourite scene has he not introduced the wind-flower? Thus, in this admirable picture of a mechanic's garden

"Still, Nature, still he loves thy uplands brown-
The rock that o'er his father's freehold towers!
And strangers hurrying through the dingy town
May know his workshop by its sweet wild flowers.
Cropped on the Sabbath from the hedge-row bowers,
The hawthorn blossom in his window droops;

Far from the headlong stream and lucid air,
The pallid alpine rose to meet him stoops,
As if to soothe a brother in despair,
Exiled from Nature, and her pictures fair.
Even winter sends a posy to his jail,
Wreathed of the sunny celandine; the brief,
Courageous wind-flower, loveliest of the frail;
The hazel's crimson star, the woodbine's leaf,
The daisy with its half-closed eye of grief;

Prophets of fragrance, beauty, joy, and song."-P. 63.

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

"When daisies blush, and wind-flowers wet with dew;

When shady lanes with hyacinths are blue;

When the elm blossoms o'er the brooding bird,

And wild and wide the plover's wail is heard;

Where melt the mists on mountains far away,
Till morn is kindled into brightest day,

No more the shouting youngsters shall convene

To play at leap-frog on the village green," &c.-P. 87.

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 colours 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 moulded 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 aristocrat 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

are the monster serpents that he seeks to crush beneath his relent

less 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 vigour, 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 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.

Amongst the largest and best poems of Ebenezer Elliott, perhaps the Village Patriarch, the Splendid Village, and the Ranter, will always be the greatest favourites; 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 stripped 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 workhouse, 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 cannot 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 welldeveloped 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