its registration agencies swelled the electoral rolls with with voters.

In a quaint autobiographical sketch written in 1841, and printed after his death, he recorded his personal and literary development nearly as follows:-[A few pages are omitted.]

66

Soon after my Corn-law Rhymes had made me somewhat notorious, I was strongly urged by sundry persons to write a history of my life, which I then refused to do, because I had nothing remarkable to relate of myself, and because I knew not that I had done aught that could reasonably induce any person to ask, six months after my death, What sort of man was Ebenezer Elliott?" I placed, however, in the hands of my friend, G. C. Holland, M. D., a series of letters, in which I narrated some incidents of my early life, that had probably influenced the formation of my mind and character—and which might form the basis of a posthumous narrative, if wanted. I embody in the succeeding narative the substance of those letters now, following the advice which I rejected several times-reluctantly, for the same reasons ;-not that this is " a world to hide virtues in," but that I have none to hide. I have another reason for my reluctance. The portion of my history which I am about to publish is not that portion of it which would be most instructive were it written as I alone could write it; that is, if I were brave and honest enough so to write it, which I am not. Even that portion of it, however, would not be more instructive than the history of almost any one person out of millions of the queen's subjects, if truly written; nor could I write it at all without saying to dead sorrows, "Arise and weep afresh," and to errors and failings that would fain sleep forgotten, "Be ye remembered!" Two men alone in our time, Rousseau and Byron, told the truth of themselves; and how have they been requited? Yet the time may come when my present unwillingness to look back on the days of trouble will be lessened; for there is might and majesty in the tale of the honest battle for bread, and of the strength which the struggle gives to weak

ness.

Of my birth no public registry exists. My father being a dissenter, baptised me himself, or employed his friend and brother, Berean Tommy Wright, the Barnsley tinker, to baptise me. But I was born at the New Foundry, Masbro', in the parish of Rotherham, on the 17th day of March, in the year of our Lord 1781; and I narrate the fact thus particularly, that about an event of such importance there may be no contentious ink shed by historians in times to come. Robert Ellliott, my father's father, was a white

smith, of Newcastle-upon-Tyne; a man in good circumstances, or he could not have given to his son Ebenezer, my father, what was then considered a first-class commercial education, and put him apprentice to Landell & Chambers, of that great city, wholesale ironmongers, who received with him a premium of £50. His wife, who rejoiced in the pastoral name of Sheepshanks," was a Scotswoman,and, speaking metaphorically, wore breeches: a circumstance which does not seem to have lessened the love her husband bore her, for he lamented her with tears long after she had been laid in the grave, even until the day of his deathespecially when he was drunk. The ancestors of my grandfather Elliott, I have been told-and have the honour to believe were thieves, neither Scotch nor English, who lived on the cattle they stole from both. That my grandmother Sheepshanks had ancestors is probable; but of what they were, neither record nor tradition hath reached me--which is the more pity, because my great difficulty in writing Famous men are fated this narrative is want of materials. to have wants; but ask yourselves, ye Famous, who could write your histories, if all the children of want were famous? After my father left Landell and Chambers, he bewhere came one of the clerks of the Walkers of Masbro', he lodged with a surgeon called Robinson; under whose roof he first saw my mother-one of the daughters of a yeoman, at Ozzins, near Penistone, where his ancestors had lived on their fifty or sixty acres of freehold time out of mind! I think, then, I have made out my descent, if not from very fine folks, certainly from respectables, as (getting every day comparatively scarce,) they are called in these days of "ten dogs at one bone."

If famous men are fated to have wants, so are they to have misfortunes, truly such-and some of mine were born before me; for the whole life of my mother was a disease-a tale of pain, terminated by death-one long sigh. Yet she suckled eleven children, and reared eight of them to adult age. From her I have derived my nervous irritability, my bashfulness, and awkardness, my miserable proneness to anticipate evil, that make existence all catastrophe. I well remember her sending me to a dame's school, kept by Nanny Sykes, the beautiful and brave wife of a drunken husband, where I learned my ABC. I was next sent tothe Hollis School; then presided over by Joseph Ramsbotham, who taught me to write, and little more. In those days the science of monitorship was undiscovered; and as he had seldom fewer perhaps than 150 scholars, of course none but the naturally clever made

much progress. About this time, my poor mother, who was a first-rate dreamer, and a true believer in dreams, related to me one of her visions. "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, illfavoured man, with black hair, black eyes, thick stob nose, and tup-shins it was thy father."

And a special original my father was,--a man of great virtues, but not without faults. One of the latter had its origin probably in some superstitious reverence for the cabilistic number "three." I allude to his bad habit of ducking his children thrice, and keeping them the third time some seconds under water when he bathed us in the canal; which produced in me a horror of suffocation that seems to increase with my years. To avoid this cruel kindness, I was obliged to show him that 1 could do without his assistance, by bathing voluntarily; a consequence of which was that on one occasion, I narrowly escaped drowning:-" The more the pity!" I have often said since. I never knew a man who possessed the tithe of my father's satiric and humorous powers; he would have been a great comic actor. He also possessed uncommon political sagacity, which afterwards earned for him the title of "Devil Elliott," a title which is still applied to him, I am told, by the descendants of persons who then hated the poor and honoured the king. He left the Messrs. Walker, to serve Clay and Co., of the New Foundry, Masbro', for a salary of sixty or seventy pounds, with house, candle, 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 Bearean) and hell hung round with span-long children! On other days, pointing to the aqua tint 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. If ever there was a man who knew not fear, that man was the father of the

Corn-law Rhymer. From his birth to his last gasp I doubt whether he knew what it was to be afraid, except of poverty; about which he had sad forebodings-ultimately realised, after he had become nominal proprietor of the foundry of Clay and Co., the partners having sold him their shares on credit.

I

I have left some earlier incidents for after-narration, that may found on my father's peculiarities a claim to speak now of my own-or rather of certain physical or constitutional weaknesses, to which I fear, all that is poetical in me or in my doings is traceable.

"Oh, blessed are the beautiful!" says Haynes Bailey, uttering for ever a sentiment to which I can feelingly and mournfully respond; for in my sixth year I had the smallpox, which left me frightfully disfigured, and six weeks blind. From the consequences I never recovered. To them, quite as much as to my poor mother's infirm constitution, I imputed my nerve-shaken weakness. How great was that weakness I will endeavour to show the reader. When I was very young-I might be twelve years old-I fell in love with a young woman called Ridgeway-now Mrs. Woodcock, of Munster, near Greasbro'-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 if she saw me as I passed her father's house, I felt as if weights were fastened to my feet. Is genius diseased? I cannot remember the time when I was not fond of ruralities. Was I born, then, with a taste for the beautiful? When quite a child-I might be seven or eight years old-I remember filling a waster frying-pan with water, placing it in the centre of a little grove of mugwort and wormwood that grew on a stone-heap in the foundry yard, and delighting to see the reflection of the sun, and clouds, and the plants themselves, as from the surface of a natural fountain: for I so placed the pan that the water only was visible, and I seldom failed to visit it at noon, when the sun was over it. But I had also a taste for the horrible-a passion-a rage för seeing the face of the hanged or the drowned. Why 1 know not; for they made my life a burden,-following me wherever I went, sleeping with me, and haunting me in my dreams. Was this hideous taste a result of constitutional infirmity? Had it any connection with my taste for writing of horrors and crimes? I was cured of it by a memorable spectacle. A poor friendless man, who, having no home, slept in colliery hovels and similar places, having been sent, one dark night, from the glasshouse for a pitcher of ale, fell into the canal, and was drowned. In about six wook a

On

his body rose to the surface of the water, and I, of course, ran to see it. The spectacle which by that time it presented was daily and nightly, whether I was alone or in the street, in bed or by the fireside, for months my companion. Had this morbid propensity any relation to my solitary tendencies ? Healthy man is social; but in my childhood, I had no associates Although the neighbourhood swarmed with children I was always alone; and this is perhaps one reason why I was deemed rather wanting in intellect, and why I might really have had fewer ideas than other children of my age, for I cut myself off from communication with theirs. But though I was alone, I have no recollection that my solitude was painful. the contrary, I employed my time delightfully in swimming my little fleet of ships, and repairing my fortresses on the banks of the canal between the Greasbro' and Rawmarsh bridges. My early fondness for carpentering is no proof that if I had been bred an engineer I should have made any improvements in machinery-for all children are more or less fond of nicknackery; but I certainly excelled in handicrafts. I was the best kitemaker and the best shipbuilder. Most captains of sloops and other vessels possess a model of a ship of some sort. By borrowing such models, I completed, when I was about thirteen years old, a model of an eighteen gun ship. I gave it, many years afterwards, to a boat-builder of Greasbro', called Woffendin, who begged it of me, that it might obtain for him the office of boat-builder to Earl Fitzwilliam. He gave or sold it to Lord Milton, the present Earl Fitzwilliam, then a youth; and it was, I believe, a few years ago, still at Wentworth House. But my imitative talents won me no respect; nor is this very surprising. Placed be

side my wondrous brother, Giles, who was beautiful as an angel, I was ugliness itself; and in the presence of his splendid abilities, I might well look like a fool, and believe myself to be one. As I grew up my fondness for solitude increased: for I could not but observe the homage that was paid to him, and feel the contempt with which I was regarded. But I am not aware that I ever envied or at all disliked him.

When I look back on the days of rabid toryism through which I have passed, and consider the then almost universal tendency to worship the powers that were, 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