Elliott's first ventures with the public, The Vernal Walk, and Night, were unsuccessful. He published also a volume of poems, with like want of success. But Southey encouraged him to go on. "There is power in the least of these tales, but the higher you pitch your tones, the better you succeed. Thirty years ago, they would have made your reputation; thirty years hence the world will wonder that they did not do so." But Elliott was out of his element in the subjects which thus far he had chosen. Neither his education nor his rugged nature fitted him for gentle themes. The agitation for the repeal of the corn laws, and the light thrown upon the appalling hardships of the operatives, enlisted, of course, Elliott's warmest sympathies, and furnished him with topics which called out all the resources of his strong and fiery nature. His Corn-Law Rhymes had the ring of the anvil. They received almost immediate recognition, and gave the author an established position as The Poet of the People. "The inspiration of his verse is a fiery hatred of injustice. Without possessing much creative power, he almost places himself beside men of genius, by the singular intensity and might of his sensibility. He understands the art of condensing passion. Spread out thunder,' says Schiller, into its single tones, and it becomes a lullaby for children; pour it forth together, in one quick peal, and the royal sound shall move the heavens.' The great ambition of Elliott is to thunder. He is a brawny man, of nature's own make, with more than the usual portion of the old Adam stirring within him, and he says, 'I do well to be angry.' The mere sight of tyranny, bigotry, meanness, prompts his smiting invective. His poetry would hardly have been written by a man who was not physically strong. You can hear the ring of his anvil, and see the sparks fly off from the furnace, as you read his verse."Whipple. REV. RICHARD HARRIS BARHAM, 1788-1845, a humorous writer, is better known by his assumed name of Thomas Ingoldsby. The Ingoldsby Legends, a series of tales in verse and prose, appeared first in Bentley's Miscellany, and were received with general favor. None of these probably had a wider circulation than the thoroughly laughable story of the famous Lord Tomnoddy. My Cousin Nicholas, a story of college-life, came out in Blackwood. Mr. Barham was also one of the chief contributors to Gorton's Biographical Dictionary. He was a friend of Sydney Smith, Theodore Hook, and other wits of the day. "There is a deficiency in the Legends which must prevent their becoming classic. They are devoid of poetry. Master of the grotesque as he was, Barham had no mastery of the picturesque. Keen to see and seize the humorous aspects of affairs, he had none of that deeper humor which creates character. A real poet, who had written fifty or more eccentric legends, could not have helped inventing or describing certain individual characters in the course of his work. He must have done it unconsciously, must have done it if even he had tried to avoid it. There are two tests on the very surface of the true poet. If he describes a scene, you see it; if he describes a man, you know him. Barham's grotesque descriptions are often remarkable; indeed, his legends somewhat remind us of the hideous gurgoyles of old churches, wherein tradition sayeth the old ecclesiastic architects depicted their enemies, making of them waterspouts, that during rain they might seem to vomit. The men who carved those gurgoyles could not have sculptured an Apollo; and of Barham it may be said that, though he wrote laughable stories with supreme felicity, he never produced a line of poetry."- British Quarterly Review. Hood. THOMAS HOOD, 1798-1845, was the prince of comic humorists, the most audacious and successful of punsters. Hood was the son of a London publisher. He left the counting-house for the engraver's stool, and that in turn for the life of a man of letters. He became sub-editor of The London Magazine, editor of The New Monthly, and, for one year, of The Gem, besides being a regular contributor to Punch. Hood's most successful publications were his Whims and Oddities, The Comic Annual, Hood's Own, Up the Rhine, Whimsicalities, Hood's Comic Album. The three most famous of his serious poems are The Dream of Eugene Aram, The Song of the Shirt, and The Bridge of Sighs. The two latter, apart from their beauty of sentiment, are probably unsurpassed in English verse in the wonderfully delicate interlacing of their rhymes. Hood is the most comical humorist in the language, and also the most inveterate punster. No English writer has ever equalled him in the audacity with which he plays upon words. In the single ballad of Miss Killmansegg and Her Wooden Leg the puns number many hundreds. Still, even in Hood's most fantastic pieces, there is always a deep undercurrent of genuine pathos. "Hood's verse, whether serious or comic - whether serene like a cloudless autumn evening, or sparkling with puns like a frosty January midnight with stars—was ever pregnant with materials for thought. . . . Like every author distinguished for true comic humor, there was a deep vein of melancholy pathos running through his mirth; and even when his sun shone brightly, its light seemed often reflected as if only over the rim of a cloud. Well may we say, in the words of Tennyson, Would he could have stayed with us!' for never could it be more truly recorded of any one-in the words of Hamlet characterizing Yorick - that he was a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy."— D. M. Moir. Hook. THEODORE EDWARD HOOK, 1788-1841, another humorist and wit of this period, was second only to Hood. Hook was sent to Harrow to be educated. When only seventeen, he made his debut as a dramatic author in the comic opera of The Soldier's Return, which met with extraordinary success. This was followed, the next year, by the musical farce, Catch Him Who Can. His brother had entered him at Oxford, but young Hook, now the lion of the stage, remained in London. His brilliant talents, especially as an improvisatore, attracted universal attention and won the favor of the Regent, who appointed him Accountant-General of Mauritius, with a salary of £2000. This position Hook held six years, until 1818, when a deficit was discovered in his accounts, and he was arrested and imprisoned. It is now generally agreed that his only culpability was a gross neglect of official duties. During the two years of his imprisonment, and afterwards, he gave himself up with renewed energy to writing. He wrote, in all, thirty-eight works and pieces, besides editing The John Bull and The New Monthly, and contributing to other periodicals. One of his stories, Gilbert Gurney, is almost an autobiography. With regard to Hook's permanent value as an author, critics differ, as may be seen from the following quotations: "His knowledge of city life in its manners, habits, and language seemed intuitive, and has been surpassed only by Fielding and Dickens. Many and multifarious, however, as are his volumes, he has left behind him no great creation, nothing that can be pointed to as a triumphant index of the extraordinary powers which he undoubtedly possessed." — D. M. Moir. "His name will be preserved. His political songs and jeux d'esprit, when the hour comes for collecting them, will form a volume of sterling and lasting attraction; and after many clever romances of this age shall have sufficiently occupied public attention, and sunk, like hundreds of former generations, into utter oblivion, there are tales in his collection which will be read with, we venture to think, even a greater interest than they commanded in their novelty.”—J. G. Lockhart. Montgomery. JAMES MONTGOMERY, 1771-1854, holds a high rank among the poets of England. His devotional poetry especially has made a deep impression on the national heart, hardly inferior to that produced by the poetry of Cowper. Montgomery was a native of Scotland. He was for more than thirty years editor of the Sheffield Iris, a liberal journal. In his capacity as editor, he was twice fined and imprisoned for seditious publications. The last twenty years of his life were passed in retirement. Montgomery is one among the instances in which Jeffrey made shipwreck in attempting to criticize poetical productions. The slashing reviewer broke the staff over Montgomery's Wanderer in Switzerland, but all in vain. Despite the maledictions and prognostications of the Edinburgh, Montgomery's poems gained steadily in favor, until the poet obtained his just rank by the side of Campbell, Rogers, and Southey. Montgomery's larger works are: The Wanderer in Switzerland; The West Indies, a poem against the slave-trade; The World before the Flood; Greenland; The Pelican Island. Besides these, he wrote a large number of short devotional pieces that have been adopted into the hymnology of all Christian denominations. Many lines and passages, such as "There is a land, of every land the pride," have passed into the common stock of the language. "With the exception, perhaps, of Moore, Campbell, and Hemans, I doubt if an equal number of the lyrics of any modern poet have so completely found their way to the national heart, there to be enshrined in hallowed remembrance. One great merit which may be claimed for James Montgomery is that he has encroached on no man's property as a poet: he has staked off a portion of the great common of literature for himself, and cultivated it according to his own taste and fancy." - Moir. ROBERT MONTGOMERY, 1807-1856, is the author of a large number of works, chiefly poetical, on religious subjects. Robert Montgomery was a native of England. He graduated at Oxford, and took orders in the Established Church. He enjoyed great temporary popularity as a poet, but is at present little read. His principal works are: The Omnipresence of the Deity; Satan, or Intellect without God: The Messiah. Satan and The Omnipresence of the Deity were the subjects of a scathing notice by Macaulay in the Edinburgh Review. It cannot be doubted that Montgomery has committed in his poetry grievous violations of all the canons of good taste, and even of good sense. BERNARD BARTON, 1784-1849, is commonly known as "The Quaker Poet." He became a banker's clerk at the age of twenty-six, and continued in that position, like Lamb in the East India House, to the end of his life. He published no one extended poem, but a large number of detached pieces, mostly of a meditative charac ter. "His works are full of passages of natural tenderness, and his religious poems, though animated with a warmth of devotion, are still expressed with that subdued propriety of language which evinces at once a correctness of taste and feeling.” Gentleman's Magazine. THOMAS HAYNES BAYLY, 1797-1839, is widely known as a prolific writer of novels, tales, plays, and songs. His chief publications were the following: Aylmers, a Novel; Rongh Sketches of Bath; Kindness in Women; Weeds and Witchery, Poems; Poetical Works, with Life, published after his death. He produced also thirty-six pieces for the stage, and his songs are numbered by the hundred. Many of his songs are universal favorites, such as I'd be a Butterfly, Why Don't the Men Propose? The Soldier's Tear, etc. "He possessed a playful fancy, a practised ear, a refined taste, and a sentiment which ranged pleasantly from the fanciful to the pathetic, without, however, strictly attaining either the highly imaginative or the deeply passionate."— Moir. WILLIAM MOTHERWELL, 1797-1835, a native of Scotland, and editor of several periodicals of that country, is chiefly known for his Minstrelsy Ancient and Modern, with Notes and Introduction, and his Narrative and Lyrical Poems, a collection of original pieces. “He was about equally successful in two departments,- the martial and the plaintive; yet, stirring as are his Sword Chant and his Battle-Flag of Sigurd, I doubt much whether they are entitled to the same praise, or have gained the same deserved acceptance, as his Jeannie Morrison or his striking stanzas commencing My Heid is like to rend. . . . Several of his lyrics also verge on excellence; but it must be acknowledged of his poetry generally that, ingenious although it be, it rather excites expectation than fairly satisfies."- Moir. WINTHROP MACKWORTH PRAED, 1802–1839, holds a respectable position among the poets of this period. He was educated at Eton and Cambridge, and rose to some distinction in Parliament as a zealous conservative. He contributed numerous short poems to the maga zines. Many of his earlier productions appeared in The Etonian. While at the University he gained two prizes by his poems Australia and Athens. A complete edition of his poetical works was published in 1864. Among his best known pieces are The Belle of the Ball-Room, The Bachelor, Time's Changes, Lillian, etc. Praed is one of a not very numerous class of authors in England-the writers of so-called society verses. "Praed's fancy was airy, bright, and arabesque. It enabled him, with his easy command of poetical expression, to produce picturesque sketches with equal grace and facility. . . . His prose is almost as quaintly and pensively playful as his verse. We have little doubt that if his correspondence were selected from, it would display all those qualities that sparkle so gracefully in his published pieces."— Lon. Athen, Clare. JOHN CLARE, 1793-1864, is one of the peasant-poets of England. Clare obtained some little education by extra work as a ploughboy, the labor of eight weeks sufficing to gain for him one month's schooling. At the age of thirteen, he met with Thomson's Seasons, a book which seems to have a special aptitude for imparting inspiration to the lowly. Having hoarded up a shilling wherewith to purchase a copy, he walked seven miles in the early spring morning to the town to buy a copy, and reached the place before the shops were open. Returning with his treasure through the beautiful scenery of a neighboring park, he composed on the road his first poem, The Morning Walk. This was followed by The Evening Walk. Most of his poems were composed in this way, out in the open fields, or on the roadside, and were written in pencil on the top of his hat. A volume of Poems Descriptive of Country Life appeared in 1820, and another volume in 1821, The Village Minstrel and Other Poems. The reviews and magazines were unanimous in commendation of his verses, and several of the nobility were so far interested in his history as to contribute sums which gave him a permanent allowance of £30 a year. This, with what he raised from his two books, made quite a snug little fortune. He married his "Patty of the Vale," the heroine of his poetical inspirations, and settled down in calm and pleasant content amid the rural scenes of his boyhood. But his good fortune at last turned his head. He engaged in some pecuniary speculation, which proved disastrous, and his misfortunes finally drove him to the mad-house, where he died. "He was a faithful painter of rustic scenes and occupations, and he noted every light and shade of his brooks, meadows, and green lanes. His fancy was buoyant in the midst of labors and hardship; and his imagery, drawn directly from nature, various and original. His reading, before his first publication, had been extremely limited, and did not either frame his tastes or bias the direction of his poems. He wrote out of the fulness of his heart; and his love of nature was so universal, that he included all, weeds as well as flowers, in his picturesque catalogue of her charms.”— Chambers. The following extract gives a good idea of his style: THE THRUSH'S NEST-A SONNET. I heard from morn to morn a merry thrush With joy and oft an unintruding guest, I watched her secret toils from day to day; And there I witnessed, in the summer hours, |