ut bad models have had their effect, as well as good ones, on
the half-tutored taste of the working men, and engendered in them but
too often a fondness for frothy magniloquence and ferocious raving,
neither morally nor aesthetically profitable to themselves or their
readers. There are excuses for the fault; the young of all ranks
naturally enough mistake noise for awfulness, and violence for
strength; and there is generally but too much, in the biographies of
these working poets, to explain, if not to excuse, a vein of
bitterness, which they certainly did not learn from their master,
Burns. The two poets who have done them most harm, in teaching the
evil trick of cursing and swearing, are Shelley and the Corn-Law
Rhymer; and one can well imagine how seducing two such models must
be, to men struggling to utter their own complaints. Of Shelley this
is not the place to speak. But of the Corn-Law Rhymer we may say
here, that howsoever he may have been indebted to Burns's example for
the notion of writing at all, he has profited very little by Burns's
own poems. Instead of the genial loving tone of the great Scotchman,
we find in Elliott a tone of deliberate savageness, all the more
ugly, because evidently intentional. He tries to curse; "he
delights"--may we be forgiven if we misjudge the man--"in cursing;"
he makes a science of it; he defiles, of malice prepense, the
loveliest and sweetest thoughts and scenes (and he can be most sweet)
by giving some sudden sickening revulsion to his reader's feelings;
and he does it generally with a power which makes it at once as
painful to the calmer reader as alluring to those who are struggling
with the same temptations as the poet. Now and then, his trick drags
him down into sheer fustian and bombast; but not always. There is a
terrible Dantean vividness of imagination about him, perhaps
unequalled in England, in his generation. His poems are like his
countenance, coarse and ungoverned, yet with an intensity of eye, a
rugged massiveness of feature, which would be grand but for the
seeming deficiency of love and of humour--love's twin and inseparable
brother. Therefore it is, that although single passages may be found
in his writings, of which Milton himself need not have been ashamed,
his efforts at dramatic poetry are utter failures, dark, monstrous,
unrelieved by any really human vein of feeling or character. As in
feature, so in mind, he has not even the delicate and gr