ich the cunning may anticipate the fact that he is
deeply indebted to both. His earliest publication or at least
composition, "The Vernal Walk," is said to date from the very year of
the _Lyrical Ballads_, and of course owes no royalty to Wordsworth, but
is in blank verse, a sort of compound of Thomson and Crabbe. "Love" (in
Crabbian couplets slightly tinged with overlapping) and "The Village
Patriarch" (still smacking of Crabbe in form, though irregularly
arranged in rhymed decasyllables) are his chief other long poems. He
tried dramas, but he is best known by his "Corn-Law Rhymes" and
"Corn-Law Hymns," and deserves to be best known by a few lyrics of real
beauty, and many descriptions. How a man who could write "The Wonders of
the Lane" and "The Dying Boy to the Sloe Blossom" could stoop to
malignant drivel about "palaced worms," "this syllabub-throated
logician," and so forth, is strange enough to understand, especially as
he had no excuse of personal suffering. Even in longer poems the mystery
is renewed in "They Met Again" and "Withered Wild Flowers" compared with
such things as "The Ranter," though the last exhibits the author at both
his best and worst. However, Elliott is entitled to the charity he did
not show; and the author of such clumsy Billingsgate as "Arthur
Bread-Tax Winner," "Faminton," and so forth, may be forgiven for the
flashes of poetry which he exhibits. Even in his political poems they do
not always desert him, and his somewhat famous Chartist (or
ante-Chartist) "Battle-Song" is as right-noted as it is wrong-headed.

Sir Aubrey de Vere (1788-1846), a poet and the father of a poet still
alive, was a friend and follower of Wordsworth, and the author of
sonnets good in the Wordsworthian kind. But he cannot be spared much
room here; nor can much even be given to the mild shade of a poetess far
more famous in her day than he. "Time that breaks all things," according
to the dictum of a great poet still living, does not happily break all
in literature; but it is to be feared that he has reduced to fragments
the once not inconsiderable fame of Felicia Hemans. She was born (her
maiden name was Felicia Dorothea Browne) at Liverpool on 25th September
1794, and when she was only eighteen she married a Captain Hemans. It
was not a fortunate union, and by far the greater part of Mrs. Hemans'
married life was spent, owing to no known fault of hers, apart from her
husband. She did not live to old age, dying on 26