ch finally
transformed the illiterate, rugged, half-tutored youth into the man who
wrote "The Village Patriarch," and the "Corn Law Rhymes."

From this time he set himself resolutely to the work of self-education.
His knowledge of the English language was meagre in the extreme; and he
succeeded at last only by making for himself a kind of grammar by
reading and observation. He then tried French, but his native indolence
prevailed, and he gave it up in despair. He read with avidity whatever
books came in his way; and a small legacy of books to his father came in
just at the right time. He says he could never read through a
second-rate book, and he therefore read masterpieces only; "after
Milton, then Shakspeare; then Ossian; then Junius; Paine's 'Common
Sense;' Swift's 'Tale of a Tub;' 'Joan of Arc;' Schiller's 'Robbers;'
Burger's 'Lenora;' Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall;' and long afterward,
Tasso, Dante, De Stael, Schlegel, Hazlitt, and the '_Westminster
Review_.'" Reading of this character might have been expected to lead to
something; and was well calculated to make an extraordinary impression
on such a mind as Elliott's; and we have the fruit of this course of
study in the poetry which from this time he began to throw off.

He remained with his father from his sixteenth to his twenty-third year,
working laboriously without wages, except an occasional shilling or two
for pocket-money. He afterward tried business on his own account. He
made two efforts at Sheffield; the last commencing at the age of forty,
and with a borrowed capital of L150. He describes in his nervous
language the trials and difficulties he had to contend with; and all
these his imagination embodied for him in one grim and terrible form,
which he christened "Bread Tax." With this demon he grappled in
desperate energy, and assailed it vigorously with his caustic rhyme This
training, these mortifications, these misfortunes, and the demon "Bread
Tax" above all, made Elliott successively despised, hated, feared, and
admired, as public opinion changed toward him.

Mr. Howitt describes his warehouse as a dingy, and not very extensive
place, heaped with iron of all sorts, sizes, and forms, with barely a
passage through the chaos of rusty bars into the inner sanctum, at once,
study, counting-house, library, and general receptacle of odds and ends
connected with his calling. Here and there, to complete the jumble, were
plaster casts of Shakspeare, Achilles, Aj