16 THE COUN-LAW RHYMER. 



fair dominions ; not a tea-party toy, but a majestic power, a mental 

 steam-engine. While the Comfit bardlings exert their " five wits" 

 to enshrine carraways in sugar, the Sheffield shopkeeper erects " bas- 

 tions and batteries, beautiful as they are impregnable/' against the 

 oppressor, on behalf of the oppressed. They appeal to Brompton ; 

 he to the universe. The carraway-comfit tribe are each of them sui 

 generis, they resemble nobody but themselves ; Elliott claims " kith 

 and kin" with the best and noblest of mankind. He is not only the 

 Burns, the Crabbe, the Teniers, and the Wilkie, but the Salvator 

 Rosa and Michael Angelo of humble life. Some of his sketches are 

 Titanic. In the volume before us, however, a few of the pieces are 

 disgraceful to his genius. He knows but little of the language, in 

 which he frequently writes with all the splendour and might of Milton. 

 In his former publications, outrages were often committed on gram- 

 mar. In the present collection, however, these have been corrected. 

 But we know, from capital authority, that the subjunctive mood, and 

 other niceties, are,, and probably ever will be, hedgehogs to him. No 

 author is more unequal. He sometimes raves like an imaginative 

 bedlamite, and then suddenly discourses most excellent sense in pure 

 music. Most of his passages are <( clear to the meanest under- 

 standing ;" but many of them are certainly unintelligible to all the 

 world, himself included. 



Yet, with all his faults, Elliott has few compeers, either in poetry 

 or patriotism. His youth gave but little promise of his future pow- 

 ers. A friend of ours, who has known him from his infancy, asks us 

 " how we can account for his having been, in his school-boy days, 

 an impenetrable dunce, delighting in nothing but in building boats, 

 and making other puerile play-things ?" According to the same un- 

 impeachable authority, ' ' he never could learn the Numeration Table, 

 nor could he acquire, nor does he now know, a single rule of grammar. 

 When he detects errors in construction, it is by thinking alone. 

 Almost any boy's hat is too large for his head ; that of one of his 

 sons, a lad aged fourteen, and small-headed for his years, descends 

 over the father's eyes and nose ! The painter of the portrait affixed 

 to the collection of his works, has given him an inch, at least, of brain, 

 more than he possesses. His brows are remarkably prominent and 

 angular, strongly wrinkled across, and deeply indented in the centre. 

 He has no brain behind his ears, and very little above them his head 

 possessing neither height nor depth, but breadth only ; so that if Gall 

 and Spurzheim be right, the Corn-Law Rhymer is an idiot." 



In his last passage, our estimable correspondent appears to have 

 come to an unwarrantable conclusion. If his statement be correct, 

 the Corn-Law Rhymer must, according to the phrenologists, be defi- 

 cient in animal propensities, but rich in mental endowments. 



A. 



