15 



THE CORN-LAW RHYMER HIS HEAD, HIS BOYHOOD* 

 AND HIS BOOKS.* 



THE decline of what has been termed, by those who are without 

 its pale, the Cockney School of Poetry, is a matter to be somewhat 

 regretted. Bad as it was, it possessed this negative virtue, namely , 

 it might have been worse ; and while its supporters were in full fea- 

 ther, they twittered in chorus sufficiently loud to drown the " vernal 

 strains" of Kitty Wren, Tom Tit, and similar birdlings : now, how- 

 ever, that they have almost moulted their last feathers, the minikin 

 tribes come perking and peering from their obscure haunts, and find- 

 ing the old, and somewhat bigger birds silent, chirp gladsomely, vote 

 one another nightingales, and the inhabitants of Brompton believe 

 them. On the ruins of the Cockney, they have founded the Carra- 

 way-comfit School of Song; than which nothing is worse than the Bar- 

 ley-sugar ditto in cookery, which represents Leander noye by blanch- 

 ed capon, in a compot of crcme sucre, iced and waved au naturel. 



As claret is to caudle, so is the Corn-Law rhymer to the Carraway 

 comfits. They are " far as the poles asunder." While the saccharine 

 clique puzzle their small brains for confectionary conceits, Ebenezer 

 Elliott, the hardwareman of Sheffield, welds iron truths in his mental 

 smithy. He knows nothing he cares nothing about the sugar- 

 plum opinions, the small thoughts of genteel evening parties, com- 

 posed of literary danglers, slammocking girls half finery, half rags 

 who scribble verses about festal halls, and bridal joys, and glittering 

 groups, and senses stunned at seeing Signer Such-a-one glance some- 

 what too lovingly at Signora Somebody, and all that stuff, while they 

 ought to be darning their two-and-sixpenny silk stockings ; but, on 

 the contrary, turning aside, as man does from gilt gingerbread, from 

 such namby-pamby nonsense and nursery tales, dives boldly into the 

 depths of the human heart, and depicts it to us as it is ; looks upon 

 nature in the woodlands, and shows us its loveliness and its gross 

 abuse ; sees how happy the poor man might be, if his rich brother 

 would let him ; traces our sins and our sorrows to their source ; elo- 

 quently points out the polluted fountain, and indignantly calls upon us 

 to cleanse it. Poetry in his hands is something like what it should be 

 mighty, not tickling ; patriotic, not merely pretty ; conducive to the 

 amelioration of our race, not contemptibly courteous and parasitical 

 to small souchong-and-sandwich-giving coteries ; capable of being 

 felt ' from Indus to the Pole," not unintelligible beyond the bourne 

 of such little literary clans as flourish within the bills of mortality; 

 not a morsel of Mosaic work, composed of trumpery conceits and 

 distorted pictures, but a grand map of the mind and heart, truly 

 depicted ; not nature perched on the unhappy leaves of a polyanthus 

 in a London parlour-window, or a blue glass hyacinth bottle, or the 

 summit of a cockney bough-pot, but as she appears in her own free and 



* The Splendid Village ; Corn-Law Ilhvmes, and other Poems. By Eben- 

 excr Elliott. 12mo. London. B. Steill. 183:t. 



