362 MEMOIR OF JOHN WILSON. 



quoted, and for which I blush through my marrow ; but on the 

 word of a poet, whose fiction is truth, when I wrote it I was no 

 more aware, than if you had never been born, that I was writing to 

 Professor Wilson. I should hate myself if I could deliberately have 

 sent a disrespectful letter to the author of those inimitable rural 

 pictures, which, before God, I believe have lengthened my days on 

 earth. 



" After your almost saintly forbearance, I must not bother you 

 about the Corn-Laws ; but I will just observe that in our Island of 

 Jersey, where (perjury [sic] excepted) the trade in corn is free, 

 land lets much higher than in England. But is it not a shame that 

 wheat should be sent from Hollaud to Jersey, after incurring heavy 

 charges, and the Dutchman's profit, and then be sent to England as 

 the produce of Jersey ? Poor John Bull paying for all out of his 

 workhouse wages, or the sixteen-pence which he receives for four- 

 teen hours' factory labor in the climate of Jamaica. 



" What is to follow such legislation ? I am, with heartfelt respect 

 and thankfulness, Ebenezek Elliot." 



I cannot resist giving a passage from an article which afforded the 

 author of the Corn-Law Rhymes so much genuine pleasure : — 



" Ebenezer Elliot does — not only now and then, but often — ru- 

 ralize ; with the intense passionateness of a fine spirit escaping from 

 smoke and slavery into the fresh air of freedom — with the tender- 

 ness of a gentle spirit communing with nature in Sabbath-rest. 

 Greedily he gulps the dewy breath of morn, like a man who has 

 been long suffering from thirst drinking at a wayside well. He feasts 

 upon the flowers — with his eyes, with his lips ; he walks along the 

 grass as if it were cooling to his feet. The slow typhus fever per- 

 petual with townsmen is changed into a quick gladsome glow, like 

 the life of life. A strong animal pleasure possesses the limbs and 

 frame of the strong man released from labor, yet finding no leisure 

 to loiter in the lanes — and away with him to the woods and rocks 

 and heaven-kissing hills. But that is not all his pleasure — though 

 it might suffice, one would think, for a slave. Through all his 

 senses it penetrates into his soul — and his soul gets wings and soars. 



us, and written with his own hard hoof of a hand, to call us a 'big blue-bottle,' but we bear no 

 resemblance to that insect," &c— From "Poetry of E. Elliot," in Blackwood's Magaeine, 

 May, 1834. 



