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 Staël, 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 £150. 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, Ajax, and Napoleon, suggestive of the presidency of literature over the materialism of commerce which marked the career of this singular being. By dint of great industry he began to flourish in business, and, at one time, could make a profit of £20 a-day without moving from his seat. During this prosperous period he built a handsome villa-residence in the suburbs. He now had leisure to brood over the full force and effect of the Corn Laws. The subject was earnestly discussed then in all manufacturing circles of that district. Reverses now arrived. In 1837, he lost fully one-third of all his savings, getting out of the storm at last with about £6,000, which he wrote to Mr. Tait of Edinburgh, he intended, if possible, to retain. The palmy days of £20 profits had gone by for Sheffield, and instead, all was commercial disaster and distrust. Elliott did well to retire with what little he had remaining. In his retreat he was still vividly haunted by the demon "Bread Tax." This, then, was the period of the Corn-Law Rhymes, and these bitter experiences lent to them that tone of sincerity and earnestness—that fire and frenzy which they breathed, and which sent them, hot, burning words of denunciation and wrath, into the bosoms of the working classes—the toiling millions from whom Elliott sprang. "Bread Tax," indeed, to him was a thing of terrible import and bitter experience: hence he uses no gentle terms or honeyed phrases when dealing with the obnoxious impost. Sometimes coarse invective and angry assertion take the place of convincing reason and calm philosophy. At others, there is a true vein of poetry and pathos running through the rather unpoetic theme, which touches us with its Wordsworthian feeling and gentleness. Then he would be found calling down thunders upon the devoted heads of the monopolists, with all a fanatic's hearty zeal, and in his fury he would even pursue them, not merely through the world, but beyond its dim frontiers and across the threshold of another state. Take them, however, as they stand—and more vigorous, effective, and startling political poetry has not graced the literature of the age.
It was not to be supposed but that this trumpet-blast of defiance, and shrill scream of "war to the knife," should bring down upon him much obloquy, much vituperation: but all this fell harmlessly upon him; he rather liked it. When people began to bear with the turbid humor and angry utterances of the "Corn Law Rhymer," and grew familiar with the stormy march of his verse, it was discovered that he was something more than a mere political party song-writer. He was a true poet, whose credentials, signed and sealed in the court of nature, attested the genuineness of his brotherhood with those children of song who make the world holier and happier by the mellifluous strains they bring to us, like fragments of a forgotten melody, from the far-off world of beauty and of love.
Elliott will not soon cease to be distinctively known as the "Corn Law Rhymer;" but it will be by his non-political poems that he will be chiefly remembered by posterity as the Poet of the People; for his name will still be, as it has long been, a "Household Word," in the homes of all such as love the pure influences of simple, sensuous, and natural poetry. As an author he did not make his way fast: he had written poetry for twenty years ere he had attracted much notice. A genial critique by Southey in the "Quarterly," another by Carlyle in the "Edinburgh," and favorable notices in the "Athenæum" and "New Monthly," brought him into notice; and he gradually made his way until a new and cheap edition of his works, in 1840, stamped him as a popular poet. His poetry is just such as, knowing his history, we might have expected; and such as, not knowing it, might have bodied forth to us the identical man as we find him.
As we have said, Nature was his school; but flowers were the especial vocation of his muse. A small ironmonger—a keen and successful tradesman—we should scarcely have given him credit for such an exquisite love of the beautiful in Nature, as we find in some of those lines written by him in the crowded counting-room of that dingy warehouse. The incident of the floral miscellany; the subsequent study of "The Seasons;" the long rambles in meadows and on hill-sides, specimen-hunting for his Hortus Siccus, sufficiently account for the exquisite sketches of scenery, and those vivid descriptions of natural phenomena, which showed that the coinage of his brain had been stamped in Nature's mint. The most casual reader would at once discover that, with Thomson, he has ever been the devoted lover and worshiper of Nature—at wanderer by babbling streams—a dreamer in the leafy wilderness—a worshiper of morning upon the golden hill-tops. He gives us pictures of rural scenery warm as the pencil of a Claude, and glowing as the sunsets of Italy.
A few sentences will complete our sketch, and bring us to the close of the poet's pilgrimage. He had come out of the general collapse of commercial affairs in 1837, with a small portion of the wealth he had realized by diligent and continuous labor. He took a walk, on one occasion, into the country, of about eighteen miles: reached Argilt Hill, liked the place, returned, and resolved to buy it. He laid out in house and land about one thousand guineas. His family consisted of Mrs. Elliott and two daughters; a servant-maid; an occasional helper; a Welch pony and small gig; "a dog almost as big as the mare, and much wiser than his master; a pony-cart; a wheel-barrow; and a grindstone—and," says he, "turn up your nose if you like!"
From his own papers we learn that he had one son a clergyman, at Lothedale, near Skipton; another in the steel trade, on Elliott's old premises at Sheffield; two others unmarried, living on their means; another "druggisting at Sheffield, in a sort of chimney called a shop;" and another, a clergyman, living in the West Indies. Of his thirteen children, five were dead, and of whom he says. "They left behind them no memorial—but they are safe in the bosom of Mercy, and not quite forgotten even here!"
In this retirement he occasionally lectured and spoke at public meetings; but he began to suffer from a spasmodic affection of the nerves, which obliged him wholly to forego public speaking. This disease grew worse; and in December, 1839, he was warned that he could not continue to speak in public, except at the risk of sudden death. This disorder lingered about him for about six years; he then fell ill of a more serious disease, which threatened speedy termination. This was in May, 1849. In September, he writes, "I have been very, very ill." On the first of December, 1849, the event, which had so long been impending, occurred, and Elliott peacefully departed in the sixty-ninth year of his age.
Thus, then, the sun set on one whose life was one continued heroic struggle with opposing influences—with ignorance first, then trade, then the corn laws, then literary fame, and, last of all, disease: and thus the world saw its last of the material breathing form of the rugged but kindly being who made himself loved, feared, hated, and famous, as the "Corn Law Rhymer."