Page:Imperialdictiona02eadi Brandeis.pdf/258

ELL ELLIOT,, K.C.B., son of John Elliot, Esq., of Pimlico, was educated at Winchester, from whence it was intended he should proceed to New college, Oxford. An opportunity occurring, changed his destination to the East, and in 1827 he repaired to Bengal in the civil service of the East India Company. After passing through the usual junior grades to offices of responsibility, he became foreign secretary to the government of India, and accompanied the governor-general. Lord Dalhousie, to the Punjaub, where he was employed to negotiate the treaty with the Sikh chiefs, by which the territory of Ranjit Sing was annexed finally to the British possessions. On this occasion his services were rewarded by the honour of the knighthood of the civil order of the bath. In the midst of his public and political avocations. Sir Henry retained the tone of literature which he had imbibed from his Wykhamite studies; and at an early period of his career set on foot and conducted with success a magazine published at Meerut, containing many able and interesting articles on social life in India, and the revenue and political administration of the government. In 1845 he published what he modestly designated a "Supplement to the Glossary," intending thereby a contribution to a glossary of Indian judicial and revenue terms, to be compiled under the orders of the court of directors, and subsequently completed and published by Professor H. H. Wilson. The supplement, which is alphabetically arranged, extends only to the letter J, but so far is replete with curious and valuable information, especially as regards the tribes and clans of Brahmans and Rajaputs. Sir Henry's last and most important work was a bibliographical index to the Mohammedan historians of India, in which it was his purpose to have given a careful analysis of the contents, and a critical estimate of the merits of no fewer than two hundred and thirty-one historical writers in Arabic and Persian, upon the subject of the history of India from the earliest period to the present day. The work was originally calculated to occupy four volumes, of which the first only, containing the epitome of the general histories, was published, and is a mine of novel and important information. Materials not only for the completion of the work, as originally designed, but its very great extension, were collected by Sir Henry; but his failing health suspended his labours, and obliged him to make a voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, where he died at the early age of forty-five. The materials he had accumulated are in the possession of Lady Elliot, and arrangements have been made for the publication of such as are sufficiently advanced.—H. H. W.  ELLIOT,, a distinguished English engraver, born at Hampton court in 1727, and died in 1766 in London. He reproduced several works by Rubens, Cuyp, Van Goyen, the Smiths of Chichester, and others. He was particularly noted for the print of a landscape of his own composition, which obtained a prize from the Society of Arts.—R. M.  ELLIOTT,, the corn-law rhymer, was born at Masboro' in the parish of Rotheram, Yorkshire, 17th March, 1781, his father being engaged in an iron-foundry at that place. If ever there was a man who knew not fear, writes the poet, that man was the father of the corn-law rhymer; he delighted to declaim on the virtues of slandered Cromwell and of Washington the rebel; or shaking his sides with laughter, explained "the glorious victory of his majesty's forces over the rebels at Bunker's Hill." Elliott inherited from his father his sturdy independence and intense power alike of loving and hating; while he derived from his mother, whose life was a disease—"one long sigh"—his nervous awkwardness and proneness to anticipate the catastrophes of life. As a lad he lived among mingled visions of the horrible and the beautiful. Wild faces of the dead and dying haunted him, while he collected wild flowers, noted the king-fisher shooting along the Don, and formed a friendship with a beautiful green snake, which he believed kept appointments with him. At school he advanced from class to class without learning anything, until he experienced the misery of struggling with the rule of three, without having mastered numeration, and attempting to read without being able to spell; and finally was put to work at the foundry by way of punishing his idleness. So far from the work at the foundry proving a punishment, it relieved him from the sense of inferiority which had long depressed him, for he found himself not less clever there than others; and this discovery so increased his energies that he set himself manfully and successfully to the work of self-instruction. The sight of a number of Sowerby's Botany made such an impression that it lifted him "above the inmates of the alehouse at least a foot in mental stature." Elliott describes himself as always taking the shortest road to an object. This tendency led to some errors, but was a principal cause of his ultimate success as an author. He never could read a feeble book through, and hence read masterpieces only—the best thoughts of the highest minds. After Milton—Shakspeare, Swift, Schiller, Burger, Gibbon, Tasso, Dante, De Stael, Schlegel, Hazlitt, were the favourite authors of the young foundryman. At twelve years old he knew the bible almost by heart, and in his sixteenth year could repeat without missing a word, the first, second, and sixth books of Paradise Lost. Another element in the training of the poet was his close and constant contact with human vice and woe. His feelings, he says, were hammered until they became cold, short, and were apt to snap and fly off in sarcasms. Never could his heart divest itself of its intense consciousness of human suffering—"These beautiful birds are singing," exclaimed Elliott, walking in a quiet valley, "as though there were no sorrow in the world. Ye break my heart, ye little birds." Thus engaged in hard practical work, with very tangible realities; inheriting both sturdy republican independence and nervous sensibility; through natural constitution intensely moved alike by the lovely and the terrible; owing little to any companions; laboriously forming his mind on the highest models; his sympathies, not simply touched, but overwhelmed by those miseries of life with which he came in daily contact in the homes of struggling poverty; mixing with men and women whose hard-working lot intensified their vices and virtues, joys and woes—Ebenezer Elliott became a poet of the people in the deepest, sternest, truest sense. The most blessed sight upon earth to Elliott was the home of taste, where the workman could sit like a king, reading a noble book after gaining honest wage; the saddest, a home where poverty marred every joy and fostered wild passion. From his sixteenth to his twenty-third year Elliott worked for his father, without wages, except a few shillings for pocket-money. His first published poem was entitled "The Vernal Walk," written in his seventeenth year; and he apologizes for including it in his collected works, by saying, that as the idiot of the family is sometimes a favourite, so this poem is endeared to him by its critical persecution. This was followed by some metrical legends and tales; "Love;" the famous "Corn-Law Rhymes;" "The Village Patriarch;" "The Splendid Village;" and "Corn-Law Hymns." In these poems there is no metaphysical subtilty, but a genuine sincerity. There is little realization of the ideal, or idealization of the real; but there is the poetry of reality itself in its pathos and power. His dramatic sketches, if we except the startling picture of the exiled Bothwell, are comparative failures. He cannot go out of himself, but sings what he has seen with his own eyes, and felt with his own heart. There is no deep and sweet repose in his writings, because he had seen starvation and agony, and could not free himself from the burden of life's darker mysteries. In Elliott's political poetry, there is not the equable calmness of a balanced judgment, because he had watched tyranny bringing forth iniquity, and had beheld in the bitter tears of the poor the fruit of unjust laws. "If my composition smell of the workshop," he says, "I cannot help it; soot is soot; and he who lives in a chimney will do well to take the air when he can, and ruralize now and then, even in imagination." Although Elliott cursed iniquity, so far from having a fierce and bitter character, his gentle pathos was of the sweetest and tenderest. He hated because he loved; and the intensity of his scorn was but the index of the warmth of his heart. Unto his own true soul the storm had beauty as the lily hath; the very weeds their silent anthems raised; and his aspiration was, that his poesy should be like the child "gathering daisies from the lap of May, with prattle sweeter than the bloomy wild." Carlyle speaks of the rhapsody of Enoch Wray, in the "Village Patriarch," as, in its nature and unconscious history, epic; a whole world lies shadowed in it. Rudiments of an epic we say; and of the true epic of our time. After various struggles in business, Elliott managed to achieve a moderate fortune. His warehouse is characteristically described as a dingy place, piled all round with bars of iron, having a bust of Shakspeare in the centre of it; and his country house contained casts of Achilles, Ajax, and Napoleon. In appearance, so far from being the burly ironmonger, with stern muscular frame, such as visitors anticipated from his works, he was a small man, 