Truly, it was a little fairy home, with no rent, no taxes, no rates, to disturb the peace of the occupier; and no one, who has not lived in Australia, can conceive with what ease and little expense such rural beauties, such little paradises, and domestic comforts can be formed and kept up in that country. Notwithstanding, however, the beauty of all this—the variety of flowers—the magnificence of the creepers—the stillness and quietness that reigned around, it must be frankly confessed there was a certain vacuum that required filling up. If the animal senses were gratified, the mind felt somehow dissatisfied. There was a coldness, a death-like silence, which hung over the place; there appeared to be a want of rationality in the thing, for there seemed to be no human beings to enjoy it, or not a sufficient number. Yes, this spot of beauty, to make it a delightful happy home, required, what one of our favourite poets, and the poet of nature, calls nature’s “noblest work”—woman. ’Tis but too true—John Whitney wanted a wife to make his home a fit habitation for man. What is John Whitney without her? He may be an excellent carpenter, but he is at the same time a desolate, morose being, incapable of enjoying these beauties of nature. Poor John Whitney keenly felt this; and it was the hope alone, warming and clinging to his heart, that some day he could call himself the father of a family, that inspired him to gather all these beauties and comforts around him. EBENEZER ELLIOTT. The name of Ebenezer Elliott is associated with one of the greatest and most important political changes of modern times;—with events not yet sufficiently removed from us, to allow of their being canvassed in this place with that freedom which would serve the more fully to illustrate his real merits. Elliott would have been a poet, in all that constitutes true poetry, had the Corn Laws never existed. He was born on 25th March, 1781, at the New Foundry, Masborough, in the parish of Rotherham, where his father was a clerk in the employment of Messrs. Walker, with a salary of 60_l._ or 70_l._ per annum. His father was a man of strong political tendencies, possessed of humorous and satiric power, that might have qualified him for a comic actor. Such was the character he bore for political sagacity that he was popularly known as “Devil Elliott.” The mother of the poet seems to have been a woman of an extreme nervous temperament, constantly suffering from ill health, and constitutionally awkward and diffident.