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 Shakespeare; then Ossian; then Junius; Paine’s ‘Common Sense;’ Swift’s ‘Tale of a Tub;’ ‘Joan of Arc;’ Schiller’s ‘Robbers;’ Bürger’s ‘Lenora;’ Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall;’ and long afterwards, 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 afterwards 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_l._ 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 towards him.