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 humour 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 favourable 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 Thompson, he has ever been the devoted lover and worshipper of Nature—a wanderer by babbling streams—a dreamer in the leafy wilderness—a worshipper 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.