Chapter III: Part 3

As the soft sound of the bell gives notice that the hour of service is near, the party may be seen to break up: children throw aside their garlands, wives join their husbands, and with sober countenances and devout demeanour enter the House of God. There is one circumstance worthy of remark, namely, the perfect security with which they all leave their conveyances—great coats, and shawls, whips and saddles, in gigs and carts; proving that a fair day’s labour for a fair day’s work is a better protection for property than the police.

When divine service is over, the families keep more together. There is a sober reverence about them which shows that they have listened attentively. As they move to their conveyances, or walk on, it is pleasing to see that if their neighbours have been kept longer at another church, the first party out will often delay their departure till they arrive. These charitable pauses are delightful to witness; these neighbourly greetings make bigotry in dismay crouch to the earth, and show, that when the mind is rightly directed, the being of different religions is not inimical to friendship, for frequently in these cases the elder girl of a Catholic family may be seen in the cart of a Protestant neighbour; the wife of one carrying the younger child of the other, at the same time that the two husbands, as they get into the open road, slowly pace their horses, so that they may converse on their way home, occasionally interrupted perhaps by their sons, who, mounted on good horses, try their speed to please their fathers, and throw bunches of wild flowers to their mothers, while younger hands catch at the prize.

DINNER IN THE BUSH.

I unexpectedly joined the party I am now attempting to describe, and leaving my own travelling spring-van at the church-door, took a seat in their cart. On arriving at the farm, the elder son met the party at the slip-rail (homely gate). He was a tall, healthy, open-hearted lad, who greeted us with—

“Come, Mother, be careful. Jump out, girls. Now, Mrs. C——, how welcome you are; and the dinner just ready! Ah! you need not tell me who gave you the sermon: he’s as good as the clock.”

As the girls had all been to church, and there was no female servant in the house, the description of this rural home, and a short detail of the dinner, may be acceptable.

The family room was large, with a commodious fire-place. The table was laid for twelve; the plates and dishes were of blue delf; the knives and forks looked bright and shiny. It may be remarked, that the Settler’s table in New South Wales is somewhat differently arranged from what one is accustomed to see in England, for here the knife and fork were placed at the right of the plate, while a chocolate-coloured tea-cup and saucer stood at the left; a refreshing cup of tea being made a part of the dinner repast. By the fire-place might be seen a large black pot, full of potatoes, with a white cloth laid on the top for the purpose of steaming them. Again, at the outer door might be noticed the son with a man-servant, looking into an oven, and drawing from thence a large hind-quarter of pork, followed by a peach pie.

“Lend a hand here!” shouted the son.

“Ah! I thought you could not do without me,” said the father.

“Keep the youngsters out of the way, and look about you, girls;” cried the mother.

Moving where I could better see the cause of the outcry, a round of beef, cut large and “handsome,” as the settlers say in the Bush, had been forced into a pot; but no fork, although a Bush-fork is rather a formidable tool, could remove it.

“You ought to have put a cord round it,” remarked the mother.

“Turn the pot on one side,” said the father.

“Over with it; out with it; shake!—oh, here we have it now.”

As the pot was removed, the beef was seen to advantage, reeking in a bright clean milk-pan.

“Now, let us make it look decent,” said the self-trained cook, as with his knife he cut the out-pieces off to improve its appearance. His trimmings were substantial cuttings, and displayed to advantage the fine quality of the beef; each cutting he threw to his dogs, as they watched at a respectful distance his operations. Now, though some of my readers may not much admire this bush-culinary art, and this mode of dishing-up a dinner, still there was in the whole scene so much of honest hospitality, so much of cheerful and good humoured hilarity, exhibiting in the most pleasing form the simple manners of a primitive people,—the germs, in fact, of the class of English yeomanry, too often unable to flourish in their own native land, ingrafted and revived in a foreign distant shore, that even the most fastidious and refined could not but feel at such a moment a peculiar zest in joining a family so innocently happy and guileless as this, surrounded as they were by abundance of all the essential necessaries of life. Not a shade of care clouded the party, as they sat down with thankfulness to partake of those things with which God had blessed their labour.

The arrangement of the table was something in unison with the rest. The pork, so well seasoned, graced the head of the table, while the burly piece of beef, now reeking and streaming from its late trimming, was placed before the honest master of this patriarchal family, with a plentiful supply of potatoes, peas, and greens, ranged in their proper places. As soon as the party had partaken of the substantials, the eldest daughter poured tea into the cups set by each one’s plate—for this is the custom amongst the Australian settlers; at the same time the good landlady cut up the peach pie.

The eldest son could now be seen through an open doorway, peering again into the rudely constructed oven, from which he pulled, with a good deal of self-importance and glee, an orange tart, whilst his assistant-cook placed custards on the table in tumblers. The good wife looked amazed, the husband thoughtful.

“How did you get the oranges,” asked the mother.

“Why, Frank Gore brought ’em,” he replied.

“And who made the custards?”

“_I_ made ’em!”

WANTED, A GOOD WIFE.

“What! our Tom make custards!” exclaimed the mother.

“Why not?” replied the young man, evidently anxious to show that he could turn his hand to anything useful.

“I see, I see how it is,” said the father, “Tom heard that Mrs. C. was coming, and he wants a wife.”

“A wife! the like of him want a wife,” said the mother, who, for the first time, looked on his athletic and manly form with sad anxiety.

“Tom made the custard,” said Jane, “and William the tart.”

“I did not bring the oranges,” replied Tom, as Frank Gore entered with a dish of grapes.

“It’s a regular plot,” said the mother.

“A down right contrivance—and I expect it is a settled affair,” observed the father.

“Jane, don’t blush,” sportively remarked Lucy.

“Let me see,” said the father, thoughtfully. “Tom is four years older than I was when I married, so he is,—but Jane is too young.”

“Say a word,” whispered the mother to me; “say a word, Mrs. C.”

“A snug home indeed,—I only wish my father could have seen the comforts I now enjoy.”

The young people, seeing the turn matters were taking, scampered off with glowing cheeks.

“We have four farms I can say master to,” pursued the father, “and eight hundred sheep, and six hundred head of cattle, forty pigs, and a bit of money in the bank, too, that the youngsters don’t know of. Well, all the lad will want is a good wife. Let me see,—I’ll be in Sydney next Monday five weeks,—I must buy them a few things, a chest of drawers,—yes, they’d be handy; and I might as well buy one for Jane, poor girl. Like to deal out to all alike; and the wife wants one. I only thought of taking the cart, but I will want a dray, and eight good bullocks, besides,—that’s easy enough to be seen. Well, well; it’s a nice snug home—one hundred and four acres,—two acres laid out for a vineyard,—forty under crop,—handy for the station, too.” Thus the good man musingly spoke, partly to himself, and partly addressing his wife, who, with a cheerful and approving look, nodded consent.

HOMELY HINTS TO MARRIED STATESMEN.

At this little homestead there were five men, whose savings would have enabled them to have taken farms, if they could have met with suitable girls as wives; and they pretty plainly animadverted upon the policy of those whom they considered the proper persons to have rectified their grievances. One remarked, “What does Lord Stanley care, so that he has a wife himself!”

“Ah!” responded another; “and Peel, with all his great speeches, never said a single word about wives for us.”

“Lord John Russell, too,” said Tom Slaney, “seems just as bad as the rest. What does he think we’re made of? wood, or stone, or dried biscuit?”

“It ought to be properly represented to Earl Grey,” observed the fourth. “Do they call this looking after a young colony? Has nobody no sense?”

“Yes,” replied the most sensitive of the party, “the _Queen_ ought to know it,—it is a cruel shame.”

A COTTAGE, ROMANTIC AND REAL.

John Whitney had now made his hut a comfortable cottage. In the centre of the room stood a neat table, shelves were arranged over a bush-dresser, and at one corner of the room could be seen a neat little plate-rack. A young carpenter in Australia cannot make these things without thinking of matrimony; and the one in Whitney’s cottage was beautifully made, evidently intended as a bridal gift. At the opening of the small window was a neat box of mignonette; whilst a footstool, a salt-box, a board, a rolling-pin, afforded sufficient evidence that a wife was all that was wanted to make this abode a happy home.

Nor did the exterior lack any of those embellishments that are required to invest a cottage with those charms which the hand of nature alone can fully set forth. The tasteful mind and apt hand of Whitney mingled art and nature so well that the first could hardly be distinguished by the luxuriance of the latter. The workman laid first the train, and then allured nature in a manner to follow and adorn his handy-work. He first erected an open verandah of posts, saplings, and laths along the whole front of his cottage, leaving three or four door-ways, or spacious apertures for entrance. Against these posts he planted rose-trees, which in Australia grow to an extraordinary height; and around them he carefully trained beautiful creepers, passionflower, and other wild plants of the Bush, so that in the course of a short time the framework became almost invisible. The posts seemed to have grown into pillars of rosebush, thickly entwined with flowery creepers, threading their way the whole length and height of the verandah, and here and there forming the most fanciful festoons over the doorway, or round the tiny windows, thus throwing a coolness and a freshness of shade into the inmost recesses of the little cottage. There also might be observed two or three well-trained vines intermixed with all, which produced the most tempting clusters of grapes, as they could be seen to hang through the open lattice of the verandah; while, all over the roof of the house grew fine water-melons, the strong stems of which closely encircled the chimney.

It was truly delightful to view this sylvan cottage in the calm and balmy coolness of a dewy morning, and to behold this structure, as it were, of rose-trees and creepers, as the warmth of the morning sun opened those closed flowers that seem thus to take their rest for the night, and the fresh-blown rosebuds that were hardly to be seen the evening before; most of those could now be observed to be tenanted by that busy little creature, the bee, sent “as a colonist,” from England to Australia, humming, in all the active vivacity of its nature, a joyful morning carol to the God of Nature. Indeed, were it not that there were appearances of some more substantial domestic comforts to be seen in the background—such as rows of beans, sweet peas, beds of cabbages, &c., set in the garden, and some young fruit-trees; while near a shady corner might be noticed young ducks feeding under a coop, and “little roasters” gambolling outside the pig-stye, which by the way was deeply shaded by large bushy rose-trees, this cottage at a distance might have been mistaken for a green-house. We ought not to omit that a number of fowls could be observed quietly roosting in some trees at the end of one of the outer buildings.

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.

Ebenezer commenced his early training at a Dame’s school; but shy, awkward, and desultory, he made little progress; nor did he thrive much better at the school in which he was afterwards placed. Here he employed his comrades to do his tasks for him, and of course laid no foundation for his future education. His parents, disheartened by the lad’s apparent stolidity, sent him next to Dalton School, two miles distant; and here he certainly acquired something, for he retained, to old age, the memory of some of the scenes through which he used to pass on his way to and from this school. For want of the necessary preliminary training, he could do little or nothing with letters: he rather preferred playing truant and roaming the meadows in listless idleness, wherever his fancy led him. This could not last. His father soon set him to work in the Foundry; and with this advantage, that the lad stood on better terms with, himself than he had been for a considerable period, for he discovered that he could compete with others in work,—sheer hand-labour,—if he could not in the school. One disadvantage, however, arose, as he tells us, from his foundry life; for he acquired a relish for vulgar pursuits, and the village alehouse divided his attentions with the woods and fields. Still a deep impression of the charms of nature had been made upon him by his boyish rambles, which the debasing influences and associations into which he was thrown could not wholly wipe out. He would still wander away in his accustomed haunts, and purify his soul from her alehouse defilements, by copious draughts of the fresh nectar of natural beauty imbibed from the sylvan scenery around him.

The childhood and youth of the future poet presented a strange medley of opposites and antitheses. Without the ordinary measure of adaptation for scholastic pursuits, he inhaled the vivid influences of external things, delighting intensely in natural objects, and yet feeling an infinite chagrin and remorse at his own idleness and ignorance. We find him highly imaginative; making miniature lakes by sinking an iron vessel filled with water in a heap of stones, and gazing therein with wondrous enjoyment at the reflection of the sun and skies overhead; and exhibiting a strange passion for looking on the faces of those who had died violent deaths, although these dead men’s features would haunt his imagination for weeks afterwards.

He did not, indeed, at this period, possess the elements of an ordinary education. A very simple circumstance sufficed to apply the spark which fired his latent energies, and nascent poetical tendencies: and he henceforward became a different being, elevated far above his former self. He called one evening, after a drinking bout on the previous night, on a maiden aunt, named Robinson, a widow possessed of about 30_l._ a-year, by whom he was shown a number of “Sowerby’s English Botany,” which her son was then purchasing in monthly parts. The plates made a considerable impression on the awkward youth, and he essayed to copy them by holding them to the light with a thin piece of paper before them. When he found he could trace their forms by these means his delight was unbounded, and every spare hour was devoted to the agreeable task. Here commenced that intimate acquaintance with flowers, which seems to pervade all his works. This aunt of Ebenezer’s, (good soul! would that every shy, gawky Ebenezer had such an aunt!) bent on completing the charm she had so happily begun, displayed to him still further her son’s book of dried specimens; and this elated him beyond measure. He forthwith commenced a similar collection for himself, for which purpose he would roam the field still more than ever, on Sundays as well as week days, to the interruption of his attendances at chapel. This book he called his “Dry Flora,” (_Hortus Siccus_) and none so proud as he when neighbours noticed his plants and pictures. He was not a little pleased to feel himself a sort of wonder, as he passed through the village with his plants; and, greedy of praise, he allowed his acquaintance to believe that his drawings were at first hard, and made by himself from nature. “Thompson’s Seasons,” read to him about this time by his brother Giles, gave him a glimpse of the union of poetry with natural beauty; and lit up in his mind an ambition which finally transformed the illiterate, rugged, half-tutored youth into the man who wrote “The Village Patriarch,” and the “Corn Law Rhymes.”

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.

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_l._ 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 6000_l._, which he wrote to Mr. Tait of Edinburgh, he intended, if possible, to retain. The palmy days of 20_l._ 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 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.

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 realised by diligent and continuous labour. 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 69th 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.”

* * * * *

Monthly Supplement of ‘HOUSEHOLD WORDS,’

Conducted by CHARLES DICKENS.

_Price 2d., Stamped 3d._,
THE HOUSEHOLD NARRATIVE
OF
CURRENT EVENTS.

_The Number, containing a history of the past month, was
issued with the Magazines._

Published at the Office, No 16, Wellington Street North, Stand. Printed
by BRADBURY & EVANS, Whitefriars, London.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

● Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained. ● Renumbered footnotes. ● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_. ● The caret (^) is used to indicate superscript, whether applied to a single character (as in 2^d) or to an entire expression (as in 1^{st}).