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 L60 or L70 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 afterward 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's 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-labor--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 exte