Elliott, EBENEZER, the Corn-law Rhymer, was born of mixed moss-trooper and yeoman ancestry at the New Foundry, Masbro', in Rotherham parish, Yorkshire, on 17th March 1781. A shy and morbid boy, who proved a dull pupil at four different schools, he worked in his father's foundry from his sixteenth to his twenty-third year, and threatened to become a 'sad drunken dog,' till the picture of a primrose in Sowerby's Botany 'led him into the fields, and poetry followed.' His Vernal Walk, written at sixteen, was published in 1801; to it succeeded Night (1818), The Village Patriarch (1829), Corn-law Rhymes and the Ranter (3d ed. 1831), and other volumes—collected in 1840 (new ed. 2 vols. 1876). He had married early, and sunk all his wife's fortune in his father's business; but in 1821, with a borrowed capital of £100, he started on his own account as a bar-iron merchant at Sheffield, and throve exceedingly, 'making £20 a day sometimes without stirring from his counting-house, or ever seeing the goods he disposed of.' Though in 1837 he lost fully one-third of his savings, still in 1841 he was able to retire with good £300 a year to a house of his own building at Great Houghton, near Barnsley. Here he died 1st December 1849.
Elliott the poet is well-nigh forgotten. His poems are nowadays little more read than in his lifetime was his tragedy Taurassdes. It had three readers, Elliott one of them. But Elliott the Corn-law Rhymer is still remembered as the Tyrtæus of that mighty conflict whose triumph he lived to witness, as the typical maker of ballads, not needing to care who should make the laws of the nation. This Corn-law Rhymer had been bred a 'Berean' and Jacobin; yet he hated Communists, Socialists, and physical-force Chartists; he lies buried in Darfield churchyard; he left two sons Established clergymen. His whole life long he looked on the Corn-laws as the 'cause of all the crime that is committed; ' agriculturists, he maintained, 'ought not to live by robbing and murdering the manufacturers.' On the other hand, 'Capital has a right to rule the world,' and 'competition is the great social law of God.'
There are two poor memoirs of Elliott, by his son-in-law, John Watkins (1850), and by 'January Searle'—i.e. George S. Phillips (1850). See also Carlyle's essay from the Edinburgh for July 1832, and Professor Dowden in Ward's English Poets (2d ed. 1833).