[Ghost of DR. JOHNSON rises from trap-door P. S., and Ghost of BoSWELL from trap-door O. P. The latter bows respectfully to the House, and obsequiously to the Doctor's Ghost, and retires.]

Doctor's Ghost loquitur.

That which was organized by the moral ability of one has been executed by the physical efforts of many, and Drury Lane Theatre is now complete. Of that part behind the curtain, which has not yet been destined to glow beneath the brush of the varnisher, or vibrate to the hammer of the carpenter, little is thought by the public, and little need be said by the committee. Truth, however, is not to be sacrificed for the accommodation of either; and he who should pronounce that our edifice has received its final embellishment, would be disseminating falsehood without incurring favor, and risking the disgrace of detection without participating the advantage of success.

Professions lavishly effused and parsimoniously verified are alike inconsistent with the precepts of innate rectitude and the practice of external policy; let it not then be conjectured, that because we are unassuming, we are imbecile; that forbearance is any indication of despondency, or humility of demerit. He that is the most assured of success will make the fewest appeals to favor, and where nothing is claimed that is undue, nothing that is due will be withheld. A swelling opening is too often succeeded by an insignificant conclusion. Parturient mountains have, ere now, produced muscipular abortions; and the auditor who compares incipient grandeur with final vulgarity, is reminded of the pious hawkers of Constantinople, who solemnly perambulate her streets, exclaiming, "In the name of the prophet-figs!"

FINE BROWN STOUT.

A brewer in a country town
Had got a monstrous reputation;
No other beer but his went down.
The hosts of the surrounding station
Carv'd its great name upon their mugs,
And painted it on every shutter;

And tho' some envious folks would utter
Hints that its flavor came from drugs,
Others maintain'd 'twas no such matter,
But owing to his monstrous vat,
At least as corpulent as that
At Heidelberg-and some said fatter.

His foreman was a lusty Black,
An honest fellow,

But one who had an ugly knack

Of tasting samples as he brew'd,

Till he was stupefied and mellow.
One day, in his top-heavy mood,
Having to cross the vat aforesaid

(Just then with boiling beer supplied),
O'ercome with giddiness and qualms, he
Reel'd, fell in, and nothing more was said,
But in his favorite liquor died,

Like Clarence in his butt of Malmsey.

In all directions round about

The negro absentee was sought.
But as no human noddle thought
That our fat Black was now Brown Stout,
They settled that the rogue had left
The place for debt, or crime, or theft.

Meanwhile the beer was, day and day,
Drawn into casks, and sent away,

Until the lees flow'd thick and thicker;
When, lo! outstretch'd upon the ground,
Once more their missing friend they found,
As they had often done, in liquor.

"See," cried his moralizing master;
"I always knew the fellow drank hard,
And prophesied some sad disaster.
His fate should other tipplers strike:
Poor Mungo! there he wallows, like
A toast at bottom of a tankard!"

Next morn a publican, whose tap

Had help'd to drain the vat so dry,
Not having heard of the mishap,
Came to demand a fresh supply,-
Protesting loudly that the last
All previous specimens surpass'd,
Possessing a much richer gusto
Than formerly it ever used to,
And begging as a special favor
Some more of the exact same flavor.

"Zounds!" said the brewer, "that's a task

More difficult to grant than ask.

Most gladly would I give the smack

Of the last beer to the ensuing;

But where am I to find a Black

And boil him down at every brewing?"

ADDRESS TO THE MUMMY IN BELZONI'S EXHIBITION.

And thou hast walk'd about (how strange a story!)
In Thebes's streets, three thousand years ago,

When the Memnonium was in all its glory,
And time had not begun to overthrow
Those temples, palaces, and piles stupendous,
Of which the very ruins are tremendous!

Speak! for thou long enough hast acted dummy;
Thou hast a tongue, come, let us hear its tune;
Thou'rt standing on thy legs above ground, mummy!
Revisiting the glimpses of the moon.

Not like thin ghosts or disembodied creatures,
But with thy bones and flesh, and limbs and features.

Tell us for doubtless thou canst recollect

To whom should we assign the Sphinx's fame? Was Cheops or Cephrenes architect

Of either pyramid that bears his name?
Is Pompey's Pillar really a misnomer?

Had Thebes a hundred gates, as sung by Homer?
Perhaps thou wert a mason, and forbidden
By oath to tell the secrets of thy trade:
Then say, what secret melody was hidden

In Memnon's statue, which at sunrise play'd?
Perhaps thou wert a priest: if so, my struggles
Are vain, for priestcraft never owns its juggles.

Perchance that very hand, now pinion'd flat,
Has hob-a-nobb'd with Pharaoh, glass to glass,
Or dropp'd a halfpenny in Homer's hat,

Or doff'd thine own to let Queen Dido pass,
Or held, by Solomon's own invitation,
A torch at the great Temple's dedication.

I need not ask thee if that hand, when arm'd,
Has any Roman soldier maul'd and knuckled,
For thou wert dead, and buried, and embalm'd,
Ere Romulus and Remus had been suckled:"
Antiquity appears to have begun

Long after thy primeval race was run.

Thou couldst develop, if that wither'd tongue
Might tell us what those sightless orbs have seen,
How the world look'd when it was fresh and young,
And the great deluge still had left it green;
Or was it then so old that history's pages
Contain'd no record of its early ages?

Still silent, incommunicative elf!

Art sworn to secrecy? then keep thy vows;

But prithee tell us something of thyself!

Reveal the secrets of thy prison-house;

Since in the world of spirits thou hast slumber'd,

What hast thou seen,-what strange adventures number'd'

Since first thy form was in this box extended,

We have, above ground, seen some strange mutations;

The Roman empire has begun and ended,

New worlds have risen,—we have lost old nations, And countless kings have into dust been humbled, Whilst not a fragment of thy flesh has crumbled.

Did thou not hear the pother o'er thy head,

When the great Persian conqueror, Cambyses,

March'd armies o'er thy tomb with thundering tread,
O'erthrew Osiris, Orus, Apis, Isis,

And shook the pyramids with fear and wonder,
When the gigantic Memnon fell asunder?

If the tomb's secrets may not be confess'd,
The nature of thy private life unfold:

A heart has throbb'd beneath that leathern breast,
And tears adown that dusky cheek have roll'd:
Have children climb'd those knees and kiss'd that face?
What was thy name and station, age and race?

Statue of flesh-immortal of the dead!
Imperishable type of evanescence!

Posthumous man, who quitt'st thy narrow bed
And standest undecay'd within our presence,

Thou wilt hear nothing till the judgment morning,
When the great trump shall thrill thee with its warning!

Why should this worthless tegument endure,
If its undying guest be lost forever?
Oh, let us keep the soul embalm'd and pure
In living virtue, that, when both must sever,
Although corruption may our frame consume,
The immortal spirit in the skies may bloom.

EBENEZER ELLIOTT, 1781-1849.

EBENEZER ELLIOTT, the celebrated Corn-Law Rhymer, was born in 1781, at Masborough, Yorkshire, where his father was a commercial clerk in the ironworks, with a salary of £70 a year. He is said to have been very dull in his early years, and he was so oppressed with a sense of his own deficiencies compared with his bright brother Giles, that he often wept bitterly. Yet who now knows Giles, except as being the brother of Ebenezer?-a lesson to parents, who may have a child that seems dull when young, not to despair of him. He determined, however, to make the best of his opportunities, and gave his leisure time to the reading of Milton and Shakspeare. But how much leisure he had, and under what great disadvantages he labored, may be gathered from the following account which he gives of himself:-"From my sixteenth to my twenty-third year I worked for my father at Masbro' as laboriously as any servant he had, and without wages, except an occasional shilling or two for pocket-money, weighing every morning all the unfinished castings as they were made, and afterward in their finished state, besides opening and closing the shop in Rotherham when my brother happened to be ill or absent."

Elliott entered into business at Rotherham, but was unsuccessful, and in 1821 he removed to Sheffield, and made a second start in life as an iron-monger, on a capital of £100, which he borrowed. He applied the whole strength of his mind to his business, and was eminently successful, and, after years of hard

labor, he had acquired quite a competency, and built himself a good house in the suburbs of Sheffield.

His first publication was The Vernal Walk, in his seventeenth year. This was followed by Night, which was severely criticized by the Monthly Review and the Monthly Magazine, without any effect, however, to damp his spirits. But it was the commercial distresses of 1837 and 1838 that called out the strong native talent of our poet. The cry for "cheap bread" rung from one end to the other of the land. Elliott took a decided stand for the repeal of the cornlaws, and poured forth his Corn-Law Rhymes, that did more than any other one thing to stir the heart and rouse the energies of the people against monopoly; and he had the satisfaction, in a few years, to see the great object of the "CornLaw League" fully attained, and free trade in bread-stuffs completely established. In 1841 he retired from business and from active interference in politics, to spend his last years at Great Houghton, near Barnsley. After this he wrote and published very little. He died on the 1st of December, 1849.1

Elliott's publications are-1, Corn-Law Rhymes; 2, Love, a Poem; 3, The Village Patriarch, a poem; 4, Poetical Works; 5, More Verse and Prose by the CornLaw Rhymer, in two volumes. The last, though prepared by the poet himself, is a posthumous publication.2

In the following singular piece we have a key to many of the Rhymer's rhymes. It is the complaint of a heart breaking for want of human sympathy, and taking hold, in the yearnings of its tender nature, upon household pets where there are no home companions:

fortunes, and his genics would require, as they deserve, a full investigation, as furnishing an extraordinary study of human nature."

1 The venerable poet James Montgomery-in prose or verse. He was, in a transcenbears strong testimony to Elliott's poetic dental sense, the poet & the poor, whom, if not talent. "I am," says he, "quite willing to always wisely, I, at least, dare not say he hazard my critical credit, by avowing my per-loved too well. His personal character, his suasion that in originality, power, and even beauty, when he chose to be beautiful, he might have measured heads beside Byron in tremendous energy, Crabbe in graphic description, and Coleridge in effusions of domestic tenderness; while in intense sympathy with the poor, in whatever he deemed their wrongs or their sufferings, he exceeded them all,-and perhaps everybody else among contemporaries,

2 Read an article on Elliott in Chambers's Papers for the People, vol. i.; also, an interesting Autobiographical Memoir, in the London Athe næum for January, 1850, dated Sheffield, June 21, 1841.