The men who uttered such lines were driven from their class, their homes, and their country.  They were despised and hated, like all who protest against oppression and remind the smug world of uncomfortable things.  But they were great poets.  One of them was our sweetest singer, the other was, when he wrote, the most conspicuous figure in Europe, and the most shattering force.  Even England, which cares so little for her greatest inheritance of passionate intellect, cannot yet forget them.  But others who sang the same terrible theme she has long forgotten, or she keeps them only on the shelves of curious and dusty investigators.  Such men, I mean, as Ebenezer Elliot, Ebenezer Jones, Ernest Jones, Thomas Cooper, William James Linton, and Gerald Massey, who so lately died.

They were not high-born, nor were they shining poets like the twin stars of freedom whom I have quoted.  Little scholarship was theirs, little perfection of song.  Some had taught themselves their letters at the forge, some in the depths of the mine, some sang their most daring lines in prison cells where they were not allowed even to write down the words.  Nearly all knew poverty and hunger at first hand; nearly all were persecuted for righteousness’ sake.  For maintaining the cause of the poor and the helpless they were mocked and reviled; scorn was their reward.  The governing classes whose comfort they disturbed wished them dead; so did the self-righteous classes whose conscience they ruffled.  That is the common fate of any man or woman who probes a loathsome evil, too long skimmed over.  The peculiarity of these men was that, when they were driven to speak, they spoke in lines that flew on wings through the country.  Indignation made their verse, and the burning memory of the wrongs they had seen gave it a power beyond its own expression.  Which shall we recall of those ghostly poems, once so quick with flame?  Still, at moments of deep distress or public wrong-doing, we may hear the echo of the Corn-law Rhymer’s anthem: 

  “When wilt thou save the people? 
    O God of mercy! when? 
  Not kings and lords, but nations! 
    Not thrones and crowns, but men!”

Or if we read his first little book of rhymes, that may be had for twopence now, we shall find the pictures of the life that was lived under Protection—­the sort of life the landlords and their theorists invite us to enact again.  From his “Black Hole of Calcutta” we take the lines: 

  “Bread-tax’d weaver, all can see
  What that tax hath done for thee,
  And thy children, vilely led,
  Singing hymns for shameful bread,
  Till the stones of every street
  Know their little naked feet.”

Or let us take one verse from the lines, “O Lord, how long?”

  “Child, what hast thou with sleep to do? 
    Awake, and dry thine eyes! 
  Thy tiny hands must labour too;
    Our bread is tax’d—­arise! 
  Arise, and toil long hours twice seven,
    For pennies two or three;
  Thy woes make angels weep in Heaven—­
    But England still is free.”