of nervous temperament, weak in body. Retiring from business, he built a house in a quiet unfrequented district at Hargate Hill, near Barnsley, and rested in peace with his large and genial family. The successful agitation against the corn laws, to which he attributed the greatest woes of the country, added to his happiness. "These," said he to a friend, pointing to the flowers, and birds, and trees, "are my companions; from them I derive consolation and hope; for nature is all harmony and beauty, and man will one day be like her; and the war of castes and the war for bread will be no more." In one of his last letters he remarks that it was a real distinction to the corn-law rhymer, that in his grey hairs, and in the land of palaces and workhouses, he was not yet either a pauper or a pensioner. Tired and comparatively poor, but self-sustained, like one who after hard labour reaches his home and rests, he sits on his own hilltop. Elliott was troubled with a painful disease during the last year of his life, but watched the approach of death quietly and bravely, and finally passed away, December 1, 1849. His last verses were dedicated to his favourite bird the robin, which sang beneath his window as he lay upon his death-bed.—L. L. P.
ELLIOTSON, John, a distinguished English physician. He was born in London towards the close of the eighteenth century, and studied medicine in Edinburgh and Cambridge, where he graduated. He was admitted a fellow of the College of Physicians in London in 1824. He had previously been appointed assistant-physician to St. Thomas' hospital in 1817, and full physician in 1822. In 1831 he was appointed professor of practice of physic at University college; and in 1834 he resigned his appointment at St. Thomas' hospital, and was appointed physician to the hospital in connection with University college, then called North London hospital. He held this position till 1838, when he resigned, in consequence of his having adopted the practice of mesmerism in his treatment of cases against the wishes of the council of the college. In 1849 he was appointed physician to the Mesmeric hospital. He also held several other medical appointments; was for some time president of the Medico-chirurgical Society of London, of the Phrenological Society, and of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh; and was a fellow of the Royal Society. In 1817 he published a translation of Blumenbach's Institutiones Physiologicæ. This work was accompanied with copious notes; and, after passing through several editions, it was at last published, with the title of "Human Physiology, with which is incorporated much of the elementary part of the Institutiones Physiologicæ of J. S. Blumenbach." He was the first to introduce the system of clinical teaching in the London hospitals, and the lectures he delivered were published in the medical journals. These brought him into great notice, and he had one of the largest consulting practices in London. His "Lectures on the Practice of Medicine" were afterwards published in one of the medical journals, and subsequently appeared in an independent form. In 1830 he published the Lumleyan lectures on "Diseases of the Heart," delivered before the Royal College of Physicians of London. Besides these larger works, he also published many shorter papers in the medical journals, and the Transactions of the Medico-chirurgical Society. These papers display great power of observation, and a fearless determination to follow his own convictions of the truth. The science of medicine is indebted to him for the advocacy of the use of prussic acid, of iron in large doses, of creosote in nausea and vomiting, and of the use of auscultation in diseases of the chest. Having been impressed with the importance of the facts elicited by the practice of mesmerism, he endeavoured to introduce it into the treatment of disease, and wrote many papers on this subject in the pages of the Zoist. He was also a warm advocate of the principles of phrenology, and their curative application in the treatment of disease. He died in April, 1868.—E. L.
ELLIS, Clement, an English divine, was born near Penrith in 1630, and died in 1700. His father, who was steward to Porter, bishop of Carlisle, having been plundered by the republicans, young Ellis entered Queen's college, Oxford, as a servitor, and owed his subsistence for some time chiefly to presents from unknown benefactors. These turned out to be Drs. Jeremy Taylor and Hammond. Ellis was afterwards presented to the rectory of Kirkby in Nottinghamshire; and in 1693 received an acknowledgment of his merits in his being appointed a prebendary in the collegiate church of Southwell. His writings deserve more attention than they have received.—R. M., A.
ELLIS, Francis, a member of the civil service of Madras; nominated in 1796; died in 1819. Besides holding various important public appointments, Mr. Ellis distinguished himself as a Sanskrit and Tamil scholar, when such attainments were rare; he was also familiar with the other languages of the south of India, and has left three valuable dissertations on the Tamil, Telugu, and Malayaline languages. He also partly translated the Rural, a celebrated Tamil work on ethics, and published a valuable treatise on Mirasi, or hereditary tenures. One of his more interesting publications is contained in the fourteenth volume of the Calcutta Asiatic Researches, being an account of a large collection of Sanskrit manuscripts found at Pondicherry, which turned out to be the composition of the jesuit missionaries of the propaganda, who had embodied the doctrines of christianity according to the Romish church, and a quantity of legendary fiction, in very classical Sanskrit verse, and had given them the native designation of the Vedas, to palm them upon the natives of the Dakhin as the composition of those writers, the Rishis and Munis, whom they regard as the inspired authors of their scriptures.—H. H. W.
ELLIS, George, F.R.S., F.S.A., author of "Specimens of Early English Poetry;" and of "Specimens of Early English Romances in Metre"—two works which have exercised a most salutary influence upon the poetical literature of the nineteenth century—was born in 1753, and died in 1815. He began his career as an author by contributing to the "Rolliad," which owed to his pen several satirical and humorous pieces, not the least piquant of the collection. After the Rolliad came the "Probationary Odes" and the "Anti-Jacobin," and to the two latter publications, as well as to the first, Ellis, who had a keen relish both for politics and literature, contributed largely. He was hardly a match, in either arena, for the statesman who wrote the Needy Knifegrinder, and, both in grace of diction and frolic humour, was perhaps inferior to Frere; but after these two, he was the most piquant and versatile, and at the same time the most genial, of the contributors to the Anti-Jacobin. While Canning soon drew off almost entirely from pursuits which he had wit and talent enough to turn into sport, his friend Ellis chose to make literature the serious business of his life. It is a proof of the superior tastes with which he was naturally gifted, or which he had acquired in the society of the authors of the Anti-Jacobin, that he devoted himself with ardour to the study of the neglected early English poets, and that he steadfastly adhered to the task which he early imposed upon himself, of rendering that study easy and interesting to others. He might have continued to write sparkling verse, and obtained a temporary reputation of much greater lustre than he enjoyed at any time; but he preferred to pass the better part of his life in illustrating and recommending the beauties of forgotten ballads and romances, though it was at the cost of being generally taken for an antiquary, rather than a man of taste and fine poetical discernment. In this way, however, he had the honour of interpreting largely to such men as Scott and Wordsworth, the spirit of the early times of English poetry; an honour, that fortunately for himself and for the literary world, he knew how to rate at its proper value. Ellis was a delightful companion, racy, social, and full of anecdote; and accordingly he was a great favourite with Scott, who dedicated to him a canto of Marmion. Ellis was a resident for many years of the parish of Sunning Hill, Berks, and in the church of that place a monument was erected to his memory, bearing a fine inscription from the pen of Canning.—J. S., G.
ELLIS, George James Wellbore Agar, Baron Dover, was born on the 14th January, 1797, and completed his education at Christ Church, Oxford. At the age of twenty-one he entered the house of commons, where in 1824 he warmly promoted the grant for the establishment of the national gallery. In 1830 he was for a short time chief commissioner of woods and forests—a post which delicate health prevented him from long retaining. He was a generous patron of art, especially of the English school of painting, and published several works of interest and merit—among them an inquiry into "The True History of the State Prisoner commonly called the Iron Mask;" "Historical Inquiries respecting the Character of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon;" and a "Life of Frederick the Great." He also edited the Ellis Correspondence, and not long before his death, Horace Walpole's letters to Sir Horace Mann. He was raised to the peerage in 1831, and died at Dover House, London, on the 10th of July, 1833.—F. E.
