GEORGE

See also:

• ELLIS (originally SHARPE), ALEXANDER JOHN (1814-189o)
• GEORGE ELLIS (1753-1815)
• ELLIS, ROBINSON (1834- )
• ELLIS, SIR HENRY (1777-1869)
• ELLIS, WILLIAM (1794 – 1872)

ELLIS (1753-1815)  , English author, was born in London in 1753 . Educated at Westminster school and at Trinity College, Cambridge, he began his literary career by some satirical verses on Bath society published in 1777, and Poetical Tales, by " Sir Gregory Gander," in 1778 . He contributed to the Rolliad and the Probationary Odes political satires directed against Pitt's administration . He was employed in diplomatic business at the Hague in 1784; and in 1797 he accompanied Lord Malmesbury to Lille as secretary to the embassy . On his return he was introduced to Pitt, and the episode of the Rolliad, which had not been forgotten, was explained . He found continued scope for his powers as a political caricaturist in the columns of the Anti-Jacobin, a weekly paper which he founded in connexion with George Canning and William Gifford . For some years before the Anti-Jacobin was started Ellis had been working in the congenial field of Early English literature, in which he was one of the first to arouse interest . The first edition of his Specimens of the Early English Poets appeared in 1790; and this was followed by Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances (18o5) . He also edited Gregory Lewis Way's translation of select Fabliaux in 1796 . Ellis was an intimate friend of Sir Walter Scott, who styled him " the first converser I ever saw," and dedicated to him the fifth canto of Marmion . Some of the correspondence between them is to be found in Lockhart's Life . He died on the loth of April 1815 .

The

monument erected to his memory in the parish church of Gunning Hill, Berks, bears a fine inscription by Canning .