and character, his power of pathos and of satire. In some cases, indeed, Crabbe's dry humour seems to have been mistaken for stupidity. A critic in the 'Athenæum' once quoted, and quoted inaccurately, the couplet—

'And I was asked and authorised to go

To seek the firm of Clutterbuck and Co.'

from Crabbe's most powerful poem, as an instance of his hopeless dulness of style; and even that pronounced Crabbite, Fitzgerald, made the same mistake, and proposed, as Mr Holland tells us, to amend it thus

⚫And I was asked to set it right with--Oh,
Romantic title!-Clutterbuck and Co.'

Could neither of them see that Crabbe was perfectly conscious of the bathos of the vulgar name, and inserted it purposely for an effect of contrast?

Crabbe's literary defects (to dismiss them first) are no doubt obvious enough. Choosing the narrative form for his studies of human character and manners, he is apt to be prolix and flat, and to wander into unnecessary digressions, in those introductory or connecting passages which form the necessary scaffolding of a narrative poem; passages which at the best it is difficult to render effective in a literary sense, and in which he sometimes drops into a prim formality of diction which seems out of place in any versified writing, even in the structural portion of a narrative poem. It is in such passages that we feel his inferiority to Pope, whose every couplet has its point, while Crabbe is at times content, in transitional passages, if he is merely metrical and grammatical. On the other hand, he occasionally enlivens his narrative by a superficial play upon words, which recurs often enough to be called a mannerism, for instance, in the description of a village club:

'We term it Free-and-Easy, and yet we
Find it no easy matter to be free.' *

* One may recall Pope's

'And so obliging that he ne'er obliged';

but in this case the viciousness and sting of the line may be held to raise it above mere word-play.

All these little weaknesses, which are of a kind easily open to parody, are admirably, though good-naturedly, satirised in the imitation poem in 'Rejected Addresses,' one of the best performances in that sublime jeu d'esprit, from which we shrewdly suspect that not a few literary students of the present day have derived their principal notion of Crabbe.

But the real motif of Crabbe's poems, as well as their real power, lies, as those who will take the trouble to read him will soon find out, not in mere narrative, but in the portrayal of human character of various types, of human feeling as acted on by various circumstances. Though he adopts the narrative form for his studies from life, the incidents are mostly of the slightest, and only just such as are necessary to furnish occasion for the play of human character. In his earliest works, 'The Library' and 'The Village,' he only attempted descriptive poetry; the latter poem is obviously suggested by Goldsmith, though in a tone far sterner and, it may be added, far more sincere and less conventional, than that of "The Deserted Village.' Both poems contain powerful passages, such as will always be worth recalling; one can quite understand why Johnson should have admired them and predicted success for their author; in fact they show at times a literary finish which Crabbe never surpassed in his later and more serious works. Take for instance the description of the ancient books in "The Library':

'First let us view the form, the size, the dress,

For these the manners, nay, the mind express ;
That weight of wood, with leathern coat o'erlaid;
Those ample clasps, of solid metal made;
The close press'd leaves, unclosed for many an age;
The dull red edging of the well-filled page;
On the broad back the stubborn ridges roll'd,
Where yet the title stands in tarnish'd gold;
These all a sage and labour'd work proclaim,
A painful candidate for lasting fame:
No idle wit, no trifling verse can lurk
In the deep bosom of that weighty work;
No playful thoughts degrade the solemn style,
Nor one light sentence claims a transient smile.
Hence, in these times, untouched the pages lie,
And slumber out their immortality;

They had their day, when, after all his toil,
His morning study, and his midnight oil,
At length an author's ONE great work appear'd,
By patient hope and length of days endear'd;
Expecting nations hail'd it from the press;
Poetic friends prefixed each kind address;
Princes and kings received the pond'rous gift,
And ladies read the work they could not lift.'

Except for the curious slip in the misapplication of the adjective unclosed,' Pope himself could hardly have bettered that for neatness and point.

The success which Crabbe was destined to win lay, however, in a wider field than this. But in order to understand his mental attitude as displayed in his maturer writings-the grave and melancholy tone which, in spite of occasional outbreaks of lively and humorous satire, generally pervades them; his tendency to delineate and accentuate the more sordid aspects of nature and humanity -it is necessary (perhaps one may say it is only necessary) to know something of the circumstances of his early life. Never was there any writer whose productions were more obviously and permanently influenced by the impression of the scenes and the society amid which he grew up to manhood. His father was evidently a man of some talent and capacity, in what is conventionally called 'the lower middle class.' A native of Aldborough, he was for some time schoolmaster and parish clerk at a village in Norfolk, but returned to Aldborough in the capacity of warehousekeeper, and eventually became collector of the salt duties, or 'Salt-master,' in his native fishing hamlet. Here the future poet, the eldest son, was born in 1754. Aldborough has now developed into a modern neat watering place; but in the days of Crabbe's boyhood it evidently possessed all the least attractive characteristics of an east-coast fishing village, as they may still to some extent be seen in localities which have not yet become 'watering places.' A vivid picture of the place is given in the 'Life,' as the biographer (the poet's son) could remember it :

'It consisted of two parallel and unpaved streets, running between mean and scrambling houses, the abodes of sea-faring men, pilots, and fishers. The range of houses nearest to the sea had suffered so much from repeated invasions of the waves, that only a few scattered tenements appeared erect among the

desolation. . . . The beach consists of successive ridges-large rolled stones, then loose shingle, and, at the fall of the tide, a strip of fine hard sand. Vessels of all sorts, from the large heavy troll-boat to the yawl and prame, drawn up along the shore; fishermen preparing their tackle or sorting their spoil; and, nearer the gloomy old townhall (the only indication of municipal dignity), a few groups of mariners-chiefly pilots— taking their quick short walk backwards and forwards, every eye watchful of a signal from the offing-such was the squalid scene that first opened on the author of "The Village."'

When, to this description of the outward aspect of the scene, we add the remembrance of all the social ills which must have been rampant in such a place a century ago— the low standard of village morality and decency, the practice of hard drinking as the principal recreation of a sailor, the entire absence of sanitary law or custom-

'Here our reformers come not; none object
To paths polluted, or upbraid neglect ;
None care that ashy heaps at doors are cast,
That coal-dust flies along the blinding blast'-

and the prevalence of smuggling accompanied with violence and bloodshed-one can hardly wonder that the influence of such surroundings sank deep into a sensitive and observant mind brought up among them, and coloured the whole tone of his thought and his writings.

From this point of view there is a certain historical interest in many of Crabbe's pictures of characters which are evidently drawn to a great extent from actual observation. They represent, like Squire Western, types which have happily passed away, but which once filled an important place in the human comedy. It is curious, too, to be carried back to a time when the middle-class man still regarded a 'lord' as a being belonging to a class apart, who might be expected to have a different standard of life from a commoner, and to govern his behaviour to his fellow men on different principles. That Crabbe tacitly accepted this position is evident from such poems as 'The Patron,' and from other indications in his works; but this again is accounted for by his birth and circumstances. He was essentially middle-class. Just as Jane Austen, in her incomparable novels, sees the whole problem of human life from the county-society point of view, so Crabbe sees

it entirely from the middle-class point of view. The reason for the limitation of view was in its nature the same in both cases; both writers were realists, and confined themselves to representing life as it had come under their own observation; and, after all, the middle-class standpoint may be said to afford a wider view than the standpoint of county society. Crabbe cannot be compared with Jane Austen as an artist; but he knew more of life than she knew; he had looked deeper into human nature; he was acquainted with grief, and possessed the power of keen pathos a knowledge and a power which, so far as her writings show, were beyond Jane Austen's horizon.

6

Crabbe's early history, besides serving to explain the influences which gave his genius its peculiar bent, is of interest as giving us glimpses of a character of no ordinary force and individuality, apart from his literary gift. Nothing could have been more unpromising than his early prospects. His father employed him in the warehouse on the quay at Slaughden, in labours which he abhorred (though he in time became tolerably expert in them), such as piling up butter and cheese.' The profession of surgeon had been decided on for him, while he was yet at school; but after the term of his apprenticeship to a country surgeon was over, his father could neither afford to send him to London to complete his education, nor to maintain him at home in idleness, and he had for a time to return to his labours on the quay. A few months subsequently spent in London were partially wasted through want of funds to make the most of his opportunities; and when he eventually took up the practice of a country 'apothecary,' as the phrase then went, his mind was constantly tortured by the dread of a responsibility for which he did not feel prepared; nor were his prospects of an adequate practice in any case very promising. At length he resolved 'to go to London and venture all.'

With five pounds in his pocket he set out, to go through the trial of faith' (in Bunyan's phrase) which others have gone through before and since the dreary round of offering manuscripts to one publisher after another, with results varying only between the refusal courteous and the refusal curt, while the day when the purse will be drawn blank looms nearer and nearer. Some little time before, Crabbe had been happily, though at the time rather hopelessly,