tain sweet odor in the evil savors of putrefying misery and crime. This delight, however, is not an inhuman, but entirely an artistic delight-perhaps, indeed, springing from the very strength and width of his sympathies. We admire as well as wonder at that almost asbestos quality of his mind, through which he retains his composure and critical circumspection so cool amid the conflagrations of passionate subjects, which might have burned others to ashes. Few, indeed, can walk through such fiery furnaces unscathed. But Crabbe—what an admirable physician had he made to a lunatic asylum! How severely would he have sifted out every grain of poetry from those tumultuous exposures of the human mind! What clean breasts had he forced the patients to make! What tales had he.wrung out from them, to which Lewis's tales of terror were feeble and trite! How he would have commanded them, by his mild, steady, and piercing eye! And yet how calm would his brain have remained, when others, even of a more prosaic mould, were reeling in sympathy with the surrounding delirium! It were, indeed, worth while inquiring how much of this coolness resulted from Crabbe's early practice as a surgeon. That combination of warm inward sympathy and outward phlegm—of impulsive benevolence and mechanical activity-of heart all fire and manner all ice-which distinguishes his poetry, is very characteristic of the medical profession.

In correspondence with this, Crabbe generally leans to the darker side of things. This, perhaps, accounts for his favor in the sight of Byron, who saw his own eagle-eyed fury at man corroborated by Crabbe's stern and near-sighted vision. And it was accounted for partly by Crabbe's early profession, partly by his early circumstances, and partly by the clerical office he assumed. Nothing so tends to sour us with mankind as a general refusal on their part to give us bread. How can a man love a race which seems combined to starve him? This misanthropical influence Crabbe did not entirely escape. As a medical man, too, he had to come in contact with little else than human miseries and diseases; and as a clergyman, he had occasion to see much sin and sorrow and these, combining with the melancholy incidental to the poetic temperament, materially discolored his view of life. He became a searcher of dark-of the darkest bosoms; and we

see him sitting in the gloom of the hearts of thieves, murderers, and maniacs, and watching the remorse, rancor, fury, dull disgust, ungratified appetite, and ferocious or stupefied despair, which are their inmates. And even when he pictures livelier scenes and happier characters, there steals over them a shade of sadness, reflected from his favorite subjects, as a dark, sinister countenance in a room will throw a gloom over many happy and beautiful faces beside it.

In his pictures of life, we find an unfrequent but true pathos. This is not often, however, of the profoundest or most heartrending kind. The grief he paints is not that which refuses to be comforted-whose expressions, like Agamemnon's face, must be veiled-which dilates almost to despair, and complains almost to blasphemy-and which when it looks to heaven, it is

"With that frantic air,

Which seems to ask if a God be there." Crabbe's, as exhibited in "Phoebe Dawson," and other of his tales, is gentle, submissive; and its pathetic effects are produced by the simple recital of circumstances which might and often have occurred. It reminds us of the pathos of "Rosamund Gray," that beautiful story of Lamb's, of which we once, we regret to say, presumptuously pronounced an unfavorable opinion, but which has since commended itself to our heart of hearts, and compelled that tribute in tears which we had denied it in words. Hazlitt is totally wrong when he says that Crabbe carves a tear to the life in marble, as if his pathos were hard and cold. Be it the statuary of woe-has it, consequently, no truth or power? Have the chiselled tears of the Niobe never awakened other tears, fresh and burning, from their fountain? Horace's vis me

flere, &c., is not always a true principle. As the wit, who laughs not himself, often excites most laughter in others, so the calm recital of an affecting narrative acts as the meek rod of Moses applied to the rock, and is answered in gushing torrents. You close Crabbe's tale of grief, almost ashamed that you have left so quiet a thing pointed and starred with tears. His pages, while sometimes wet with pathos, are never moist with humor. His satire is often pointed with wit, and sometimes irritates into invective; but of that glad, genial, and bright-eyed thing we call humor (how well named, in its oily

Compare,

softness and gentle glitter!) he has little or none. in order to see this, his "Borough" with the "Annals of the Parish." How dry, though powerful, the one; how sapру the other! How profound the one; how pawky the other! Crabbe goes through his Borough, like a scavenger with a rough, stark, and stiff besom, sweeping up all the filth: Galt, like a knowing watchman of the old school-a canny Churlie-keeping a sharp look-out, but not averse to a sly joke, and having an eye to the humors as well as misdemeanors of the streets. Even his wit is not of the finest grain. It deals too much in verbal quibbles, puns, and antitheses with their points broken off. His puns are neither good nor bad -the most fatal and anti-ideal description of a pun that can be given. His quibbles are good enough to have excited the laugh of his curate, or gardener; but he forgets that the public is not so indulgent. And though often treading in Pope's track, he wants entirely those touches of satire, at once the lightest and the most withering, as if dropped from the fingers of a malignant fairy-those faint whispers of poetic perdition-those drops of concentrated bitterness-those fatal bodkin-stabs-and those invectives, glittering all over - with the polish of profound malignity-which are Pope's glory as a writer, and his shame as a man.

We have repeatedly expressed our opinion, that in Crabbe there lay a higher power than he often exerted. We find evidence of this in his "Hall of Justice" and his "Eustace Grey." In these he is fairly in earnest No longer dozing by his parlor fire over the "Newspaper," or napping in a corner of his " Library," or peeping in through the windows of the "Workhouse," or recording the select scandal of the "Borough," he is away out into the wide and open fields of highest passion and imagination. What a tale that "Hall of Justice" hears to be paralleled only in the “Thousand and One Nights of the Halls of Eblis!". -a tale of misery, rape, murder, and furious despair; told, too, in language of such lurid fire as has been seen to shine o'er the graves of the dead! But, in "Eustace Grey," our author's genius reaches its climax. Never was madness--in its misery-its remorse the dark companions, "the ill-favored ones," who cling to it in its wild way and will not let it go, although it curse them with the eloquence of hell-the

visions it sees-the scenery it creates and carries about with it in dreadful keeping-and the language it uses, high, aspiring, but broken, as the wing of a struck eagle-so strongly and meltingly revealed. And, yet, around the dismal tale there hangs the breath of beauty, and, like poor Lear, Sir Eustace goes about crowned with flowers-the flowers of earthly poetry-and of a hope which is not of the earth. And, at the close, we feel to the author all that strange gratitude which our souls are constituted to entertain to those who have most powerfully wrung and tortured them.

Would that Crabbe had given us a century of such things. We would have preferred to the "Tales of the Hall," "Tales of Greyling Hall," or more tidings from the "Hall of Justice." It had been a darker Decameron, and brought out more effectually-what the " Village Poorhouse," and the sketches of Elliott have since done-the passions, miseries, crushed aspirations, and latent poetry, which dwell in the hearts of the plundered poor; as well as the wretchedness which, more punctually than their veriest menial, waits often behind the chairs, and hands the silver dishes of the great.

We will not dilate on his other works individually. In glancing back upon them as a whole, we will endeavor to answer the following questions: 1st, What was Crabbe's object as a moral poet? 2dly, How far is he original as an artist? 3dly, What is his relative position to his great contemporaries? And, 4thly, what is likely to be his fate with posterity? 1st, His object. The great distinction between man and man, and author and author, is purpose. It is the edge and point of character; it is the stamp on the subscription of genius; it is the direction on the letter of talent. Character without it is blunt and torpid. Talent without it is a letter, which, undirected, goes no whither. Genius without it is bullion, sluggish, splendid, uncirculating. Purpose yearns after and secures artistic culture. It gathers, as by a strong suction, all things which it needs into itself. Crabbe's artistic object is tolerably clear, and has been already indicated. His moral purpose is not quite so apparent. Is it to satirize, or is it to reform vice? Is it pity, or is it contempt, that actuates his song? What are his plans for elevating the lower classes in the scale of society? Has he any, or

does he believe in the possibility of their permanent elevation? Such questions are more easily asked than answered. We must say that we have failed to find in him any one overmastering and earnest object, subjugating every thing to itself, and producing that unity in all his works which the trunk of a tree gives to its smallest, its remotest, to even its withered leaves. And yet, without apparent intention, Crabbe has done good moral service. He has shed much light upon the condition of the poor. He has spoken in the name and stead of the poor dumb mouths that could not tell their own sorrows or sufferings to the world. He has opened the mine, which Ebenezer Elliot and others, going to work with a firmer and more resolute purpose, have dug to its depths.

2dly, His originality. This has been questioned by some critics. He has been called a version, in coarser paper and print, of Goldsmith, Pope, and Cowper. His pathos comes from Goldsmith-his wit and satire from Pope-and his minute and literal description from Cowper. If this were true, it were as complimentary to him as his warmest admirer could wish. To combine the characteristic excellences of three true poets is no easy matter. But Crabbe has not combined them. His pathos wants altogether the naiveté of sentiment and curiosa felicitas of expression which distinguish Goldsmith's "Deserted Village." He has something of Pope's terseness, but little of his subtlety, finish, or brilliant malice. And the motion of Cowper's mind and style in description differs as much from Crabbe's as the playful leaps and gambols of a kitten from the measured, downright, and indomitable pace of a hound-the one is the easiest, the other the severest, of describers. Resemblances, indeed, of a minor kind are to be found; but still Crabbe is as distinct from Goldsmith, Cowper, and Pope, as Byron from Scott, Wordsworth, and Coleridge.

Originality consists of two kinds-one, the power of inventing new materials; and the other, of dealing with old materials in a new way. We do not decide whether the first of these implies an act of absolute creation; it implies all we can conceive in an act of creative power; from elements bearing to the result the relation which the Alphabet does to the "Iliad "-genius brings forth its bright progeny, and