tool stands upon three legs or
upon four. If a settle by the fire-side stands awry, it gives him as
much disturbance as a tottering world; and he records the rent in a
ragged counterpane as an event in history. He is equally curious in his
back-grounds and in his figures. You know the Christian and surnames of
every one of his heroes,--the dates of their achievements, whether on a
Sunday or a Monday,--their place of birth and burial, the colour of
their clothes, and of their hair, and whether they squinted or not. He
takes an inventory of the human heart exactly in the same manner as of
the furniture of a sick room: his sentiments have very much the air of
fixtures; he gives you the petrifaction of a sigh, and carves a tear, to
the life, in stone. Almost all his characters are tired of their lives,
and you heartily wish them dead. They remind one of anatomical
preservations; or may be said to bear the same relation to actual life
that a stuffed cat in a glass-case does to the real one purring on the
hearth: the skin is the same, but the life and the sense of heat is
gone. Crabbe's poetry is like a museum, or curiosity-shop: every thing
has the same posthumous appearance, the same inanimateness and identity
of character. If Bloomfield is too much of the Farmer's Boy, Crabbe is
too much of the parish beadle, an overseer of the country poor. He has
no delight beyond the walls of a workhouse, and his officious zeal would
convert the world into a vast infirmary. He is a kind of Ordinary, not
of Newgate, but of nature. His poetical morality is taken from Burn's
Justice, or the Statutes against Vagrants. He sets his own imagination
in the stocks, and his Muse, like Malvolio, "wears cruel garters." He
collects all the petty vices of the human heart, and superintends, as in
a panopticon, a select circle of rural malefactors. He makes out the
poor to be as bad as the rich--a sort of vermin for the others to hunt
down and trample upon, and this he thinks a good piece of work. With him
there are but two moral categories, riches and poverty, authority and
dependence. His parish apprentice, Richard Monday, and his wealthy
baronet, Sir Richard Monday, of Monday-place, are the same individual--
the extremes of the same character, and of his whole system. "The latter
end of his Commonwealth does not forget the beginning." But his parish
ethics are the very worst model for a state: any thing more degrading
and helpless cann