tiful in the extreme. He was
particularly struck with the description of the substantial happiness
of a farmer's wife.

From great novelists the tributes are not less noteworthy than from great
statesmen. Jane Austen, whose personality perhaps has more real womanly
attractiveness than that of any sister novelist of the first rank,
declared playfully that if she could have been persuaded to change her
state it would have been to become Mrs. Crabbe; and who can forget Sir
Walter Scott's request in his last illness: "Read me some amusing
thing--read me a bit of Crabbe." They read to him from _The Borough_,
and we all remember his comment, "Capital--excellent--very good." Yet at
this time--in 1832--any popularity that Crabbe had once enjoyed was
already on the wane. Other idols had caught the popular taste, and from
that day to this there was to be no real revival of appreciation for
these poems. There were to be no lack of admirers, however, of the
audience "fit though few." Byron's praise has been too often quoted for
repetition. Wordsworth, who rarely praised his contemporaries in poetry,
declared of Crabbe that his works "would last from their combined merit
as poetry and truth." Macaulay writes of "that incomparable passage in
Crabbe's _Borough_ which has made many a rough and cynical reader cry
like a child"--the passage in which the condemned felon

Takes his tasteless food, and when 'tis done,
Counts up his meals, now lessen'd by that one,--

a story which Macaulay bluntly charges Robert Montgomery with stealing.
Lord Tennyson, again, at a much later date, admitted that "Crabbe has a
world of his own."

Not less impressive surely is the attitude of the two writers as far as
the poles asunder in their outlook upon life and its mysteries--Cardinal
Newman and Edward FitzGerald. The famous theologian, we learn from the
_Letters and Correspondence_ collected by Anne Mozley, writes in 1820 of
his "excessive fondness" for _The Tales of the Hall_, and thirty years
later in one of his _Discourses_ he says of Crabbe's poems that they are
among "the most touching in our language." Still another twenty years,
and the aged cardinal reread Crabbe to find that he was more delighted
than ever with our poet. That great nineteenth century pagan, on the
other hand, that prince of letter-writers and wonderful poet of whom
Suffolk has also reason to be proud, Edward FitzGerald, was even more
ardent. Praise o