poets, and one of the most interesting figures in all English
literature, although no small share of his one-time popularity was due to
his identification with Evangelicalism in religion. Cowper had humour
and other qualities which enabled him to make the universal appeal to all
hearts which is the test of the greatest literature--the appeal of "John
Gilpin," the "Lines" to his Mother's Portrait, and his verses on "The
loss of the _Royal George_." Crabbe made no such appeal, and he has not
the adventitious assistance that association with a religious sect
affords. Hence the popularity he once enjoyed was more entirely on his
merits than was that of Cowper. He was the first of the eighteenth
century poets who was able to _see things as they really are_. Therein
lies his strength. Were they poets at all--those earlier eighteenth
century writers? It sounds like rank blasphemy to question it, but what
is poetry? Surely it is the expression artistically in rhythmic form--or
even without it--of the sincerest emotions concerning nature and life.
The greatest poet is not the one who is most sincere--a very bad poet can
be that--but the poet who expresses that sincerity with the most perfect
art. From this point of view the poets before Cowper and Crabbe, Pope,
Goldsmith, Johnson and others were scarcely poets at all. Masters of
language every one of them, able to command a fine rhetoric, but not
poets. Gray in two or three pieces was a poet, but for Johnson that
claim can scarcely be made. Cowper was the first to emancipate himself
from the conventionality of his age, and Crabbe emancipated himself still
further. He had boundless sincerity, and he is really a very great poet
even if he has not the perfection of art of some later poets. Many know
Crabbe only by the parody of his manner in _Rejected Addresses_:

John Richard William Alexander Dwyer
Was footman to Justinian Stubbs Esquire;
But when John Dwyer listed in the blues,
Emanuel Jennings polished Stubbs's shoes.

and it must be admitted that there are plenty of lines like these in
Crabbe, as for example:--

Grave Jonas Kindred, Sybil Kindred's sire
Was six feet high, and looked six inches higher.

or this:--

The church he view'd as liberal minds will view
And there he fixed his principles and pew.

Banalities of this kind are scattered through his pages as they are
scattered through those of Wordsworth. Nevertheless he was a