ch leads to more
unctuous hypocrisy; for, though he says of the wicked squire that

His worship ever was a Churchman true,
And held in scorn the Methodistic crew,

the scorn is only objectionable to him in so far as it is a cynical
cloak for scorn of good morals. He tells how boys run away to sea, or
join strolling players, and have in consequence to beg their bread at
the end of their days. The almshouse or the county gaol is the natural
end of his villains, and he paints to the life the evil courses which
generally lead to such a climax. Nobody describes better the process of
going to the dogs. And most of all, he sympathises with the village
maiden who has listened too easily to the voice of the charmer, in the
shape of a gay sailor or a smart London footman, and has to reap the
bitter consequences of her too easy faith. Most of his stories might be
paralleled by the experience of any country clergyman who has entered
into the life of his parishioners. They are as commonplace and as
pathetic as the things which are happening round us every day, and which
fill a neglected paragraph in a country newspaper. The treatment varies
from the purely humorous to the most deep and genuine pathos; though it
never takes us into the regions of the loftier imagination.

The more humorous of these performances may be briefly dismissed. Crabbe
possesses the faculty, but not in any eminent degree; his hand is a
little heavy, and one must remember that Mr. Tovell and his like were of
the race who require to have a joke driven into their heads with a
sledge-hammer. Once or twice we come upon a sketch which may help to
explain Miss Austen's admiration. There is an old maid devoted to Mira,
and rejoicing in stuffed puppies and parrots, who might have been
ridiculed by Emma Woodhouse, and a parson who would have suited the
Eltons admirably:--

Fiddling and fishing were his arts; at times
He altered sermons and he aimed at rhymes;
And his fair friends, not yet intent on cards,
Oft he amused with riddles and charades.

Such sketches are a pleasant relief to his more sombre portraiture; but
it is in the tragic elements that his true power comes out. The motives
of his stories may be trivial, but never the sentiment. The deep manly
emotion makes us forget not only the frequent clumsiness of his style
but the pettiness of the incident, and what is more difficult, the
rather bread-and-butter tone of morality. If he