'He never cursed,
But could not breathe, and said his heart would burst.'
'And so will mine'----'But, father, you must pray;
My uncle said it took his pains away.'

Praying, however, cannot bring back the dead; and the fratricide, for
such he feels himself to be, is a melancholy man to the end of his days.
In Balzac's hands repentance would have had no place, and selfishness
have been finally triumphant and unabashed. We need not ask which would
be the most effective or the truest treatment; though I must put in a
word for the superior healthiness of Crabbe's mind. There is nothing
morbid about him. Still it would be absurd to push such a comparison
far. Crabbe's portraits are only spirited vignettes compared with the
elaborate full-lengths drawn by the intense imagination of the French
novelist; and Crabbe's whole range of thought is incomparably narrower.
The two writers have a real resemblance only in so far as in each case a
powerful accumulation of life-like details enables them to produce a
pathos, powerful by its vivid reality.

The singular power of Crabbe is in some sense more conspicuous in the
stories where the incidents are almost audaciously trifling. One of them
begins with this not very impressive and very ungrammatical couplet:--

With our late Vicar, and his age the same,
His clerk, hight Jachin, to his office came.

Jachin is a man of oppressive respectability; so oppressive, indeed,
that some of the scamps of the borough try to get him into scrapes by
temptations of a very inartificial kind, which he is strong enough to
resist. At last, however, it occurs to Jachin that he can easily
embezzle part of the usual monthly offerings while saving his character
in his own eyes by some obvious sophistry. He is detected and dismissed,
and dies after coming upon the parish. These materials for a tragic poem
are not very promising; and I do not mean to say that the sorrows of
poor Jachin affect us as deeply as those of Gretchen or Desdemona. The
parish clerk is perhaps a fit type of all that was least poetical in the
old social order of the country, and virtue which succumbs to the
temptation of taking two shillings out of a plate scarcely wants a
Mephistopheles to overcome it. We may perhaps think that the apologetic
note which the excellent Crabbe inserts at the end of his poem, to the
effect that he did not mean by it to represent mankind as 'puppets of an
overpowering destiny,' or 'to