lways 'steaming up' from the world, and
to which it is one, though perhaps not the highest, of the poet's
functions to make us duly sensible. Crabbe, like all realistic writers,
must be studied at full length, and therefore quotations are necessarily
unjust. It will be sufficient if I refer--pretty much at random--to the
short story of 'Phoebe Dawson' in the 'Parish Register,' to the more
elaborate stories of 'Edward Shore' and the 'Parting Hour' in the
'Tales,' or to the story of 'Ruth' in the 'Tales of the Hall,' where
again the dreary pathos is strangely heightened by Crabbe's favourite
seaport scenery, to prove that he might be called as truly as Goldsmith
_affectuum potens_, though scarcely _lenis, dominator_.

It is time, however, to conclude with a word or two as to Crabbe's
peculiar place in the history of English literature. I said that, unlike
his contemporaries, Cowper and Burns, he adhered rigidly to the form of
the earlier eighteenth-century school, and partly for this reason
excited the wayward admiration of Byron, who always chose to abuse the
bridge which carried him to fame. But Crabbe's clumsiness of expression
makes him a very inadequate successor of Pope or of Goldsmith, and his
claims are really founded on the qualities which led Byron to call him
'nature's sternest painter, yet her best.' On this side he is connected
with some tendencies of the school which supplanted his early models. So
far as Wordsworth and his followers represented the reaction from the
artificial to a love of unsophisticated nature, Crabbe is entirely at
one with them. He did not share that unlucky taste for the namby-pamby
by which Wordsworth annoyed his contemporaries, and spoilt some of his
earlier poems. Its place was filled in Crabbe's mind by an even more
unfortunate disposition for the simply humdrum and commonplace, which,
it must be confessed, makes it almost as hard to read a good many of his
verses as to consume large quantities of suet pudding, and has probably
destroyed his popularity with the present generation. Still, Crabbe's
influence was powerful as against the old conventionality. He did not,
like his predecessors, write upon the topics which interested 'persons
of quality,' and never gives us the impression of having composed his
rhymes in a full-bottomed wig or even in a Grub Street garret. He has
gone out into country fields and village lanes, and paints directly from
man and nature, with almost a cynical