eaden cloud hanging over it. Mr. Crabbe's
style might be cited as an answer to Audrey's question--"Is poetry
a true thing?" There are here no ornaments, no flights of fancy, no
illusions of sentiment, no tinsel of words. His song is one sad reality,
one unraised, unvaried note of unavailing woe. Literal fidelity serves
him in the place of invention; he assumes importance by a number of
petty details; he rivets attention by being tedious. He not only deals
in incessant matters of fact, but in matters of fact of the most
familiar, the least animating, and the most unpleasant kind; but he
relies for the effect of novelty on the microscopic minuteness with
which he dissects the most trivial objects--and for the interest he
excites, on the unshrinking determination with which he handles the most
painful. His poetry has an official and professional air. He is called
in to cases of difficult births, of fractured limbs, or breaches of the
peace; and makes out a parochial list of accidents and offences. He
takes the most trite, the most gross and obvious and revolting part of
nature, for the subject of his elaborate descriptions; but it is Nature
still, and Nature is a great and mighty Goddess! It is well for the
Reverend Author that it is so. Individuality is, in his theory, the only
definition of poetry. Whatever _is_, he hitches into rhyme. Whoever
makes an exact image of any thing on the earth, however deformed or
insignificant, according to him, must succeed--and he himself has
succeeded. Mr. Crabbe is one of the most popular and admired of our
living authors. That he is so, can be accounted for on no other
principle than the strong ties that bind us to the world about us, and
our involuntary yearnings after whatever in any manner powerfully and
directly reminds us of it. His Muse is not one of _the Daughters of
Memory_, but the old toothless, mumbling dame herself, doling out the
gossip and scandal of the neighbourhood, recounting _totidem verbis et
literis_, what happens in every place of the kingdom every hour in the
year, and fastening always on the worst as the most palatable morsels.
But she is a circumstantial old lady, communicative, scrupulous, leaving
nothing to the imagination, harping on the smallest grievances, a
village-oracle and critic, most veritable, most identical, bringing us
acquainted with persons and things just as they chanced to exist, and
giving us a local interest in all she knows and tells. Mr. Cra