versed in life as contemporary fiction depicts it,
feels, on turning to the already antiquated forms of the eighteenth
century, that it has to divest itself for the nonce of more than half
its equipment of habitual thought and emotion." This might serve as text
for a long sermon, I only cite it in passing as an interesting example
of the _idola specus_ which beset a clever man who loses the power of
comparative vision, and sees _Tom Jones_ as a toylike structure with the
_Kreutzer Sonata_ beside it as a human world.

I

CRABBE

There is a certain small class of persons in the history of literature
the members of which possess, at least for literary students, an
interest peculiar to themselves. They are the writers who having
attained, not merely popular vogue, but fame as solid as fame can ever
be, in their own day, having been praised by the praised, and having as
far as can be seen owed this praise to none of the merely external and
irrelevant causes--politics, religion, fashion or what not--from which
it sometimes arises, experience in a more or less short time after their
death the fate of being, not exactly cast down from their high place,
but left respectfully alone in it, unvisited, unincensed, unread. Among
these writers, over the gate of whose division of the literary Elysium
the famous, "Who now reads Bolingbroke?" might serve as motto, the
author of "The Village" and "Tales of the Hall" is one of the most
remarkable. As for Crabbe's popularity in his own day there is no
mistake about that. It was extraordinarily long, it was extremely wide,
it included the select few as well as the vulgar, it was felt and more
or less fully acquiesced in by persons of the most diverse tastes,
habits, and literary standards. His was not the case, which occurs now
and then, of a man who makes a great reputation in early life and long
afterwards preserves it because, either by accident or prudence, he does
not enter the lists with his younger rivals, and therefore these rivals
can afford to show him a reverence which is at once graceful and cheap.
Crabbe won his spurs in full eighteenth century, and might have boasted,
altering Landor's words, that he had dined early and in the best of
company, or have parodied Goldsmith, and said, "I have Johnson and
Burke: all the wits have been here." But when his studious though barren
manhood was passed, and he again began, as almost an old man, to write
poetry, he entered into