add a third trinity as remarkable as those others of Gifford, Jeffrey,
and Wilson, of Wordsworth, Byron, and Scott. Much more recently Mr.
Courthope has used Crabbe as a weapon in that battle of his with
literary Liberalism which he has waged not always quite to the
comprehension of his fellow-critics; Mr. Leslie Stephen has discussed
him as one who knows and loves his eighteenth century. But who reads
him? Who quotes him? Who likes him? I think I can venture to say, with
all proper humility, that I know Crabbe pretty well; I think I may say
with neither humility nor pride, but simply as a person whose business
it has been for some years to read books, and articles, and debates,
that I know what has been written and said in England lately. You will
find hardly a note of Crabbe in these writings and sayings. He does not
even survive, as "Matthew Green, who wrote 'The Spleen,'" and others
survive, by quotations which formerly made their mark, and are retained
without a knowledge of their original. If anything is known about Crabbe
to the general reader, it is the parody in "Rejected Addresses," an
extraordinarily happy parody no doubt, in fact rather better Crabbe in
Crabbe's weakest moments than Crabbe himself. But naturally there is
nothing of his best there; and it is by his best things, let it be
repeated over and over in face of all opposition, that a poet must be
judged.

Although Crabbe's life, save for one dramatic revolution, was one of the
least eventful in our literary history, it is by no means one of the
least interesting. Mr. Kebbel's book[3] gives a very fair summary of it;
but the Life by Crabbe's son which is prefixed to the collected editions
of the poems, and on which Mr. Kebbel's own is avowedly based, is
perhaps the more interesting of the two. It is written with a curious
mixture of the old literary state and formality, and of a feeling on
the writer's part that he is not a literary man himself, and that not
only his father, but Mr. Lockhart, Mr. Moore, Mr. Bowles and the other
high literary persons who assisted him were august beings of another
sphere. This is all the more agreeable, in that Crabbe's sons had
advantages of education and otherwise which were denied to their father,
and might in the ordinary course of things have been expected to show
towards him a lofty patronage rather than any filial reverence. The poet
himself was born at Aldborough, a now tolerably well-known
watering-place (the