ts judgment in the same way, but history will certainly maintain the
fame of the father as well as the fame of the son. A man of a very
different order from any of these we have just mentioned, but who has
made a reputation of his own in literature as well as in politics, closed
his career within the same reign. We have already spoken in this volume
of William Cobbett's command of simple, strong English, which made his
prose style hardly inferior to that of Swift himself. Indeed, one of the
most distinguished authors of the present day, a man who has made a name
in political life as well as in literature, has been heard to contend
with earnestness that, as a writer of pure, strong, idiomatic English,
Cobbett might be accounted the rival of Swift. The great engineer,
Telford, and the really gifted and genuine, although eccentric and
opinionated, physician, Dr. Abernethy, were among the celebrities whose
deaths rather than their works belong to the time when William the Fourth
was King.

[Sidenote: 1754-1834--Coleridge and Hannah More]

Poetry, romance, and art suffered many heavy losses during the same time.
We have already chronicled the death of Walter Scott. One who had known
him and had been kindly welcomed by him, James Hogg, the Ettrick
Shepherd, died three years after Scott in 1835. The death of George
Crabbe was one of the memorable events of the reign. Crabbe might well
be described in the words which a later singer set out for his own
epitaph, as "the poet of the poor." Crabbe pictured the struggles, the
sufferings, the occasional gleams of happiness which are common to the
lives of the poor with a realism as vigorous and as vivid as the prose of
Charles Dickens himself could show, and he had touches here and there of
exquisitely tender poetic feeling which were not unworthy of Keats or
Wordsworth. Nothing was nobler in the life of Burke than his early
appreciation and generous support of Crabbe. Hannah More died in 1833.
The fame of this remarkable woman has somewhat faded of late years, and
even the {283} most successful of her writings find probably but few
readers among the general public. She has, however, won for herself a
distinct place in history, not less by her life itself than by her work
in various fields of literature. In her early days she had been an
associate of Samuel Johnson, Burke, and Goldsmith, and Reynolds, and she
had known Macaulay from his childhood. She was always a writer