always have his books by him; none of his poems
appeared without the warmest welcome, the most discriminating and
applausive criticism from Jeffrey, the first critic of his long day.

Crabbe had not only this exquisitely intelligent hearing, but he was
accepted on his own terms, as a poet who saw so much beauty in simple
and common life that he could not help painting it. He painted it in
pieces of matchless fidelity to the fact, with nothing of flattery, but
everything of charm in the likeness. His work is the enduring witness of
persons, circumstances, customs, experiences utterly passed from the
actual world, but recognizably true with every sincere reader. These
tales of village life in England a hundred years ago are of an absolute
directness and frankness. They blink nothing of the sordid, the mean,
the vicious, the wicked in that life, from which they rarely rise in
some glimpse of the state of the neighboring gentry, and yet they abound
in beauty that consoles and encourages. They are full of keen analysis,
sly wit, kindly humor, and of a satire too conscientious to bear the
name; of pathos, of compassion, of reverence, while in unaffected
singleness of ideal they are unsurpassed.

Will our contrary-minded correspondent believe that these studies, these
finished pictures, which so perfectly "reflect the common life ... of
the day," are full of the license, the tinkle, the German divorce of
verb and subject, the twisted grammatical sequence which her soul
abhors in verse? Crabbe chose for his vehicle the heroic couplet in
which English poetry had jog-trotted ever since the time of Pope, as it
often had before; and he made it go as like Pope's couplet as he could,
with the same caesura, the same antithetical balance, the same feats of
rhetoric, the same inversions, and the same closes of the sense in each
couplet. The most artificial and the most natural poets were at one in
their literary convention. Yet such was the freshness of Crabbe's
impulse, such his divine authority to deal with material unemployed in
English poetry before, that you forget all the affectations of the
outward convention, or remember them only for a pleasure in the
quaintness of their use for his purposes. How imperishable, anyway, is
the interest of things important to the spirit, the fancy, and how
largely does this interest lie in the freshness of the mind bringing
itself to the things, how little in the novelty of the things! The
deman