s hampered, as Wordsworth was not, by a
lifelong adherence to a metre--the heroic couplet--with which this same
poetic diction was most closely bound up. He did not always escape the
effects of this contagion, but in the main he was delivered from it by
what I have called a first-hand association with man and nature. He was
ever describing what he had seen and studied with his own eyes, and the
vocabulary of the bards who had for generations borrowed it from one
another failed to supply him with the words he needed. The very
limitations of the first five-and-twenty years of his life passed in a
small and decaying seaport were more than compensated by the intimacy
of his acquaintance with its inhabitants. Like Wordsworth he had early
known love and sorrow "in huts where poor men lie."

Wordsworth's fame and influence have grown steadily since his death in
1850. Crabbe's reputation was apparently at its height in 1819, for it
was then, on occasion of his publishing his _Tales of the Hall_, that
Mr. John Murray paid him three thousand pounds for the copyright of this
work, and its predecessors. But after that date Crabbe's popularity may
be said to have continuously declined. Other poets, with other and more
purely poetical gifts, arose to claim men's attention. Besides
Wordsworth, as already pointed out, Scott, Byron, Coleridge, Keats,
Shelley had found their various admirers, and drawn Crabbe's old public
from him. It is the purpose of this little volume to inquire into the
reasons why he is still justly counted a classic, and whether he has
not, as Tennyson said of him, "a world of his own," still rich in
interest and in profit for the explorer.

* * * * *

Aldeburgh--or as it came to be more commonly spelled in modern times,
Aldborough--is to-day a pleasant and quiet watering-place on the coast
of Suffolk, only a few miles from Saxmundham, with which it is connected
by a branch line of the Great Eastern Railway. It began to be known for
its fine air and sea-bathing about the middle of the last century, and
to-day possesses other attractions for the yachtsman and the golfer. But
a hundred years earlier, when Crabbe was born, the town possessed none
of these advantages and means of access, to amend the poverty and rough
manners of its boating and fishing inhabitants. In the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries Aldeburgh had been a flourishing port with a
population able to provide notable