t with no sale. Burns had as yet published nothing.
But two poetic masterpieces, dealing with the joys and sorrows of
village folk, were fresh in Englishmen's memory. One was _The Elegy in a
Country Churchyard_, the other was _The Deserted Village_. Both had left
a deep impression upon their readers--and with reason--for two poems,
more certain of immortality, because certain of giving a pleasure that
cannot grow old-fashioned, do not exist in our literature. Each indeed
marked an advance upon all that English descriptive or didactic poets
had thus far contributed towards making humble life and rural scenery
attractive--unless we except the _Allegro_ of Milton and some passages
in Thomson's _Seasons_. Nor was it merely the consummate workmanship of
Gray and Goldsmith that had made their popularity. The genuineness of
the pathos in the two poems was beyond suspicion, although with Gray it
was blended with a melancholy that was native to himself. Although
their authors had not been brought into close personal relations with
the joys and sorrows dealt with, there was nothing of sentiment, in any
unworthy sense, in either poet's treatment of his theme. But the result
of their studies of humble village life was to produce something quite
distinct from the treatment of the realist. What they saw and remembered
had passed through the transfiguring medium of a poet's imagination
before it reached the reader. The finished product, like the honey of
the bee, was due to the poet as well as to the flower from which he had
derived the raw material.

It seems to have been generally assumed when Crabbe's _Village_
appeared, that it was of the nature of a rejoinder to Goldsmith's poem,
and the fact that Crabbe quotes a line from _The Deserted Village_,
"Passing rich on forty pounds a year," in his own description of the
village parson, might seem to confirm that impression. But the opening
lines of _The Village_ point to a different origin. It was rather during
those early years when George's father read aloud to his family the
pastorals of the so-called Augustan age of English poetry, that the boy
was first struck with the unreality and consequent worthlessness of the
conventional pictures of rural life. And in the opening lines of _The
Village_ he boldly challenges the judgment of his readers on this head.
The "pleasant land" of the pastoral poets was one of which George
Crabbe, not unjustly, "thought scorn."

"The village life, a