ot well be imagined. He exhibits just the contrary view
of human life to that which Gay has done in his Beggar's Opera. In a
word, Crabbe is the only poet who has attempted and succeeded in the
_still life_ of tragedy: who gives the stagnation of hope and fear--
the deformity of vice without the temptation--the pain of sympathy
without the interest--and who seems to rely, for the delight he is to
convey to his reader, on the truth and accuracy with which he describes
only what is disagreeable.

The best descriptive poetry is not, after all, to be found in our
descriptive poets. There are set descriptions of the flowers, for
instance, in Thomson, Cowper, and others; but none equal to those in
Milton's Lycidas, and in the Winter's Tale.

We have few good pastorals in the language. Our manners are not
Arcadian; our climate is not an eternal spring; our age is not the age
of gold. We have no pastoral-writers equal to Theocritus, nor any
landscapes like those of Claude Lorraine. The best parts of Spenser's
Shepherd's Calendar are two fables, Mother Hubberd's Tale, and the Oak
and the Briar; which last is as splendid a piece of oratory as any to be
found in the records of the eloquence of the British senate! Browne, who
came after Spenser, and Withers, have left some pleasing allegorical
poems of this kind. Pope's are as full of senseless finery and trite
affectation, as if a peer of the realm were to sit for his picture with
a crook and cocked hat on, smiling with an insipid air of no-meaning,
between nature and fashion. Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia is a lasting
monument of perverted power; where an image of extreme beauty, as that
of "the shepherd boy piping as though he should never be old," peeps out
once in a hundred folio pages, amidst heaps of intricate sophistry and
scholastic quaintness. It is not at all like Nicholas Poussin's picture,
in which he represents some shepherds wandering out in a morning of the
spring, and coming to a tomb with this inscription--"I also was an
Arcadian!" Perhaps the best pastoral in the language is that prose-poem,
Walton's Complete Angler. That well-known work has a beauty and romantic
interest equal to its simplicity, and arising out of it. In the
description of a fishing-tackle, you perceive the piety and humanity of
the author's mind. It is to be doubted whether Sannazarius's Piscatory
Eclogues are equal to the scenes described by Walton on the banks of the
river Lea. He