f Crabbe is scattered freely throughout the many volumes
of his correspondence, and he edited, as we all know, a book of
Selections, which I want to see reprinted. It contains a preface that,
it may be admitted, is not really worthy of FitzGerald, so lacking is it
in the force and vigour of his correspondence. But this also was in fact
yet another death-bed tribute, for it was, I think, one of the last
things FitzGerald wrote. FitzGerald, however, has done more for Crabbe
among the moderns than any other man. His keen literary judgment must
have brought new converts to that limited brotherhood of the elect, of
which this gathering forms no inconsiderable portion.

We have one advantage in speaking about George Crabbe that does not
obtain with any other poet of great eminence; that is to say, that his
life story has not been hackneyed by repetition. With almost any other
writer there is some standing biography which is widely familiar. The
_Life of George Crabbe_, written by his son, although it is one of the
very best biographies that I have ever read, is little known. It was
quite out of print for years, and it has never been reprinted separately
from the poems. It is an admirable biography, and it offers a
contradiction of the view occasionally urged that a man's life should not
be written by a member of his own family; for George Crabbe the second
would seem not only to have been an exceedingly able man, but possessed
of a frankness of disposition in criticizing his father which sons are
often prone to show in real life, but which, I imagine, they rarely show
in print. His book is a model of candid statement, treating of Crabbe's
little weaknesses--and who of us has not his little weaknesses--in the
most cheery possible manner. It is perhaps a small matter to tell us in
one place of his father's want of "taste," his insensibility to the
beauty of order in his composition--that had been done by the critics
before him; but he even has something to say about the philandering which
characterized the old gentleman in the last years of his life, his
apparent anxiety to get married again. {106} The only thing that he all
but ignores is Crabbe's opium habit--a habit that came to him as a
sedative from a painful complaint and inspired, as was the case with
Coleridge, his more melodious utterances. Taken altogether the picture
is as pleasant as it is capable and exhaustive. We see his early boyhood
at Aldeburgh, hi