great poet,
bringing us before Wordsworth out of the ruck of artificiality and
insincerity. Does any one suppose that Pope in his _Essay on Man_, that
Johnson in his _London_ or that Goldsmith in his _Deserted Village_ had
any idea other than the production of splendid phrases. Each and all of
them were brilliant men of letters. Crabbe was not a brilliant man of
letters, but he was a fine and a genuine poet. You will look in vain in
his truest work for the lyrical and musical gift that we associate with
poets who came after:--Shelley, Keats, Tennyson--poets who made Crabbe's
work quite distasteful for some three generations. Crabbe it has been
claimed had that gift also, to be found in "Sir Eustace Grey" and other
verses written under the inspiration of opium, as much of Coleridge's
best work was written--but it is not in these that his admirers will seek
to emphasize his achievement--it is in his work which treats of

The simple annals of my parish poor.

_The Village_, _The Parish Register_, _The Borough_, and many of the
_Tales_ bear witness to a clear vision of life as it is lived by the
majority of people born into this world. I have seen criticism of Crabbe
which calls him the poet who took the middle classes for his subjects,
criticism which compared him with George Eliot. All this is quite beside
the mark. Crabbe is pre-eminently the poet of the poor, with a lesson
for to-day as much as for a century ago. Villages are not now what they
were then, we are told. But I fully believe that there are all the
conditions of life to-day hidden beneath the surface as Crabbe's close
observations pictured them. "The altered position of the poor," says Mr.
Courthope, "has fortunately deprived his poems of much of the reality
they once possessed." I do not believe it. The closely packed towns,
the herding together of families, the squalor are still to be found in
our midst. Crabbe has his message for our time as well as for his own.
How he tore the veil from the conventional language of his day, the
picture of the ideal village where the happy peasantry passed through
life so joyously. Contrast such pictures with his sad declaration--

I've seldom known, though I have often read
Of happy peasants on their dying-bed.

Solution Crabbe offers none for the tragedy of poverty. He was no
politician. He signed the nomination paper for John Wilson Croker the
Tory in his native Aldeburgh, and he supported a