ut
there pretty well even well-read people are content to leave him. "What
have our literary critics been about that they have suffered such a
writer to drop into neglect and oblivion?" asks a recent Quarterly
Reviewer. He does not live as Cowper does by a few lyrics and ballads
and by incomparable letters. Scarcely a line of Crabbe survives in
current conversation. If you turn to one of those handy volumes of
reference--Dictionaries of Quotation, as they are called--from which we
who are journalists are supposed to obtain most of the literary knowledge
that we are able to display on occasion, you will scarcely find a dozen
lines of Crabbe. And yet I venture to affirm that Crabbe has a great and
permanent place in literature, and that as he has been a favourite in the
past, he will become a favourite in the future. Crabbe can never lose
his place in the history of literature, a place as the forerunner of
Wordsworth and even of Cowper, but it would be a tragedy were he to drop
out of the category of poets that are read. A dainty little edition in
eight volumes is among my most treasured possessions. I have read it not
as we read some so-called literature, from a sense of duty, but with
unqualified interest. We have had much pure realism in these latter
days; why not let us return to the most realistic of the poets. He was
beloved by all the greatest among his contemporaries. Scott and
Wordsworth were devoted to his work, and so also was Jane Austen. At a
later date Tennyson praised him. We have heard quite recently the story
of Mr. James Russell Lowell in his last illness finding comfort in
reading Scott's _Rob Roy_. Let us turn to Scott's own last illness and
see what was the book he most enjoyed, almost on his deathbed:--

"Read me some amusing thing," said Sir Walter, "read me a bit of
Crabbe." "I brought out the first volumes of his old favourite that I
could lay hand on," says Lockhart, "and turned to what I remembered
was one of his favourite passages in it. He listened with great
interest. Every now and then he exclaimed, "Capital, excellent,
excellent, very good."

Cardinal Newman and Edward FitzGerald at the opposite poles, as it were,
of religious impressions, agree in a devotion to Crabbe's poetry.
Cardinal Newman speaks of _Tales of the Hall_ as "a poem whether in
conception or in execution one of the most touching in our language," and
in a footnote to his _Idea of a Unive