me "Posthumous Tales" and to
the inclusion by his son of divers fragments both in the Life and in the
Works. It is understood, however, that there are still considerable
remains in manuscript; perhaps they might be published with less harm to
the author's fame and with less fear of incurring a famous curse than in
the case of almost any other poet.

For Crabbe, though by no means always at his best, is one of the most
curiously equal of verse-writers. "Inebriety" and such other very
youthful things are not to be counted; but between "The Village" of 1783
and the "Posthumous Tales" of more than fifty years later, the
difference is surprisingly small. Such as it is, it rather reverses
ordinary experience, for the later poems exhibit the greater play of
fancy, the earlier the exacter graces of form and expression. Yet there
is nothing really wonderful in this, for Crabbe's earliest poems were
published under severe surveillance of himself and others, and at a time
which still thought nothing of such value in literature as correctness,
while his later were written under no particular censorship, and when
the Romantic revival had already, for better or worse, emancipated the
world. The change was in Crabbe's case not wholly for the better. He
does not in his later verse become more prosaic, but he becomes
considerably less intelligible. There is a passage in "The Old
Bachelor," too long to quote but worth referring to, which, though it
may be easy enough to understand it with a little goodwill, I defy
anybody to understand in its literal and grammatical meaning. Such
welters of words are very common in Crabbe, and Johnson saved him from
one of them in the very first lines of "The Village." Yet Johnson could
never have written the passages which earned Crabbe his fame. The great
lexicographer knew man in general much better than Crabbe did; but he
nowhere shows anything like Crabbe's power of seizing and reproducing
man in particular. Crabbe is one of the first and certainly one of the
greatest of the "realists" who, exactly reversing the old philosophical
signification of the word, devote themselves to the particular only. Yet
of the three small volumes by which he, after his introduction to
Burke, made his reputation, and on which he lived for a quarter of a
century, the first and the last display comparatively little of this
peculiar quality. "The Library" and "The Newspaper" are characteristic
pieces of the school of Pope