in the author, which is kept up throughout. Although, like all
satire, it belongs at best but to the outer courts of poetry, it is so
good that none can complain. Then the page is turned and one reads:--

"I met," said Richard, when returned to dine,
"In my excursion with a friend of mine."

It may be childish, it may be uncritical, but I own that such verse as
that excites in me an irritation which destroys all power of enjoyment,
except the enjoyment of ridicule. Nor let any one say that pedestrian
passages of the kind are inseparable from ordinary narrative in verse
and from the adaptation of verse to miscellaneous themes. If it were so
the argument would be fatal to such adaptation, but it is not. Pope
seldom indulges in such passages, though he does sometimes: Dryden never
does. He can praise, abuse, argue, tell stories, make questionable
jests, do anything in verse that is still poetry, that has a throb and a
quiver and a swell in it, and is not merely limp, rhythmed prose. In
Crabbe, save in a few passages of feeling and a great many of mere
description--the last an excellent setting for poetry but not
necessarily poetical--this rhythmed prose is everywhere. The matter
which it serves to convey is, with the limitations above given, varied,
and it is excellent. No one except the greatest prose novelists has such
a gallery of distinct, sharply etched characters, such another gallery
of equally distinct scenes and manner-pieces, to set before the reader.
Exasperating as Crabbe's style sometimes is, he seldom bores--never
indeed except in his rare passages of digressive reflection. It has, I
think, been observed, and if not the observation is obvious, that he has
done with the pen for the neighbourhood of Aldborough and Glemham what
Crome and Cotman have done for the neighbourhood of Norwich with the
pencil. His observation of human nature, so far as it goes, is not less
careful, true, and vivid. His pictures of manners, to those who read
them at all, are perfectly fresh and in no respect grotesque or faded,
dead as the manners themselves are. His pictures of motives and of
facts, of vice and virtue, never can fade, because the subjects are
perennial and are truly caught. Even his plays on words, which horrified
Jeffrey--

Alas! your reverence, wanton thoughts I grant
Were once my motive, now the thoughts of want,

and the like--are not worse than Milton's jokes on the guns. He has
immense talent