the place of his words, keeping the verse, and it would
not as a rule be much the worse. You cannot do either of these things
with poets who are poets. Therefore I shall conclude that save at the
rarest moments, moments of some sudden gust of emotion, some happy
accident, some special grace of the Muses to reward long and blameless
toil in their service, Crabbe was not a poet. But I have not the least
intention of denying that he was great, and all but of the greatest
among English writers.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] In 1834, after Crabbe's death, Wordsworth wrote to his son: "Your
father's works ... will last, from their combined merit as poetry and
truth, full as long as anything that has been expressed in verse since
the date of their first appearance." A very different estimate by
Wordsworth of Crabbe has been published in Mr. Clayden's _Rogers and his
Contemporaries_. Here he argues at great length that "Crabbe's verses
can in no sense be called poetry," and that "nineteen out of twenty of
his pictures are mere matter of fact." It is fair to say that this was
in 1808, before the appearance of "The Borough" and of almost all
Crabbe's best work.

[3] _Great Writers; Crabbe_: by T. E. Kebbel. London, 1888.

[4] Although constantly patronised by the Rutland family in successive
generations, and honoured by the attentions of "Old Q." and others, his
poems are full of growls at patrons. These cannot be mere echoes of
Oldham and Johnson, but their exact reason is unknown. His son's
reference to it is so extremely cautious that it has been read as a
confession that Crabbe was prone to his cups, and quarrelsome in them--a
signal instance of the unwisdom of not speaking out.

[5] Rogers told Ticknor in 1838 that "Crabbe was nearly ruined by grief
and vexation at the conduct of his wife for above seven years, at the
end of which time she proved to be insane." But this was long after her
death and Crabbe's, and it is not clear that while she was alive Rogers
knew Crabbe at all. Nor is there the slightest reason for attaching to
the phrase "vexation at the conduct" the sense which it would usually
have. A quatrain found after Crabbe's death wrapped round his wife's
wedding-ring is touching, and graceful in its old-fashioned way.

The ring so worn, as you behold,
So thin, so pale, is yet of gold:
The passion such it was to prove;
Worn with life's cares, love yet was love.

[6] See below, Essay on Hazlitt.