nal) uniformity of his work is great, and its external
conformity to the traditions and expectations of the time at which it
first appeared is almost greater. A hasty judgment, and even one which,
though not hasty, is not very keen-sighted, might see little difference
between Crabbe and any poet from Pope to Goldsmith except the
innovators. He is all but constant to the heroic couplet--the Spenserian
introduction to _The Birth of Flattery_, the variously-grouped
octosyllabic quatrains of _Reflections_, _Sir Eustace Grey_, _The Hall
of Justice_, and _Woman_, with a few other deviations, being merely
islets among a wide sea of rhymed decasyllabics constituting at least
nineteen-twentieths of the poet's outpouring. Moreover, he was as a rule
constant, not merely to the couplet, but to what has been called the
"shut" couplet--the couplet more or less rigidly confined to itself,
and not overlapping. But he did sometimes overlap, and either in fealty
to Dryden, or from a secret feeling of the craving for freedom which his
more lawless contemporaries expressed in other ways, he reverted to the
Drydenian triplet and Alexandrine on which Pope had frowned. In Crabbe's
couplet, too, there is something which distinguishes it from almost all
others. This something varies very much in appeal. It is sometimes, nay,
too often, a rather ludicrous something, possessing a sort of awkward
prosaic "flop," which is excellently caricatured in _Rejected
Addresses_. But it always shows signs of a desire to throw the emphasis
with more variation than the icy uniformity of the Popian cadence
admitted; and it is sometimes curiously effective.

Crabbe's position, independently of the strange gap in his publication
(which has been variously accounted for), is not a little singular. The
greater and the better part of his work was composed when the Romantic
revival was in full swing, but it shows little or no trace of the
influence of that revival in versification or diction. His earliest
attempts do indeed show the same reaction from Pope to Dryden (of whom
we know that he was an eager student) which is visible in Cowper and
Churchill; and throughout his work, both earlier and later, there is a
ruthless discarding of conventional imagery and a stern attention to the
realities of scenery and character. But Crabbe has none of the Grace of
the new dispensation, if he has some glimpses of its Law. He sails so
close to the wind of poetry that he is sometim