rapid and continuous transition from
scene to scene, and period to period, is the same in both. Foreign kings
and other potentates reappear, as with De Quincey, in ghostly and
repellent forms:--

"I know not how, but I am brought
Into a large and Gothic hall,
Seated with those I never sought--
Kings, Caliphs, Kaisers--silent all;
Pale as the dead; enrobed and tall,
Majestic, frozen, solemn, still;
They make my fears, my wits appal,
And with both scorn and terror fill."

This, again, may be compared, or rather contrasted, with Coleridge's
_Pains of Sleep_, and it can hardly be doubted that the two poems had a
common origin.

The year 1805 was the last of Crabbe's sojourn in Suffolk, and it was
made memorable in the annals of literature by the appearance of the _Lay
of the Last Minstrel_. Crabbe first met with it in a bookseller's shop
in Ipswich, read it nearly through while standing at the counter, and
pronounced that a new and great poet had appeared.

This was Crabbe's first introduction to one who was before long to prove
himself one of his warmest admirers and friends. It was one of Crabbe's
virtues that he was quick to recognise the worth of his poetical
contemporaries. He had been repelled, with many others, by the weak side
of the _Lyrical Ballads_, but he lived to revere Wordsworth's genius.
His admiration for Burns was unstinted. But amid all the signs of a
poetical _renaissance_ in progress, and under a natural temptation to
tread the fresh woods and pictures new that were opening before him, it
showed a true judgment in Crabbe that he never faltered in the
conviction that his own opportunity and his own strength lay elsewhere.
Not in the romantic or the mystical--not in perfection of form or melody
of lyric verse, were his own humbler triumphs to be won. Like
Wordsworth, he was to find a sufficiency in the "common growth of
mother-earth," though indeed less in her "mirth" than in her "tears,"
Notwithstanding his _Eustace Grey_, and _World of Dreams_, and the
really powerful story of Aaron the Gipsy (afterwards to appear as the
_The Hall of Justice_), Crabbe was returning to the themes and the
methods of _The Village_. He had already completed _The Parish
Register_, and had _The Borough_ in contemplation, when he returned to
his Leicestershire parish. The woods of Belvoir, and the rural charms of
Parham and Glemham, had not dimmed the memory of the sordid little
fishing-town, w