more room for him as an innovator in the art of fiction. Macaulay, in
his essay on Addison, has pointed out how the Roger de Coverley papers
gave the public of his day the first taste of a new and exquisite
pleasure. At the time "when Fielding was birds-nesting, and Smollett was
unborn," he was laying the foundations of the English novel of real
life. After nearly a hundred years, Crabbe was conferring a similar
benefit. The novel had in the interim risen to its full height, and then
sunk. When Crabbe published his _Parish Register_, the novels of the day
were largely the vapid productions of the Minerva Press, without
atmosphere, colour, or truth. Miss Edgeworth alone had already struck
the note of a new development in her _Castle Rackrent_, not to mention
the delightful stories in _The Parents' Assistant, Simple Susan, Lazy
Lawrence_, or _The Basket-Woman_. Galt's masterpiece, _The Annals of the
Parish_, was not yet even lying unfinished in his desk. The
Mucklebackits and the Headriggs were still further distant. Miss
Mitford's sketches in _Our Village_--the nearest in form to Crabbe's
pictures of country life--were to come later still. Crabbe, though he
adhered, with a wise knowledge of his own powers, to the heroic couplet,
is really a chief founder of the rural novel--the _Silas Marner_ and the
_Adam Bede_ of fifty years later. Of course (for no man is original) he
had developed his methods out of that of his predecessors. Pope was his
earliest master in his art. And what Pope had done in his telling
couplets for the man and woman of fashion--the Chloes and Narcissas of
his day--Crabbe hoped that he might do for the poor and squalid
inhabitants of the Suffolk seaport. Then, too, Thomson's "lovely young
Lavinia," and Goldsmith's village-parson and poor widow gathering her
cresses from the brook, had been before him and contributed their share
of influence. But Crabbe's achievement was practically a new thing. The
success of _The Parish Register_ was largely that of a new adventure in
the world of fiction. Whatever defects the critic of pure poetry might
discover in its workmanship, the poem was read for its stories--for a
truth of realism that could not be doubted, and for a pity that could
not be unshared.

In 1809 Crabbe forwarded a copy of his poems (now reduced by the
publisher to the form of two small volumes, and in their fourth edition)
to Walter Scott, who acknowledged them and Crabbe's accompanying letter