children, which had been brought about by the changed economic conditions. The, talked of the horros of the slave rade and of prison life. Through it all Crabbe remained utterly unmoved. We do not know that he was conscious at all of the world's life, he seems nou to have been. He could have said with Burke: "We fear God; we look up with awe to kings; with affection to parliaments; with duty to magistrates; with reverence to priests; and with respec o the nobility." (1) (1) Burke's Works V. 188, Reflections on the Revol..tion in France. He did say: "Is it not known, agreed, confirm'd, confess 'd, That of all people, we are govern'd best; We have the force of monarchies; are free, And have those prudent counsels that arise In grave and cautious aristocracies." (1) Tennyson said, "Crabbe has a world of his own; by virtue of that original genius, I suppose, which is said to entitle and carry the possessor to what we call immortality."(2) His world was rural Engåand and the England of Suffolk. He knew that thoroughly and he has drawn it for us with photographie accuracy. Nothing was so small and mean as to escape his notice. The Opinion of his Contemporaries. Now as to the truth of Crabbe's pictures. "Mr. Crabbe", says Jeffrey, "exhibits the common people of England pretty much as they are and as the must appear to every one who will take the trouble of examining into their condition....In short he shows us something which we have all seen, or may see, in real life; he draws from it such feelings and such reflections (1) Crabbe IV., 169. (2) Fitzgerald III., 490. as every human being must acknowledge that it is calculated to excite. He delights us by the truth, and vivid and pieturesque beauty of his representations, and by the force and pathos of the sensations with which we feel that they ought to be connected! (1) Another contemporary writes: "Mr. Crabbe is one of the most popular and admirable of our living authors.... His muse is not one of the 'Daughters of Memory' but the old toothless, mumbling dame herself, doling out the gossip and scandal of the neighborhood, recounting 'totidem verbis et literis', what happens in evry place of the kingdom every hour in the year, and fastening always on the worst as the most palatable morsels. But she is a circumstantial old lady, communicative, serupulous, leaving nothing to the imagination, harping on the smallest grievances, a village oracle and a critic, most veritable, most identical, bringing us acquainted with persons and things just as they chanced to exist, and giving us a local interest in all she knew s and tells." (2) "He is for the most part a peet only because he writes in lines, of ten syllables all the rest might be found in a newspaper or an eld magazine or a country register."(3) (1) Edinburgh Review XII. 133; Crabbe II. 81 note. (2) Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age p.239; (3) Ibid. 241. |