pointed him to the livings of Muston in Leicestershire, and West Arlington in Lincolnshire, and in 1789 he removed to Muston. This period, though barren of literary results, was not so in effort. Crabbe wrote much, but acting upon the advice of friends, committed to the flames an essay on Botany, three novels, and a volume of tales in verse.

The poet's next work was "The Parish Register," which he submitted to Fox, who made a number of criticisms and suggestions which Crabbe carefully observed. In the autumn of 1807 the "Parish Register" was published, and with it, besides some reprints, three new poems, "The Birth of Flattery," "Sir Eustace Gray," and "The Hall of Justice." The work was received with warm expressions of approval from both the public and the press; and the Edinburgh Review, which had come into existence since the publication of his other poems, spoke so highly of it that the whole of the first edition was sold out within two days of the appearance of the Review. "The Parish Register" is an advance upon "The Village," in its human interest, its delineations of character, and its depth of feeling. "The Hall of Justice," and "Sir Eustace Gray," are among the finest productions of Crabbe's genius.

Towards the end of 1809, Crabbe visited Aldeburgh, where he finished "The Borough," a poem in twentyfour letters, which was published by Hatchard in 1810. This work in its turn was pronounced to be superior to its predecessors, as the "Tales in Verse," published two years later, were declared to be superior to it. "The Borough" certainly contains some of the poet's most powerful writing, and is probably, all round, his best work.

The "Tales in Verse," published in August 1812, are twenty-one in number, and show the descriptive power of "The Village" and "The Parish Register," and the mastery in the delineation of character and the analysis of motive of "The Borough" in a wider sphere of action.

In the autumn of 1813 the poet became a widower. and was laid aside by a severe illness. On his recovery, the Duke of Rutland, the son of his former patron, presented him with the living of Trowbridge in Wiltshire, where he was inducted June 14th, 1814. Here he saw Samuel Rogers, whom he afterwards visited at St. James' Place, where he met the group of wits and poets who may be said to have succeeded the splendid company he had mingled with thirty years before. Johnson, Burke, and Sir Joshua Reynolds had all passed away; and Crabbe, who spent the earlier days in their society, now joined "the feast of reason and the flow of soul" with Rogers, Campbell, Byron, Moore, Scott, and Canning, himself the solitary connecting link between the old time and the new.

In the full tide of his popularity Crabbe published his "Tales of the Hall," June 1819. This work, like its predecessors, was a great and immediate success. Mr. Murray paid the poet no less a sum than £3,000 for "The Tales" and the remaining copyright of his other works; and Crabbe was so delighted with his success that he insisted on carrying the bills, with which he had been paid, down to Trowbridge to show his son. At the invitation of Scott, Crabbe visited Edinburgh, where he met Professor Wilson, James Hogg, Jeffrey, and others; after which he paid annual visits to

London, renewing old friendships and forming new, among which those of Wordsworth, Joanna Baillie, Wilberforce, and Southey, may be named.

At the end of 1831, while on a visit to his son at Pucklechurch, Crabbe preached twice on one Sunday with so much vigour that his son told him that he had another ten years before him, to which he gave the significant reply, "Ten weeks." The poet was, in this instance, a true prophet, for two months after his return to Trowbridge, he caught a cold from which he never recovered. Crabbe died on the 3rd of February, 1832, at about seven o'clock in the morning, in the seventy-eighth year of his age. Crabbe's posthumous "Tales" were published Iwith his life by his son in 1834, and a volume of posthumous sermons followed in 1850.

Crabbe was fortunate enough to gain the approval of both schools of contemporary criticism. His adoption of the old forms gained for him the friendship of the one, and his infusion of the new spirit excited for him the sympathy of the other. Wordsworth said of Crabbe's poems, "They will last, from their combined merits as truth and poetry, fully as long as anything that has been expressed in verse since they first made their appearance;" and Byron, who began, in 1809, by describing him in his "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers as "Nature's sternest painter yet her best," said in 1816 that he thought "Crabbe and Coleridge the first of these times in point of power and genius," and in 1820 declared him to be the "first of living poets." While contemporary "English bards" thus paid tribute to his genius, the "Scotch Reviewers" were equally warm in their appreciation; Jeffrey declaring that Crabbe

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was the author of "some of the most original and powerful poetry which the world had ever seen;" and Professor Wilson describing him as confessedly the most original and vivid painter of the vast varieties of common life, that England had ever produced."

Doubtless Crabbe has suffered more from the admiration of his friends than from the attacks of his enemies. Byron's laudation of him as the saviour of the school of Pope was ill-judged and premature. He adopted Pope's form, and in some measure his style, because it was the one most familiar to him, and because he found facility in its use, but he was not of Pope's school nor did he save it. The wit who called Crabbe "Pope in worsted stockings " was judging by manner rather than matter, and was just as wrong as he would have been had he called Pope, "Crabbe in silk tights." The point of difference was in the men, the point of similitude, in so far as it exists, is in the garments, though there is a difference in the texture of these. As a versifier Pope was greatly his superior, but Crabbe was a better man; and in place of brilliant diction and polished periods gave deep feeling and high moral purpose. Crabbe's faults were the result of uncultured taste (in which he is a contrast to Pope), and a want of care in composition, of which Pope was never guilty. Crabbe's work abounds in "tricky terms, awkward conceits, and illegal constraints of language," and he not unfrequently oversteps the line that divides refinement from vulgarity. With the exactness of a Dutch painter he is apt to spoil his pictures with vulgar detail, and mar his descriptions with prosaic and

commonplace allusions. But, allowing for these defects there remains a large body of powerful poetry which occupies a place of its own in English literature. Crabbe was pre-eminently the poet of the poor. In early life he had lived among them and mingled with their joys and sorrows, and as he grew older, whether in the capacity of a surgeon's assistant, or in the discharge of a clergyman's duty, he must have often witnessed the extremities of sin and suffering which he afterwards so vividly described. He had a purpose, and he made his purpose clear; it was to paint life as he found it, to show human nature to be the same, whether clothed in rags, or robed in purple and fine linen, to trace sin to its consequent suffering and show how easily, if not innocently, humanity may sink lower and lower in the moral scale; and yet to preach forgiveness for repentance to the most wretched and debased, and to offer to the "weary and heavy laden," as from the Judgment-seat in "The Hall of Justice," in the stanza which Sir Walter Scott applied to the deathbed of Meg Merrilies, the conIsolation of the thought, that,

"-though seduced and led astray,

Thou'st travell'd far and wander'd long;
Thy God hath seen thee all the way,

And all the turns that led thee wrong."

To the accomplishment of a high moral purpose Crabbe brought a rare combination of powerful qualities. Professor Wilson was right when he said, "The power is almost miraculous with which he has stirred up nature from its very dregs, and shown working in them the common spirit of