Browning or a Crabbe, he writes to please himself, not the public, and will not trouble himself even to correct obvious faults. We may wish then that he had avoided the exceeding flatness of some of his lines and couplets; it is never effective to be ridiculous, and Crabbe is not unfrequently ridiculous but we are not to complain that a poet did not write prose.

*

Moreover, his prose style is conventional and stilted. His dedications must have been tedious even in an age of dedications. His biography of Lord Robert Manners is pompous and heavy. Though he could write letters full of grace and ease, like those to his Quaker friend, Mrs. Leadbetter, he seems to have been burdened by the sense of what was due to the dignity of prose composition, and prose essays from his pen would have been intolerable. Yet he is in most of his pieces an essayist of the Addison type; he states a theme and illustrates it, and the characters and incidents are subordinated to the theme. Sometimes the story-teller prevails over the essayist, and then he is at his best. The Parting Hour' is not unworthy to be compared with 'Enoch Arden.' 'The Danger of Delay' is an excellent story admirably told; and generally when he is interested in his story, he does not merely introduce it into his theme, like an anecdote in a sermon, but he interests his readers too, and the thing lives. Too often, it must be confessed, he mistakes description for incident, or incident for circumstance; his figures do not move on the stage, from want of vitality and definition; and we find it hard to keep count of so many men, maids and widows, when every man and woman has a story of love or no love. Where he is tedious, it is because the essayist prevails over the poet, and thinks more of the moral than of the people whose sins and sorrows point it.

An instance of Crabbe's method is more to the purpose than a general reference. Take the 'Tales of the Hall," the most pleasing and not the least truthful of Crabbe's works. There is a slender thread of persons and circumstancesit can hardly be called a story-on which other studies of persons and circumstances are strung. A more skilful narrator would lift the persons and circumstances into actuality by dwelling on harmonies and enforcing contrasts. Good narrative comes near to drama, and we shall find no drama in Crabbe. But we must go at his pace, and his ambling nag does a good day's journey.

* Annual Register, 1783.

The principal characters in the Tales of the Hall' two brothers, long parted and partly estranged, who meet in middle age. The younger brother, Richard, pays a visit to the bachelor, George. They find that they like each other. Richard stays on much longer than he would in these days of short invitations. He is introduced to the neighbours, each of whom in turn tells the story of his life. This is indeed a very simple artifice; but we like to hear Crabbe talk, and when we come to the end the story is told and a picture drawn:

'The brothers met, with both too much at heart
To be observant of each other's part;

"Brother, I'm glad," was all that George could say,
Then stretched his hand, and turned his head away;

Richard meantime made some attempts to speak,
Strong in his purpose, in his trial weak. . .
At length affection, like a risen tide,
Stood still, and then seem'd slowly to subside;
Each on the other's looks had power to dwell,
And brother brother greeted passing well.'

George, the elder brother, has tried life in a leisurely way, neither expecting much from it, nor contented with what it has given him. He falls in love at first sight, but his father disapproves, and sends him to business; the nymph,' as Crabbe provokingly calls her, disappears, and he only finds her years after, draggled and desecrated, ' slave to the 'vices that she never loved.' Love is dead, but pity and friendship and some vestiges of the old flame draw him to her, and when she dies of consumption he is at hand to soothe her.

'Still as I went came other change-the frame

And features wasted, and yet slowly came

The end; and so inaudible the breath,

And still the breathing, we exclaimed-" "Tis Death!"
When as it came-or did my fancy trace

That lively, lovely flushing o'er the face,

Bringing back all that my young heart impressed

It came and went !-she sighed, and was at rest!'

Here is the outline of a complete romantic tragedy. Do we wish the story told in full? Perhaps not; at any rate, not by Crabbe, whose art is to outline and suggest, not to narrate and dramatise. The brother proceeds with his tale :

'Home I returned, with spirits in that state
Of vacant woe I care not to relate,

Nor how, deprived of all her hope and strength,
My soul turned feebly to the world at length.'

:

The kindly and impressionable but indolent character became selfish from want of objects to take him out of himself, took the day as it came, without much joy or sorrow or introspection.

'Ease leads to habit, as success to ease,

He lives by rule who lives himself to please;
For change is trouble, and a man of wealth
Consults his quiet as he guards his health;
And habit now on George had sovereign power,
His actions all had their accustomed hour:
At the fixed time he slept, he walked, he read,
Or sought his grounds, his gruel, and his bed
;
For every season he with caution dressed,
And morn and eve had the appropriate vest;
He talked of early mists, and night's cold air,
And in one spot was fixed his Worship's chair.'

His brother's visit supplies the missing motive, and in spite of misunderstandings bred of close but unfamiliar intercourse, which make each brother think that the other is tired of him, George cannot let Richard go.

Say, how am I to live
Without the comfort thou art wont to give?
How will the heavy hours my mind afflict,—
No one t' agree, no one to contradict,
None to awake, excite me, or prevent,
To hear a tale, or hold an argument?

Who now by manners lively or serene
Comes between me and sorrow like a screen,
And giving, what I looked not to have found,
A care, an interest in the world around?'

The end of the story is that George buys an estate and gives it to his brother's wife :

"It is my brother's! "—

"No!" he answers, "No!

'Tis to thy own possession that we go;

It is thy wife's, and will thy children's be,

Earth, wood, and water !-all for thine and thee.

There wilt thou soon thine own Matilda view-
She knows our deed, and she approves it too;

Here, on this lawn, thy boys and girls shall run,
And play their gambols when their tasks are done;
There, from that window, shall their mother view
The happy tribe and smile at all they do;

While thou, more gravely, hiding thy delight,
Shalt cry O! childish!' and enjoy the sight." '

The tale is fanciful, but no better scheme could be devised for the portrayal of character in Crabbe's manner. We should like to dwell upon the contrasted character of Richard, if only to quote again the often-quoted passage 'Richard's boyhood,' admired by Newman.

But before we end we must give one instance of a narrative of pathos chosen out of many because it is another of the Tales of the Hall.'

Ruth's story is told by her mother, Hannah, a fisherman's wife :

But

'I could perceive, though Hannah bore full well
The ills of life, that few with her would dwell,
pass away like shadows o'er the plain
From flying clouds, and leave it fair again;
Still every evil, be it great or small,
Would one past sorrow to the mind recall,
The grand disease of life, to which she turns,
And common cares and lighter suffering spurns.
"O! these are nothing, they will never heed
Such idle contests who have fought indeed
And have the wounds unclosed "-I understood
My hint to speak, and my design pursued,
Curious the secret of that heart to find,

66

To mirth, to song, to laughter loud inclined,

And yet to bear and feel a weight of grief behind.'

Ruth had a lover carried off by a press-gang when the marriage-day was in sight; she gave birth to a child who never knew his father, killed in battle. The prudence of the father, which had delayed her marriage, now again brought about tragedy.

In Hannah's words:

'There was a Teacher, where my husband went

Sent, as he told the people-what he meant

You cannot understand, but-he was sent.'

The preacher, a weaver by trade, falls in love with Ruth whilst ministering to her; and her father, admiring him for the large congregations he drew, and

Ruth must marry her sanctified lover or go on the parish Ruth protests:

with her child.

'Can the form or rite Make me a wife in my Creator's sight?'

As for the workhouse

'Never, dear mother! my poor boy and I
Will at the mercy of a parish lie . . .
Mixed with a crew long wedded to disgrace,
A vulgar, forward, equalising race.'

Ruth's choice is to drown herself in the sea. is described by the old wife :

'The east wind roared, the sea returned the sound,
And the rain fell as if the world were drowned;

And she was gone! the waters wide and deep
Rolled o'er her body as she lay asleep.
She heard no more the angry waves and wind,
She heard no more the threat'ning of mankind.

But O! what storm was in that mind! what strife

That could compel her to lay down her life!'

The scene

Nor is the scene in the cottage the less humorously touched on:—

'My good man,

To kindness frightened, with a groan began
To talk of Ruth, and pray; and then he took
The Bible down, and read the holy book.'

Hurrying to the shore, he fancied that he saw her ghost rise from the sea. Hannah herself indulged in pious reflexions on the power of spirits to return, seeing that her daughter kept

'that world in sight

Where frailty mercy finds, and wrong has right;

but she concludes with the earth-born ejaculation'Well had it still remained a world unseen.'

Crabbe's distinguishing characteristic-that which gives him some title to the name of a great poet-is his clearsightedness and knowledge of human nature. Closely let 'me view the naked human heart,' he writes; and he was as good as his word. He is a satirist who lacks the indignation of Juvenal, the savageness of Swift, the goodhumoured contempt of Samuel Butler, and the largehearted cynicism-if it can be called cynicism-of Thackeray; he has still less of the grim realism of Hardy; he has much of the gloom of Lucan and Tacitus, though in a far narrower field; and something of the happy generalising power of Horace, though none of his serenity and playfulness. Such sayings, for example, as the qui fit,

VOL. CXCVIII. NO. COCCV.

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