REV. GEORGE CRABBE.

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correctness, were placed by Professor Wilson at the head of all our translations of Homer. With three such testimonials for his epitaph, it cannot be said that Sotheby, as a literary labourer, lived in vain.

Without any disparagement to Darwin or Hayley, to Lewis or Leyden, to Grahame or Kirke White, to Canning, or Frere, or Gifford, or Bloomfield, or other of the poets just adverted to, a far greater now comes before us in the author of "The Village," "The Parish Register," and the "Lyrical Tales." George Crabbe emerged from an obscurity scarcely less hopeless than that of the author of "The Farmer's Boy"-certainly more so than that of Robert Burns. The details of his infancy and boyhood are such as to weigh on the heart like a very nightmare-an utter hopelessness seemed to environ him; but the Cyclops was not even thus to be shut up in his cave. Through a more than Cretan labyrinth of doubt and dismay and darkness, he battled his way over all obstacles forwards to the open day; and his works are now, and for ever, a prominent and a distinctive portion of our literature. Crabbe is alike the Teniers and the Wilkie of our poets. He was not unfelicitously designated by Sir Walter Scott "the British Juvenal;" and Lord Byron characterises him as "Nature's sternest painter, but her best."

It is not my purpose to interfere at all with the strange and striking biography of George Crabbe, or to record the early struggles under which most would have sunk despairing, but which at length terminated in his introduction to Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson, and in the publication, first of "The Library," and then of "The Village "-poems which, for their raciness and originality of manner, as well as truthful description, attracted immediate notice. In them he did not show that confidence of composition which he afterwards did, when an author exulting in the exuberance of mature strength, and when possessed of a popularity

40

CRABBE'S WORKS-THEIR ORIGINALITY.

which licensed an occasional vagary; but they contain passages which Crabbe himself never afterwards excelled-his description of a "Parish Workhouse" being as likely to endure as any equal number of couplets in British literature.

Crabbe now settled down into a parish clergyman, the duties of which from that time till his death-half a century afterwards-he most faithfully and assiduously performed. For a great number of years his voice was unheard; but, happily for literature, the fire of his inspiration had been only stifled up, not extinguished, and was yet to break forth more brilliantly. "The Village was published in 1783; and it was not until 1807, after a lapse of twenty-four years, that he again appeared as a poet in his "Parish Register"-certainly one of the most characteristic of his writings, whether we regard subject or mode of handling. "The Borough" and "The Tales "-each marked by the same daring originality in matter and manner, and by the same very peculiar beauties and defectsfollowed within the succeeding five years, thoroughly winning for their author a place among the master spirits of his age. The last great work of Crabbe was the "Tales of the Hall," which appeared in 1819, and exhibited no symptoms of falling off; although in these his exhibitions of character are, for the most part, taken from higher grades of society than those in the depicturing of which he had won his early laurels. A subsequent collection-but scarcely equal to these in merit, from not having received the master's finishing touches, (for Crabbe, with all his seeming fluency and ease, was a great elaborator,)-appeared posthumously, under the able editorship of his son George.

If originality, if the striking out a new path, constitutes one of the highest claims to poetical excellence, few are entitled to stand in the same rank with Crabbe.

CRABBE'S WORKS-THEIR ORIGINALITY.

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Indeed, it would be difficult to point to any prototype, either as regards his style or his subjects. The nearest approach I have met with to his sententiousness, is in the old, quaint, pointed satires of Dr Donne ; and something of his graphic truth and elaborate minuteness of description may be found in the verse of Chaucer, more especially "The Canterbury Pilgrims." But Crabbe added much-very much-which is unequivocally his own, and which acknowledges no borrowed lustre. His sea-side sketches are taken from observation; they savour of the briny breeze and the sea-weed-of the decaying fish on the beach-of the tarry boat and its bilge-water, and are not mere imaginary limnings like the "Piscatory Eclogues" of Sannazarius, or of Phineas Fletcher, where "Tom Bowling" figures as Thelgon, and "Black-eyed Susan" as Chromis. He "paints the cot as truth would paint it, and as bards would not." His pictures of humble life have none of the "Peter Pastoral" about them, and are invaluable as truthful contrasts to the Hobbinols and Diggin Davies of Spenser to the Marinas and Dorydons of William Browne-the Molly Moggs and Evanders of Gay-the Damons and Daphnes of Pope-and the Corydons and Phyllises of Shenstone. These were all alike creatures of a cloudland Arcadia, moulded into any form or figure of the poet's imagination, and who might have pipes in their mouths, either for tobacco or music. Allan Ramsay is the only predecessor of Crabbe who approaches him in truth; but the difference between their protraitures is as wide as that between the limnings of Titian and those of Rembrandt. Ramsay's is the Doric, and, as far as his sketches go, the real sunshiny Doric. Crabbe's landscapes take in a wider and much more varied range-the sandy sea-coast, and its stunted belts of woodland-the wide expanse of black, bleak moor, with its enlivening patches of cultivation -the umbrageous forest, with its tumbling and tossing

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THEIR TRUTHFULNESS.

stream-and the green ascent of hills overlooking all these. He gives us the shade as well as the sunshinethe gloom as well as the glitter; nay, he seems to prefer Nature in her wintry to her summer aspects, and to paint men and manners in hues whose truth we are often called upon to deplore, while forced to acknowledge.

The characters of Crabbe are those of real and everyday life, not monsters of iniquity gorgeously decked out in silks and satins, like the heroes of Lord Byron; nor angelic visions of humanity, like many of the personages of Moore. They perform their parts, just as their prototypes do in the great world; but we fondly hope that a larger portion of their vices than of their virtues has been disclosed to us. He ransacks every lazar-house of the heart, and anatomises the very heart itself, with an unsparing scalpel. His forenoon's walk is amid the hovels of poverty, the abodes of guilt, of misery, and of wretchedness, where the thatch is rotting on the roof, and where the window, rudely patched with paper, "admits the tempest, yet excludes the day." Nothing is so insignificant as to escape his notice, from the ashesheap and the miry kennel before the threshold, to the undisturbed and downy dust in the window-corner; from the fishing-rod or fowling-piece hung in the secret nook, to the fir-deal table, daubed with the glistening and glutinous streaks of last night's ale. So with the inmates—nothing in the outward man or woman escapes observation and chronicling, from the wellworn cap and kerchief to the pieced jacket, the old glazed hat, and the tattered shoes. He enumerates the very plants in their little gardens, and the succession of their yearly crops. Everything that relates to themselves, and to their fathers before them-what were their callings, and what their characters-the number of their sons and daughters, dutiful or rebellious

their respective ages-their qualifications and defi

CRABBE AND ROBERT BURNS.

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ciencies the colour of their eyes, and the cut of their hair.

In Burns, poverty, from the fascination and heartiness of his pictures, is made to look almost like a piece of good fortune. It is associated with kindly simplicity, with proud patriotism, with devoted affection, with uncompromising independence. Pastoral and patriarchal integrity and uprightness are weighed in the balance with the precarious entrancements of luxury and refinement; and life, in its lowliness, is invested with a peculiar charm, which might be ill exchanged for the polish of rank, or the varnished hollowness of artificial manners. Such delineations we have in the "Hallowe'en," in his "Epistles to his Brother Poets,” and in many of the immortal "Songs ;" and who ever rose from "The Cottar's Saturday Night" without a heightened glow of religious feeling, and without a proud conviction that the true glory of man is based, not on his mere transient external circumstances, but on his moral nature? Crabbe's etchings are equally deep, but very different; and, unfortunately, I fear, not therefore a jot less faithful. In his poetry he reads us a stern and instructive lesson, by exhibiting to us the sinfulness of sin in the certain misery of its issues, while he endeavours to lower the pride of the human heart, by showing how often its motives originate in selfishness. The gloom of his pictures is, however, occasionally lighted up by redeeming traits, tending to show that, fallen though our nature may be, something of "the divinity yet stirs within us." His episodes of "Phoebe Dawson" in the "Borough," of "Ruth," and of "Charles the Painter" in "Tales of the Hall," and his tale of "Resentment," where the hard-hearted wife allows the old man and his ass to shiver in the winter's snow, overflow with touching tenderness; while the stories of "Peter Grimes" in "The Parish Register," and of " Smugglers and Poachers" in "Tales of the Hall," on the other