to harsh and grating verse?  The philosopher in painting the dark side of human nature may have reason on his side, and a moral lesson or remedy in view.  The tragic poet, who shews the sad vicissitudes of things and the disappointments of the passions, at least strengthens our yearnings after imaginary good, and lends wings to our desires, by which we, “at one bound, high overleap all bound” of actual suffering.  But Mr. Crabbe does neither.  He gives us discoloured paintings of life; helpless, repining, unprofitable, unedifying distress.  He is not a philosopher, but a sophist, a misanthrope in verse; a namby-pamby Mandeville, a Malthus turned metrical romancer.  He professes historical fidelity; but his vein is not dramatic; nor does he give us the pros and cons of that versatile gipsey, Nature.  He does not indulge his fancy, or sympathise with us, or tell us how the poor feel; but how he should feel in their situation, which we do not want to know.  He does not weave the web of their lives of a mingled yarn, good and ill together, but clothes them all in the same dingy linsey-woolsey, or tinges them with a green and yellow melancholy.  He blocks out all possibility of good, cancels the hope, or even the wish for it as a weakness; check-mates Tityrus and Virgil at the game of pastoral cross-purposes, disables all his adversary’s white pieces, and leaves none but black ones on the board.  The situation of a country clergyman is not necessarily favourable to the cultivation of the Muse.  He is set down, perhaps, as he thinks, in a small curacy for life, and he takes his revenge by imprisoning the reader’s imagination in luckless verse.  Shut out from social converse, from learned colleges and halls, where he passed his youth, he has no cordial fellow-feeling with the unlettered manners of the Village or the Borough; and he describes his neighbours as more uncomfortable and discontented than himself.  All this while he dedicates successive volumes to rising generations of noble patrons; and while he desolates a line of coast with sterile, blighting lines, the only leaf of his books where honour, beauty, worth, or pleasure bloom, is that inscribed to the Rutland family!  We might adduce instances of what we have said from every page of his works:  let one suffice—­

  “Thus by himself compelled to live each day,
  To wait for certain hours the tide’s delay;
  At the same times the same dull views to see,
  The bounding marsh-bank and the blighted tree;
  The water only when the tides were high,
  When low, the mud half-covered and half-dry;
  The sun-burnt tar that blisters on the planks,
  And bank-side stakes in their uneven ranks;
  Heaps of entangled weeds that slowly float,
  As the tide rolls by the impeded boat. 
  When tides were neap, and in the sultry day,
  Through the tall bounding mud-banks made their way,
  Which on each side rose swelling, and