reading the new poems in print at the manifest need of revision and correction before they could be given to the world.  They delicately hint that the meaning is often obscure, and the “images left imperfect.”  This criticism is absolutely just, but unfortunately some less well-judging persons though “of the highest eminence in literature” had advised the contrary.  So “second thoughts prevailed,” instead of those “third thoughts which are a riper first,” and the Tales, or a selection from them, were printed.  They have certainly not added to Crabbe’s reputation.  There are occasional touches of his old and best pathos, as in the story of Rachel; and in The Ancient Mansion there are brief descriptions of rural nature under the varying aspects of the seasons, which exhibit all Crabbe’s old and close observation of detail, such as:—­

  “And then the wintry winds begin to blow,
  Then fall the flaky stars of gathering snow,
  When on the thorn the ripening sloe, yet blue,
  Takes the bright varnish of the morning dew;
  The aged moss grows brittle on the pale,
  The dry boughs splinter in the windy gale.”

But there is much in these last Tales that is trivial and tedious, and it must be said that their publication has chiefly served to deter many readers from the pursuit of what is best and most rewardful in the study of Crabbe.  To what extent the new edition served to revive any flagging interest in the poet cannot perhaps be estimated.  The edition must have been large, for during many years past no book of the kind has been more prominent in second-hand catalogues.  As we have seen, the popularity of Crabbe was already on the wane, and the appearance of the two volumes of Tennyson, in 1842, must farther have served to divert attention from poetry so widely different.  Workmanship so casual and imperfect as Crabbe’s had now to contend with such consummate art and diction as that of The Miller’s Daughter and Dora.

As has been more than once remarked, these stories belong to the category of fiction as well as of poetry, and the duration of their power to attract was affected not only by the appearance of greater poets, but of prose story-tellers with equal knowledge of the human heart, and with other gifts to which Crabbe could make no claim.  His knowledge and observation of human nature were not perhaps inferior to Jane Austen’s, but he could never have matched her in prose fiction.  He certainly was not deficient in humour, but it was not his dominant gift, as it was hers.  Again, his knowledge of the life and social ways of the class to which he nominally belonged, does not seem to have been intimate.  Crabbe could not have written prose fiction with any approximation to the manners of real life.  His characters would have certainly thou’ed and thee’ed one another as they do in his verse, and a clergyman would always have been addressed as “Reverend Sir!”