the author.”  There were unfriendly critics, however, in Crabbe’s native county who professed to think otherwise, and “whispered that the manuscript had been so cobbled by Burke and Johnson that its author did not know it again when returned to him.”  On which Crabbe’s son rejoins that “if these kind persons survived to read The Parish Register their amiable conjectures must have received a sufficient rebuke.”

This confident retort is not wholly just.  There can be no doubt that some special mannerisms and defects of Crabbe’s later style had been kept in check by the wise revision of his friends.  And again, when after more than twenty years Crabbe produced The Parish Register, that poem, as we shall see, had received from Charles James Fox something of the same friendly revision and suggestion as The Village had received from Burke and Johnson.

The Village, in quarto, published by J. Dodsley, Pall Mall, appeared in May 1783, and at once attracted attention by novel qualities.  Among these was the bold realism of the village-life described, and the minute painting of the scenery among which it was led.  Cowper had published his first volume a year before, but thus far it had failed to excite general interest, and had met with no sale.  Burns had as yet published nothing.  But two poetic masterpieces, dealing with the joys and sorrows of village folk, were fresh in Englishmen’s memory.  One was The Elegy in a Country Churchyard, the other was The Deserted Village.  Both had left a deep impression upon their readers—­and with reason—­for two poems, more certain of immortality, because certain of giving a pleasure that cannot grow old-fashioned, do not exist in our literature.  Each indeed marked an advance upon all that English descriptive or didactic poets had thus far contributed towards making humble life and rural scenery attractive—­unless we except the Allegro of Milton and some passages in Thomson’s Seasons.  Nor was it merely the consummate workmanship of Gray and Goldsmith that had made their popularity.  The genuineness of the pathos in the two poems was beyond suspicion, although with Gray it was blended with a melancholy that was native to himself.  Although their authors had not been brought into close personal relations with the joys and sorrows dealt with, there was nothing of sentiment, in any unworthy sense, in either poet’s treatment of his theme.  But the result of their studies of humble village life was to produce something quite distinct from the treatment of the realist.  What they saw and remembered had passed through the transfiguring medium of a poet’s imagination before it reached the reader.  The finished product, like the honey of the bee, was due to the poet as well as to the flower from which he had derived the raw material.