There is no “mealy-mouthed philanthropy” here.  No one can doubt the earnestness and truth of the poet’s mingled anger and sorrow.  The misery of irregular unions had never been “bitten in” with more convincing force.  The verse, moreover, in the passage is freer than usual from many of Crabbe’s eccentricities.  It is marked here and there by his fondness for verbal antithesis, almost amounting to the pun, which his parodists have not overlooked.  The second line indeed is hardly more allowable in serious verse than Dickens’s mention of the lady who went home “in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair.”  But Crabbe’s indulgence in this habit is never a mere concession to the reader’s flippant taste.  His epigrams often strike deeply home, as in this instance or in the line:—­

  “Too soon made happy, and made wise too late.”

The story that follows of Phoebe Dawson, which helped to soothe Fox in the last stage of his long disease, is no less powerful.  The gradual steps by which the village beauty is led to her ruin are told in a hundred lines with a fidelity not surpassed in the case of the story of Hetty Sorrel.  The verse, alternately recalling Pope and Goldsmith, is yet impelled by a moral intention, which gives it absolute individuality.  The picture presented is as poignantly pathetic as Frederick Walker’s Lost Path, or Langhorne’s “Child of misery, baptized in tears.”  That it will ever again be ranked with such may be doubtful, for technique is the first quality demanded of an artist in our day, and Crabbe’s technique is too often defective in the extreme.

These more tragic incidents of village life are, however, relieved at proper intervals by some of lighter complexion.  There is the gentleman’s gardener who has his successive children christened by the Latin names of his plants,—­Lonicera, Hyacinthus and Senecio.  Then we have the gallant, gay Lothario, who not only fails to lead astray the lovely Fanny Price, but is converted by her to worthier aims, and ends by becoming the best friend and benefactor of her and her rustic suitor.  There is an impressive sketch of the elderly prude:—­

      “—­wise, austere, and nice,
  Who showed her virtue by her scorn of vice”;

and another of the selfish and worldly life of the Lady at the Great House who prefers to spend her fortune in London, and leaves her tenants to the tender mercies of her steward.  Her forsaken mansion is described in lines curiously anticipating Hood’s Haunted House:—­

                “—­forsaken stood the Hall: 
  Worms ate the floors, the tap’stry fled the wall: 
  No fire the kitchen’s cheerless grate display’d;
  No cheerful light the long-closed sash convey’d;
  The crawling worm that turns a summer fly,
  Here spun his shroud, and laid him up to die
  The winter-death:—­upon the bed of state,
  The bat shrill shrieking woo’d his flickering mate.”