The appearance of these two prominent reviews to a certain extent influenced the direction of Crabbe’s genius for the remainder of his life.  He evidently had given them earnest consideration, and in the preface to the Tales, his next production, he attempted something like an answer to each.  Without mentioning any names he replies to Jeffrey in the first part of his preface, and to the Quarterly reviewer in the second.  Jeffrey had expressed a hope that Crabbe would in future concentrate his powers upon some interesting and connected story.  “At present it is impossible not to regret that so much genius should be wasted in making us perfectly acquainted with individuals of whom we are to know nothing but their characters.”  Crabbe in reply makes what was really the best apology for not accepting this advice.  He intimates that he had already made the experiment, but without success.  His peculiar gifts did not fit him for it.  As he wrote the words, he doubtless had in mind the many prose romances that he had written, and then consigned to the flames.  The short story, or rather the exhibition of a single character developed through a few incidents, he felt to be the method that fitted his talent best.

Crabbe then proceeds to deal with the question, evidently implied by the Quarterly reviewer, how far many passages in The Borough, when concerned with low life, were really poetry at all.  Crabbe pleads in reply the example of other English poets, whose claim to the title had never been disputed.  He cites Chaucer, who had depicted very low life indeed, and in the same rhymed metre.  “If all that kind of satire wherein character is skilfully delineated, must no longer be esteemed as genuine poetry,” then what becomes of the author of The Canterbury Tales?  Crabbe could not supply, or be expected to supply, the answer to this question.  He could not discern that the treatment is everything, and that Chaucer was endowed with many qualities denied to himself—­the spirit of joyousness and the love of sunshine, and together with these, gifts of humour and pathos to which Crabbe could make no pretension.  From Chaucer, Crabbe passes to the great but very different master, on whom he had first built his style.  Was Pope, then, not a poet? seeing that he too has “no small portion of this actuality of relation, this nudity of description, and poetry without an atmosphere”?  Here again, of course, Crabbe overlooks one essential difference between himself and his model.  Both were keen-sighted students of character, and both described sordid and worldly ambitions.  But Pope was strongest exactly where Crabbe was weak.  He had achieved absolute mastery of form, and could condense into a couplet some truth which Crabbe expanded, often excellently, in a hundred lines of very unequal workmanship.  The Quarterly reviewer quotes, as admirable of its kind, the description in The Borough of the card-club, with the bickerings and ill-nature of the old ladies and gentlemen who frequented it.  It is in truth very graphic, and no doubt absolutely faithful to life; but it is rather metrical fiction than poetry.  There is more of the essence of poetry in a single couplet of Pope’s: