The story, though it has no precise prototype in Crabbe’s own history, is clearly the fruit of his experience of life at Belvoir Castle, combined with the sad recollection of his sufferings when only a few years before he, a young man with the consciousness of talent, was rolling butter-tubs on Slaughden Quay.

Much of the Tale is admirably and forcibly written, but again it may be said that it is powerful fiction rather than poetry—­and indeed into such matters poetry can hardly enter.  It displays the fine observation of Miss Austen, clothed in effective couplets of the school of Johnson and Churchill.  Yet every now and then the true poet comes to the surface.  The essence of a dank and misty day in late autumn has never been seized with more perfect truth than in these lines: 

  “Cold grew the foggy morn, the day was brief,
  Loose on the cherry hung the crimson leaf;
  The dew dwelt ever on the herb; the woods
  Roar’d with strong blasts, with mighty showers the floods: 
  All green was vanish’d, save of pine and yew,
  That still displayed their melancholy hue;
  Save the green holly with its berries red,
  And the green moss that o’er the gravel spread.”

The scheme of these detached Tales had served to develop one special side of Crabbe’s talent.  The analysis of human character, with its strength and weakness (but specially the latter), finds fuller exercise as the poet has to trace its effects upon the earthly fortunes of the persons portrayed.  The Tale entitled The Gentleman Farmer is a striking illustration in point.  Jeffrey in his review of the Tales in the Edinburgh supplies, as usual, a short abstract of the story, not without due insight into its moral.  But a profounder student of human nature than Jeffrey has, in our own day, cited the Tale as worthy even to illustrate a memorable teaching of St. Paul.  The Bishop of Worcester, better known as Canon Gore to the thousands who listened to the discourse in Westminster Abbey, finds in this story a perfect illustration of what moral freedom is, and what it is often erroneously supposed to be: 

“It is of great practical importance that we should get a just idea of what our freedom consists in.  There are men who, under the impulse of a purely materialist science, declare the sense of moral freedom to be an illusion.  This is of course a gross error.  But what has largely played into the hands of this error is the exaggerated idea of human freedom which is ordinarily current, an idea which can only be held by ignoring our true and necessary dependence and limitation.  It is this that we need to have brought home to us.  There is an admirable story among George Crabbe’s Tales called ’The Gentleman Farmer.’  The hero starts in life resolved that he will not put up with any bondage.  The orthodox clergyman, the orthodox physician, and orthodox matrimony—­all these alike represent social bondage in different forms, and he will have none of them So he starts on a career of ’unchartered freedom’

      ‘To prove that he alone was king of him,’