In his preface FitzGerald claims for Crabbe’s latest work that the net impression left by it upon the reader is less sombre and painful than that left by his earlier poems.  “It contains,” he urges, “scarce anything of that brutal or sordid villainy of which one has more than enough in the poet’s earlier work.”  Perhaps there is not so much of the “brutal or sordid,” but then in The Parish Register or The Borough, the reader is in a way prepared for that ingredient, because the personages are the lawless and neglected poor of a lonely seaport.  It is because, when he moves no longer among these, he yet finds vice and misery quite as abundant in “a village with its tidy homestead, and well-to-do tenants, within easy reach of a thriving country-town,” that a certain shock is given to the reader.  He discovers that all the evil passions intrude (like pale Death) into the comfortable villa as impartially as into the hovels at Aldeburgh.  But FitzGerald had found a sufficient alleviation of the gloom in the framework of the Tales.  The growing affection of the two brothers, as they come to know and understand each other better, is one of the consistently pleasant passages in Crabbe’s writings.  The concluding words of FitzGerald’s preface, as the little volume is out of print and very scarce, I may be allowed to quote:—­

“Is Crabbe then, whatever shape he may take, worth making room for in our over-crowded heads and libraries?  If the verdict of such critics as Jeffrey and Wilson be set down to contemporary partiality or inferior ‘culture,’ there is Miss Austen, who is now so great an authority in the representation of genteel humanity, so unaccountably smitten with Crabbe in his worsted hose that she is said to have pleasantly declared he was the only man whom she would care to marry.  If Sir Walter Scott and Byron are but unaesthetic judges of the poet, there is Wordsworth who was sufficiently exclusive in admitting any to the sacred brotherhood in which he still reigns, and far too honest to make any exception out of compliment to any one on any occasion—­he did nevertheless thus write to the poet’s son and biographer in 1834:  ’Any testimony to the merit of your revered father’s works would, I feel, be superfluous, if not impertinent.  They will last from their combined merits as poetry and truth, full as long as anything that has been expressed in verse since they first made their appearance’—­a period which, be it noted, includes all Wordsworth’s own volumes except Yarrow Revisited, The Prelude, and The Borderers.  And Wordsworth’s living successor to the laurel no less participates with him in his appreciation of their forgotten brother.  Almost the last time I met him he was quoting from memory that fine passage in Delay has Danger, where the late autumn landscape seems to borrow from the conscience-stricken lover who gazes on it the gloom which it reflects upon him; and in the course of further conversation on the