This cannot be; yet moved by your request,
A part I paint-let fancy form the rest.
Citles and towns, the various haunts of men,
Require the pencil; they defy the pen.

Could he, who sang so well the Grecian Fleet,
So well have sung of Alley, Lane, or Street?
Can measured lines these various buildings show,
The Town Hall Turning, or the Prospect Row ?
Can I the seats of wealth and want explore,

And lengthen out my lays from door to door?"

No, good parson! how should you? I exclaimed to myself. You see the absurdity of your subject, and yet you rush into it. He who sang of the Greek Fleet certainly would never have thought of singing of Alley, Lane, or Street! What a difference from

Or

"Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring

Of woes unnumbered, heavenly goddess, sing!"

"The man for wisdom's various arts renowned,
Long exercised in woes, O Muse, resound!"

What a difference from

"Arms and the man I sing, who forced by fate,
And haughty Juno's unrelenting hate!

Or from the grandeur of that exordium :—

"Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, heavenly Muse! that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire'

That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed
In the beginning, how the Heavens and Earth
Rose out of chaos; or, if Sion-hill

Delight thee more, and Siloa's brook, that flowed
Fast by the Oracle of God, I thence
Invoke thine aid to my adventurous song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.
And chiefly Thou, O Spirit! that dost prefer
Before all temples the upright heart and pure,

Instruct me, for Thou knowest: Thou from the first

Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread,

Dove-like sat'st brooding on the vast abyss,

And mad'st it pregnant; what in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;

That to the height of this great argument
I may assert Eternal Providence,

And justify the ways of God to men."

With this glorious sound in my ears, like the opening hymn of an archangel-language in which more music and more dignity were united than in any composition of mere mortal man, and which heralded in the universe, God and man, perdition and salvation, creation and the great sum total of the human destinies,—what a fall was there to those astounding words

"Describe the Borough!"

It was a shock to everything of the ideal great and poetical in the young and sensitive mind, attuned to the harmonies of a thousand great lays of the bygone times, that was never to be forgotten

Are we then come to this? I asked. Is this the scale of topic, and is this the tone to which we are reduced in this generation? Turning over the heads of the different books did not much tend to remove this feeling. The Church, Sects, the Election, Law, Physic, Trades, Clubs and Social Meetings, Players, Almshouse and Trustees, Peter Grimes and Prisons! What, in heaven's name, were the whole nine Muses to do with such a set of themes! And then the actors! See a set of drunken sailors in their ale-house :

"The Anchor, too, affords the seaman joys,

In small smoked room, all clamour, crowds, and noise;
Where a curved settle half surrounds the fire,
Where fifty voices purl and punch require;

They come for pleasure in their leisure hour,
And they enjoy it to their utmost power;

Standing they drink, they swearing smoke, while all
Call, or make ready for a second call."

But, spite of all, a book was a book, and therefore it was read. At every page the same struggle went on in the mind between all the old notions of poetry, and the vivid pictures of actual life which it unfolded. When I had read it once, I told the lender that it was the strangest, cleverest, and most absorbing book I had ever read, but that it was no poem. It was only by a second and a third perusal that the first surprise subsided; the first shock gone by, the poem began to rise out of the novel composition. The deep and experienced knowledge of human life, the sound sense, the quiet satire, there was no overlooking from the first; and soon the warm sympathy with poverty and suffering, the boldness to display them as they existed, and to suffer no longer poetry to wrap her golden haze round human life, and to conceal all that ought to be known, because it must be known before it could be removed; the tender pathos, and the true feeling for nature, grew every hour on the mind. It was not long before George Crabbe became as firmly fixed in my bosom as a great and genuine poet, as Rembrandt, or Collins, or Edwin Landseer are as genuine painters.

Crabbe saw plainly what was become the great disease of our literature. It was a departure from actual life and nature.

"I've often marvelled, when by night, by day,
I've marked the manners moving in my way,
And heard the language and beheld the lives
Of lass and lover, goddesses and wives,
That books which promise much of life to give
Should show so little how we truly live."

To this home-truth, succeeds that admirable satirical description of our novel literature, which introduces the sad story of Ellen Orford. My space is little, but I must give a specimen of the manner in which the Cervantes of England strips away the sublime fooleries of our literary knight-errantry.

"Time have I lent-I would their debt were less-
To flowing pages of sublime distress;

And to the heroine's soul-distracting fears

I early gave my sixpences and tears;

Oft have I travelled in these tender tales,
To Darnley Cottages, and Maple Vales.

I've watched a wintry night on cast.e walls,
I've stalked by moonlight through deserted halls;
And when the weary world was sunk to rest,
I've had such sights-as may not be expressed.

"Lo! that chateau, the western tower decayed,
The peasants shun it, they are all afraid;
For there was done a deed! could walls reveal
Or timbers tell it, how the heart would feel.
Most horrid was it :-for, behold the floor

Has stains of blood, and will be clean no more.

Hark to the winds! which, through the wide saloon,
And the long passage, send a dismal tune,-
Music that ghosts delight in; and now heed

Yon beauteous nymph who must unmask the deed:
See! with majestic sweep she swims alone
Through rooms all dreary, guided by a groan.

Though windows rattle, and though tapestries shake,
And the feet falter every step they take,

Mid moans and gibing sprites she silent goes,
To find a something which shall soon expose
The villanies and wiles of her determined foes:
And having thus adventured, thus endured,
Fame, wealth, and lover, are for life secured.

"Much have I feared, but am no more afraid,
When some chaste beauty, by some wretch betrayed,
Is drawn away with such distracted speed
That she anticipates a dreadful deed.
Not so do I. Let solid walls impound
The captive fair, and dig a moat around:
Let there be brazen locks and bars of steel,
And keepers cruel, such as never feel.
With not a single note the purse supply,
And when she begs let men and maids deny.
Be windows those from which she dare not fall,
And help so distant 'tis in vain to call;
Still means of freedom will some power devise,
And from the baffled ruffian snatch the prize."

From all this false sublime, Crabbe was the first to free us, and to lead us into the true sublime of genuine human life. How novel at that time, and yet how thrilling, was the incident of the sea-side visitors surprised out on the sands by the rise of the tide! Here was real sublimity of distress, real display of human passion. The lady, with her children in her hand, wandering from the tea-table which had been spread on the sands, sees the boatmen asleep, the boat adrift, and the tide advancing :—

"She gazed, she trembled, and though faint her call,
It seemed like thunder to confound them all,
Their sailor-guests, the boatman and his mate,
Had drunk and slept, regardless of their state;
'Awake!' they cried aloud! Alarm the shore!
Shout all, or never shall we reach it more!'
Alas! no shout the distant land can reach,
No eye behold them from the foggy beach:
Again they join in one loud, fearful cry,
Then cease, and eager listen for reply;
None came the rising wind blew sadly by.
They shout once more, and then they turn aside
To see how quickly flowed the coming tide;
Between each cry they find the waters steal
On their strange prison, and new horrors feel.
Foot after foot on the contracted ground
The billows fall, and dreadful is the sound;
Less and yet less the sinking isle became,

And there was weeping, wailing, wrath, and blame."

A A

It has been said that Crabbe's poetry is mere description, however accurate, and that he has not a spark of imagination. The charge arises from a false view of the poet and his objects. He saw that the world was well supplied with what are poems of the creative faculty, that it was just as destitute of the poetry of truth and reality. He saw human life lie like waste land, as worthless of notice, while our poets and romancers

"In trim gardens took their pleasure."

He saw the vice, the ignorance, the misery, and he lifted the vei and cried," Behold your fellow-men! Such are the multitude of your fellow-creatures, amongst whom you live and move. Do you want to weep over distress? Behold it there, huge, dismal, and excruciating! Do you wish for a sensation? Find it there! Follow the ruined gentleman from his gaming and his dissipation, to his squalid den and his death. Follow the grim savage, who murders his shrieking boy at sea. Follow the poor maiden to her ruin, and the parent weeping and withering under the curse of a depraved child. Go down into the abodes of ignorance, of swarming vice, of folly, and madness-and if you want a lesson, or a moral, there they are by thousands."

Crabbe knew that the true imaginative faculty had a great and comprehensive task, to dive into the depths of the human heart, to fathom the recesses and the springs of the mind, and to display all their movements under the various excitements of various passions, with the hand of a master. He has done this, and done it with unrivalled tact and vigour. Out of the scum and chaos of lowest life, he has evoked the true sublime. He has taught us that men are our proper objects of display, and that the multitude has claims on our sympathies that duty as well as taste demand obedience to. He was the first to dare these desperate and deserted walks of humanity, and to prove to us that still it was humanity. At every step he revealed scenes of the truest pathos, of the profoundest interest, and gave instances of the most generous sacrifices, the most patient love, the most heroic duty, in the very abodes of unvisited wretchedness. He made us feel that these beings were men! There are few pictures so touching in all the volumes of romance, as that of the dying sailor and his sweetheart. What hero breathed a more beautiful devotion, or clothed it in more exquisite language, than this poor sailor youth, when believing himself dying at sea:

"He called his friend, and prefaced with a sigh

A lover's message-Thomas, I must die.
Would I could see my Sally, and could rest
My throbbing temples on her faithful breast,
And gazing go!-if not, this trifle take,

And say till death I wore it for her sake:

Yes, I must die-blow on, sweet breeze, blow on!
Give me one look before my life be gone,

Oh! give me that and let me not despair,

One last fond look-and now repeat the prayer.'

"She placed a decent stone his grave above,
Neatly engraved-an offering of her love;
For that she wrought, for that forsook her bed,
Awake alike to duty and the dead."

It was by these genuine vindications of our entire humanity, that Crabbe, by casting the full blaze of the sunshine of truth and genius on the real condition of the labouring population of these kingdoms, laid the foundations of that great popular feeling which prevails at the present day. He was not merely a poet, but a poet who had the sagacity to see into the real state of things, and the heart to do his duty-the great marks of the true poet, who is necessarily a true and feeling man. To him popular education, popular freedom, popular advance into knowledge and power, owe a debt which futurity will gratefully acknowledge, but no time can cancel.

George Crabbe was born on the borders of that element which he so greatly loved, and which he has so powerfully described in the first chapter of the Borough. He has had the good fortune to have in his son George a biographer such as every good man would desire. The life written by him is full of the veneration of the son, yet of the candour of the historian; and is at once one of the most graphic and charming of books.

From this volume we learn that the poet was born at Aldborough, in Suffolk, on the Christmas eve of 1754. His birthplace was an old house in that range of buildings which the sea has now almost demolished. The chamber projected far over the ground floor; and the windows were small, with diamond panes almost impervious to the light. A view of it by Stanfield forms the vignette to the biography.

Both the father and grandfather of Crabbe bore the name of George, as well as himself. The grandfather, a burgess of Aldborough, and collector of customs there, yet died poor. The father, originally educated for trade, had been in early life the keeper of a parochial school in the porch of the church at Orford. He afterwards became schoolmaster and parish clerk at Norton, near Loddon, in Norfolk; and finally, returning to his native Aldborough, rose to the collection of the salt duties, as Salt-master. He was a stern but able man, and with all his sternness not destitute of good qualities. The mother of Crabbe was an excellent and pious woman. Besides himself there were five other children, all of whom, except one girl, lived to mature years. His next brother, Robert, was a glazier, who retired from business at Southwold. John Crabbe, the third son, was the captain of a Liverpool slave ship, who perished by an insurrection of the slaves. The fourth brother, William, also a seafaring man, was carried prisoner by the Spaniards into Mexico, and was once seen by an Aldborough sailor on the coast of Honduras, but never heard of again. This sailor brother, in his inquiries after all at home, had expressed much astonishment to find that George was become a clergyman, when he left him a doctor; and on this incident Crabbe afterwards founded the sailor's story in The Parting Hour. His only surviving sister married a Mr. Sparkes, a builder of Aldborough, and died in 1827. Such were Crabbe's family. The scenery amongst which he spent his boyhood has been frequently described in his poetry, especially in the opening