Mr. Campbell’s prose-criticisms on contemporary and other poets (which have appeared in the New Monthly Magazine) are in a style at once chaste, temperate, guarded, and just.

Mr. Crabbe presents an entire contrast to

Mr. Campbell:—­the one is the most ambitious and aspiring of living poets, the other the most humble and prosaic.  If the poetry of the one is like the arch of the rainbow, spanning and adorning the earth, that of the other is like a dull, leaden cloud hanging over it.  Mr. Crabbe’s style might be cited as an answer to Audrey’s question—­“Is poetry a true thing?” There are here no ornaments, no flights of fancy, no illusions of sentiment, no tinsel of words.  His song is one sad reality, one unraised, unvaried note of unavailing woe.  Literal fidelity serves him in the place of invention; he assumes importance by a number of petty details; he rivets attention by being tedious.  He not only deals in incessant matters of fact, but in matters of fact of the most familiar, the least animating, and the most unpleasant kind; but he relies for the effect of novelty on the microscopic minuteness with which he dissects the most trivial objects—­and for the interest he excites, on the unshrinking determination with which he handles the most painful.  His poetry has an official and professional air.  He is called in to cases of difficult births, of fractured limbs, or breaches of the peace; and makes out a parochial list of accidents and offences.  He takes the most trite, the most gross and obvious and revolting part of nature, for the subject of his elaborate descriptions; but it is Nature still, and Nature is a great and mighty Goddess!  It is well for the Reverend Author that it is so.  Individuality is, in his theory, the only definition of poetry.  Whatever is, he hitches into rhyme.  Whoever makes an exact image of any thing on the earth, however deformed or insignificant, according to him, must succeed—­and he himself has succeeded.  Mr. Crabbe is one of the most popular and admired of our living authors.  That he is so, can be accounted for on no other principle than the strong ties that bind us to the world about us, and our involuntary yearnings after whatever in any manner powerfully and directly reminds us of it.  His Muse is not one of the Daughters of Memory, but the old toothless, mumbling dame herself, doling out the gossip and scandal of the neighbourhood, recounting totidem verbis et literis, what happens in every place of the kingdom every hour in the year, and fastening always on the worst as the most palatable morsels.  But she is a circumstantial old lady, communicative, scrupulous, leaving nothing to the imagination, harping on the smallest grievances, a village-oracle and critic, most veritable, most identical, bringing us acquainted with persons and things just as they chanced to exist, and giving us a local interest in all she knows and tells.  Mr. Crabbe’s Helicon is choked up with weeds and corruption; it