tend imperceptibly to restore it.  Painting is essentially an imitative art; it cannot subsist for a moment on empty generalities:  the critic, therefore, who had been used to this sort of substantial entertainment, would be disposed to read poetry with the eye of a connoisseur, would be little captivated with smooth, polished, unmeaning periods, and would turn with double eagerness and relish to the force and precision of individual details, transferred, as it were, to the page from the canvas.  Thus an admirer of Teniers or Hobbima might think little of the pastoral sketches of Pope or Goldsmith; even Thompson describes not so much the naked object as what he sees in his mind’s eye, surrounded and glowing with the mild, bland, genial vapours of his brain:—­but the adept in Dutch interiors, hovels, and pig-styes must find in Mr. Crabbe a man after his own heart.  He is the very thing itself; he paints in words, instead of colours:  there is no other difference.  As Mr. Crabbe is not a painter, only because he does not use a brush and colours, so he is for the most part a poet, only because he writes in lines of ten syllables.  All the rest might be found in a newspaper, an old magazine, or a county-register.  Our author is himself a little jealous of the prudish fidelity of his homely Muse, and tries to justify himself by precedents.  He brings as a parallel instance of merely literal description, Pope’s lines on the gay Duke of Buckingham, beginning “In the worst inn’s worst room see Villiers lies!” But surely nothing can be more dissimilar.  Pope describes what is striking, Crabbe would have described merely what was there.  The objects in Pope stand out to the fancy from the mixture of the mean with the gaudy, from the contrast of the scene and the character.  There is an appeal to the imagination; you see what is passing in a poetical point of view.  In Crabbe there is no foil, no contrast, no impulse given to the mind.  It is all on a level and of a piece.  In fact, there is so little connection between the subject-matter of Mr. Crabbe’s lines and the ornament of rhyme which is tacked to them, that many of his verses read like serious burlesque, and the parodies which have been made upon them are hardly so quaint as the originals.

Mr. Crabbe’s great fault is certainly that he is a sickly, a querulous, a uniformly dissatisfied poet.  He sings the country; and he sings it in a pitiful tone.  He chooses this subject only to take the charm out of it, and to dispel the illusion, the glory, and the dream, which had hovered over it in golden verse from Theocritus to Cowper.  He sets out with professing to overturn the theory which had hallowed a shepherd’s life, and made the names of grove and valley music to our ears, in order to give us truth in its stead; but why not lay aside the fool’s cap and bells at once?  Why not insist on the unwelcome reality in plain prose?  If our author is a poet, why trouble himself with statistics?  If he is a statistic writer, why set his ill news