Surely, it will be argued, all this is sufficient to account for the entire disappearance of Crabbe from the list of poets whom every educated lover of poetry is expected to appreciate.  Yet the fact remains, as FitzGerald quotes from Sir Leslie Stephen, that “with all its short-and long-comings, Crabbe’s better work leaves its mark on the reader’s mind and memory as only the work of genius can,” and almost all English poets and critics of mark, during his time and after it, have agreed in recognising the same fact.  We know what was thought of him by Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, and Tennyson.  Critics differing as widely in other matters as Macaulay, John Henry Newman, Mr. Swinburne, and Dr. Gore, have found in Crabbe an insight into the springs of character, and a tragic power of dealing with them, of a rare kind.  No doubt Crabbe demands something of his readers.  He asks from them a corresponding interest in human nature.  He asks for a kindred habit of observation, and a kindred patience.  The present generation of poetry-readers cares mainly for style.  While this remains the habit of the town, Crabbe will have to wait for any popular revival.  But he is not so dead as the world thinks.  He has his constant readers still, but they talk little of their poet.  “They give Heaven thanks, and make no boast of it.”  These are they to whom the “unruly wills and affections” of their kind are eternally interesting, even when studied through the medium of a uniform and monotonous metre.

A Trowbridge friend wrote to Crabbe’s son, after his father’s death, “When I called on him, soon after his arrival, I remarked that his house and garden were pleasant and secluded:  he replied that he preferred walking in the streets, and observing the faces of the passers-by, to the finest natural scenes.”  There is a poignant line in Maud, where the distracted lover dwells on “the faces that one meets.”  It was not by the “sweet records, promises as sweet,” that these two observers of life were impressed, but rather by vicious records and hopeless outlooks.  It was such countenances that Crabbe looked for, and speculated on, for in such, he found food for that pity and terror he most loved to awaken.  The starting-point of Crabbe’s desire to portray village-life truly was a certain indignation he felt at the then still-surviving conventions of the Pastoral Poets.  We have lately watched, in the literature of our own day, a somewhat similar reaction against sentimental pictures of country-life.  The feebler members of a family of novelists, which some one wittily labelled as the “kail-yard school,” so irritated a young Scottish journalist, the late Mr. George Douglas, that he resolved to provide what he conceived might be a useful corrective for the public mind.  To counteract the half-truths of the opposite school, he wrote a tale of singular power and promise, The House with the Green Shutters.  Like all reactions, it erred in the violence of its