Crabbe, also a prime favorite with the authors of the Lay of the Last Minstrel, and Childe Harold, is recorded by his biographer—­his own son—­to have exhibited “a remarkable indifference to all the proper objects of taste;” to have had “no real love for painting, or music, or architecture or for what a painter’s eye considers as the beauties of landscape.”  “In botany, grasses, the most useful but the least ornamental, were his favorites.”  “He never seemed to be captivated with the mere beauty of natural objects or even to catch any taste for the arrangement of his specimens.  Within, the house was a kind of scientific confusion; in the garden the usual showy foreigners gave place to the most scarce flowers, especially to the rarer weeds, of Britain; and were scattered here and there only for preservation.  In fact he neither loved order for its own sake nor had any very high opinion of that passion in others."[024] Lord Byron described Crabbe to be

    Though nature’s sternest painter, yet the best.

What! was he a better painter of nature than Shakespeare?  The truth is that Byron was a wretched critic, though a powerful poet.  His praises and his censures were alike unmeasured.

    His generous ardor no cold medium knew.

He seemed to recognize no great general principles of criticism, but to found all his judgments on mere prejudice and passion.  He thought Cowper “no poet,” pronounced Spenser “a dull fellow,” and placed Pope above Shakespeare.  Byron’s line on Crabbe is inscribed on the poet’s tombstone at Trowbridge.  Perhaps some foreign visitor on reading the inscription may be surprized at his own ignorance when he learns that it is not the author of Macbeth and Othello that he is to regard as the best painter of nature that England has produced, but the author of the Parish Register and the Tales of the Hall.  Absurd and indiscriminate laudations of this kind confound all intellectual distinctions and make criticism ridiculous.  Crabbe is unquestionably a vigorous and truthful writer, but he is not the best we have, in any sense of the word.

Though Dr. Johnson speaks so contemptuously of Shenstone’s rural pursuits, he could not help acknowledging that when the poet began “to point his prospects, to diversify his surface, to entangle his walks and to wind his waters,” he did all this with such judgment and fancy as “made his little domain the envy of the great and the admiration of the skilful; a place to be visited by travellers, and copied by designers.”

Mason, in his English Garden, a poem once greatly admired, but now rarely read, and never perhaps with much delight, does justice to the taste of the Poet of the Leasowes.

                            Nor, Shenstone, thou
    Shalt pass without thy meed, thou son of peace! 
    Who knew’st, perchance, to harmonize thy shades
    Still softer than thy song; yet was that song
    Nor rude nor inharmonious when attuned
    To pastoral plaint, or tale of slighted love.