George Crabbe was born on December 24th, 1754, at Aldborough, Suffolk.  His father was a poor man; and Crabbe, with little early education, was apprenticed to a surgeon, and afterwards practised; but his aspirations were such that he went to London, with three pounds in his pocket, for a literary venture.  He would have been in great straits, had it not been for the disinterested generosity of Burke, to whom, although an utter stranger, he applied for assistance.  Burke aided him by introducing him to distinguished literary men; and his fortune was made.  In 1781 he published The Library, which was well received.  Crabbe then took orders, and was for a little time curate at Aldborough, his native place, while other preferment awaited him.  In 1783 he appeared under still more favorable auspices, by publishing The Village, which had a decided success.  Two livings were then given him; and he, much to his credit, married his early love, a young girl of Suffolk.  In The Village he describes homely scenes with great power, in pentameter verse.  The poor are the heroes of his humble epic; and he knew them well, as having been of them.  In 1807 appeared The Parish Register, in 1810 The Borough, and in 1812 his Tales in Verse,—­the precursor, in the former style, however, of Wordsworth’s lyrical stories.  All these were excellent and very popular, because they were real, and from his own experience. The Tales of the Hall, referring chiefly to the higher classes of society, are more artificial, and not so good.  His pen was most at home in describing smugglers, gipsies, and humble villagers, and in delineating poverty and wretchedness; and thus opening to the rich and titled, doors through which they might exercise their philanthropy and munificence.  In this way Crabbe was a reformer, and did great good; although his scenes are sometimes revolting, and his pathos too exacting.  As a painter of nature, he is true and felicitous; especially in marine and coast views, where he is a pre-Raphaelite in his minuteness.  Byron called him “Nature’s sternest painter, but the best.”  He does not seem to write for effect, and he is without pretension; so that the critics were quite at fault; for what they mainly attack is not the poet’s work so much as the consideration whether his works come up to his manifesto.  Crabbe died in 1832, on the 3d of February, being one of the famous dead of that fatal year.

Crabbe’s poems mark his age.  At an earlier time, when literature was for the fashionable few, his subjects would have been beneath interest; but the times had changed; education had been more diffused, and readers were multiplied.  Goldsmith’s Deserted Village had struck a new chord, upon which Crabbe continued to play.  Of his treatment of these subjects it must be said, that while he holds a powerful pen, and portrays truth vividly, he had an eye only for the sadder conditions of life, and gives pain rather than excites sympathy in the reader.  Our meaning will be best illustrated by a comparison of The Village of Crabbe with The Deserted Village of Goldsmith, and the pleasure with which we pass from the squalid scenes of the former to the gentler sorrows and sympathies of the latter.