genius can hope to arrive at, after the lapse of one or two generations, is the perfection of that more refined and effeminate style of studied elegance and adventitious ornament, which is the result, not of nature, but of art.  In fact, no other style of poetry has succeeded, or seems likely to succeed, in the present day.  The public taste hangs like a millstone round the neck of all original genius that does not conform to established and exclusive models.  The writer is not only without popular sympathy, but without a rich and varied mass of materials for his mind to work upon and assimilate unconsciously to itself; his attempts at originality are looked upon as affectation, and in the end, degenerate into it from the natural spirit of contradiction, and the constant uneasy sense of disappointment and undeserved ridicule.  But to return.

Crabbe is, if not the most natural, the most literal of our descriptive poets.  He exhibits the smallest circumstances of the smallest things.  He gives the very costume of meanness; the nonessentials of every trifling incident.  He is his own landscape-painter, and engraver too.  His pastoral scenes seem pricked on paper in little dotted lines.  He describes the interior of a cottage like a person sent there to distrain for rent.  He has an eye to the number of arms in an old worm-eaten chair, and takes care to inform himself and the reader whether a joint-stool stands upon three legs or upon four.  If a settle by the fire-side stands awry, it gives him as much disturbance as a tottering world; and he records the rent in a ragged counterpane as an event in history.  He is equally curious in his back-grounds and in his figures.  You know the Christian and surnames of every one of his heroes,—­the dates of their achievements, whether on a Sunday or a Monday,—­their place of birth and burial, the colour of their clothes, and of their hair, and whether they squinted or not.  He takes an inventory of the human heart exactly in the same manner as of the furniture of a sick room:  his sentiments have very much the air of fixtures; he gives you the petrifaction of a sigh, and carves a tear, to the life, in stone.  Almost all his characters are tired of their lives, and you heartily wish them dead.  They remind one of anatomical preservations; or may be said to bear the same relation to actual life that a stuffed cat in a glass-case does to the real one purring on the hearth:  the skin is the same, but the life and the sense of heat is gone.  Crabbe’s poetry is like a museum, or curiosity-shop:  every thing has the same posthumous appearance, the same inanimateness and identity of character.  If Bloomfield is too much of the Farmer’s Boy, Crabbe is too much of the parish beadle, an overseer of the country poor.  He has no delight beyond the walls of a workhouse, and his officious zeal would convert the world into a vast infirmary.  He is a kind of Ordinary, not of Newgate, but of nature.