His poetical morality is taken from Burn’s Justice, or the Statutes against Vagrants.  He sets his own imagination in the stocks, and his Muse, like Malvolio, “wears cruel garters.”  He collects all the petty vices of the human heart, and superintends, as in a panopticon, a select circle of rural malefactors.  He makes out the poor to be as bad as the rich—­a sort of vermin for the others to hunt down and trample upon, and this he thinks a good piece of work.  With him there are but two moral categories, riches and poverty, authority and dependence.  His parish apprentice, Richard Monday, and his wealthy baronet, Sir Richard Monday, of Monday-place, are the same individual—­ the extremes of the same character, and of his whole system.  “The latter end of his Commonwealth does not forget the beginning.”  But his parish ethics are the very worst model for a state:  any thing more degrading and helpless cannot well be imagined.  He exhibits just the contrary view of human life to that which Gay has done in his Beggar’s Opera.  In a word, Crabbe is the only poet who has attempted and succeeded in the still life of tragedy:  who gives the stagnation of hope and fear—­ the deformity of vice without the temptation—­the pain of sympathy without the interest—­and who seems to rely, for the delight he is to convey to his reader, on the truth and accuracy with which he describes only what is disagreeable.

The best descriptive poetry is not, after all, to be found in our descriptive poets.  There are set descriptions of the flowers, for instance, in Thomson, Cowper, and others; but none equal to those in Milton’s Lycidas, and in the Winter’s Tale.

We have few good pastorals in the language.  Our manners are not Arcadian; our climate is not an eternal spring; our age is not the age of gold.  We have no pastoral-writers equal to Theocritus, nor any landscapes like those of Claude Lorraine.  The best parts of Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar are two fables, Mother Hubberd’s Tale, and the Oak and the Briar; which last is as splendid a piece of oratory as any to be found in the records of the eloquence of the British senate!  Browne, who came after Spenser, and Withers, have left some pleasing allegorical poems of this kind.  Pope’s are as full of senseless finery and trite affectation, as if a peer of the realm were to sit for his picture with a crook and cocked hat on, smiling with an insipid air of no-meaning, between nature and fashion.  Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia is a lasting monument of perverted power; where an image of extreme beauty, as that of “the shepherd boy piping as though he should never be old,” peeps out once in a hundred folio pages, amidst heaps of intricate sophistry and scholastic quaintness.  It is not at all like Nicholas Poussin’s picture, in which he represents some shepherds wandering out in a morning of the spring, and coming to a tomb with this inscription—­“I also was an Arcadian!” Perhaps the best pastoral