á fastidious poet. He sings the country, and he sings it in a pitiful He chooses this subject only to take the charm out of it, and to dispel the illusion, the glory, and the dream; which had hovered over it in golden verse from Theocritus to Cowper. He sets out with professing to overturn the theory which had hallowed a shepherd's life, and made the names of grove and valley music in our ears, to give us truth in its stead; but why not lay aside the fool's cap and bells at once, why not insist on the unwelcome reality in plain prose? If our author is a poet, why trouble himself with statistics? If he is a statistic writer, why set his ill news to harsh and grating verse? The philosopher in painting the dark side of human nature may have reason on his side, and a moral lesson or a remedy in view. The tragic poet, who shows the sad vicissitudes of things, and the disappointments of the passions, at least strengthens our yearnings after imaginary good, and lends wings to our desires, by which we, at one bound, high overleap all bound" of actual suffering. But Mr. Crabbe does neither. He gives us discoloured paintings of things-helpless, repining, unprofitable, unedifying distress. He is not a philosopher, but a sophist, and a misanthrope in verse: a namby-pamby Mandeville, a Malthus turned metrical romancer. He professes historical fidelity; but his vein is not dramatic: he does not give us the pros and cons of that versatile gipsey, Nature. He does not indulge his fancy or sympathise with us, or tell us how the poor feel; but how he should feel in their situation, which we do not want to know. He does not weave the web of their lives of a mingled yarn, good and ill together, but clothes them all in the same overseer's dingy linsey-woolsey, or tinges them with a green and yellow melancholy. He blocks out all possibility of good, cancels the hope, or even the wish for it, as a weakness; check-mates Tityrus and Virgil at the game of pastoral cross-purposes, disables all his adversary's white pieces, and leaves none but black ones on the board. The situation of a country clergyman is not necessarily favourable to the cultivation of the Muse. He is set down, per haps, as he thinks, in a small curacy for life, and he takes his revenge by imprisoning the reader's imagination in luckless verse. Shut out from social converse, from learned colleges and halls, where he passed his youth, he has no cordial fellow-feeling with the unlettered manners of the Village or the Borough, and he describes his neighbours as more uncomfortable and discontented than himself. All this while he dedicates successive volumes to rising generations of noble patrons; and while he desolates a line of coast with sterile, blighting lines, the only leaf of his books where honour, beauty, worth, or pleasure bloom, is that inscribed to the Rutland family! But enough of this; and to our task of quotation. The poem of the Village sets off nearly as follows: No; cast by Fortune on a frowning coast, Which neither groves nor happy valleys boast; Where other cares than those the Muse relates, And other shepherds dwell with other mates; By such examples taught, I paint the cot, As truth will paint it, and as bards will not: Nor you, ye poor, of letter'd scorn complain, To you the smoothest song is smooth in vain; O'ercome by labour and bow'd down by time, Feel you the barren flattery of a rhyme ? Can poets soothe you, when you pine for bread, By winding myrtles round your ruin'd shed? Can their light tales your weighty griefs o'erpower, Or glad with airy mirth the toilsome hour? This plea, we would remark by tisfactory. By associating pleasing the way, is more plausible than sarich to extend their good offices to ideas with the poor, we incline the them. The cottage twined round with real myrtles, or with the poet's wreath, will invite the hand of kindly assistance sooner than Mr. Crabbe's naked ruin'd shed;" for though unusual, unexpected distress excites and remediless produces nothing but compassion, that which is uniform disgust and indifference. Repulsive objects (or those which are painted so) do not conciliate affection, or soften the heart. Lo! where the heath, with withering brake grown o'er, Lends the light turf that warms the neighbouring poor: From thence a length of burning sand ap pears, Where the thin harvest waves its withered Rank weeds, that every art and care defy,- There the blue bugloss paints the sterile Hardy and high, above the slender sheaf, And clasping tares cling round the sickly With mingled tits the rocky coasts abound, Betrayed by man, then left for man to rose, While her sad eyes the troubled breast disclose; Whose outward splendour is but folly's dress, Exposing most, when most it gilds distress. This is a specimen of Mr. Crabbe's taste in landscape-painting, of the power, the accuracy, and the hardness of his pencil. If this were merely a spot upon the canvas, which might act as a foil to more luxuriant and happier scenes, it would be well. But our valetudinarian "travels from Dan to Beersheba, and cries it is all barren." Or if he lights "in a favouring hour" on some more favoured spot, where plenty smiles around, he then turns his hand to his human figures, and the balance of the account is still very much against Providence, and the blessings of the English Constitution. Let us see.— But these are scenes where Nature's niggard hand Gave a spare portion to the famish'd land: Of fruitless toil and labour spent in vain ; And those who taste not, yet behold her Are as the slaves that dig the golden ore, The wealth around them makes them doubly poor. Or will you deem them amply paid in health, This is a pleasing line; because the unconsciousness to the mischief in the child is a playful relief to the mind, and the picturesqueness of the imagery gives it double point and naiveté. + This seems almost a parody on the lines in Shakspeare. Not all these, laid in bed majestical, Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave, Gets him to rest, cramm'd with distressful bread; Sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and all night And follows so the ever-running year With profitable labour to his grave: Winding up days with toil and nights with sleep, Who shall decide where two such authorities disagree! Henry V. is a master-piece of description, and the climax of the author's inverted system of rural optimism. Thus groan the Old, till by disease opprest, They taste a final woe, and then they rest. Theirs is yon house that holds the parish poor, Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door; There, where the putrid vapours, flagging, play, And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day There children dwell who know no parents' care; Parents, who know no children's love, dwell there! Heart-broken Matrons on their joyless bed, Forsaken wives and mothers never wed; The lame, the blind, and, far the happiest they! The moping Idiot and the Madman gay. Here too the sick their final doom receive, Here brought, amid the scenes of grief, to grieve, Where the loud groans from some sad chamber flow, Mix'd with the clamours of the crowd below; Here sorrowing, they each kindred sorrow Now once again the gloomy scene explore, low; There lie the happy Dead, from trouble free, And the glad parish pays the frugal fee: No more, O Death! thy victim starts to hear Churchwarden stern, or kingly Overseer; No more the farmer claims his humble bow, Thou art his lord, the best of tyrants thou! Now to the church behold the Mourners come, Sedately torpid and devoutly dumb; The village-children now their games suspend, To see the bier that bears their ancient friend : For he was one in all their idle sport, stand Silent and sad, and gazing, hand in hand; While bending low, their cager eyes ex plore The mingled relics of the parish-poor; The bell tolls late, the moping owl flies round, Fear marks the flight and magnifies the sound; The busy priest, detain'd by weightier care, To think a poor man's bones should lie unblest. To put our taste in poetry, and the fairness of our opinion of Mr. Crabbe's in particular, to the test at once, we will confess, that we think the two lines we have marked in italics, Him now they follow to his grave, and stand Silent and sad, and gazing, hand in hand— worth nearly all the rest of his verses put together, and an unanswerable condemnation of their general tendency and spirit. It is images, such as these, that the polished mirror of the poet's mind ought chiefly to convey; that cast their soothing, startling reflection over the length of human life, and grace with their amiable innocence its closing scenes; while its less alluring and more sombre tints sink in, and are lost in an ab And the motion unsettles a tear. Wordsworth. sorbent ground of unrelieved prose. Poetry should be the handmaid of the imagination, and the fosternurse of pleasure and beauty: Mr. Crabbe's Muse is a determined enemy to the imagination, and a spy on nature. Before we proceed, we shall just mark a few of those quaintnesses of expression, by which our descriptive poet has endeavoured to vary his style from common prose, and so far has succeeded. Speaking of Quarle he says, Of Hermit Quarle we read, in island rare, want. that men, Who guide the plough, should fail to guide For half a mile, the furrows even lie; The Library and the Newspaper, in the same volume, are heavy and common-place. Mr. Crabbe merely sermonises in his didactic poetry He must pierce below the surface to get at his genuine vein. He is properly himself only in the petty and the painful. The Birth of Flattery is a homely, incondite lay. The writer is no more like Spenser than he is like Pope. The ballad of Sir Eustace Grey is a production of great power and genius. The poet, in treating of the wanderings of a maniac, has given a loose to his conception of imaginary and preternatural evils. But they are of a sort that chill, rather than melt the mind; they repel instead of haunting it. They might be said to be square, portable horrors, physical, external,— not shadowy, not malleable; they do not arise out of any passion in the mind of the sufferer, nor touch the Women like me, as ducks in a decoy, Swim down a stream, and seem to swim in reader with involuntary sympathy. joy. But from the day, that fatal day she spied The pride of Daniel, Daniel was her pride. As an instance of the curiosa. felicitas in descriptive allusion (among many others) take the following. Our author, referring to the names of the genteeler couples, written in the parish-register, thus "morals" on the circumstance: Beds of ice, seas of fire, shaking bogs, and fields of snow, are disagreeable matters of fact; and though their contact has a powerful effect on the senses, we soon shake them off in fancy. Let any one compare this fictitious legend with the unadorned, unvarnished tale of Peter Grimes, and he will see in what Mr. Crabbe's characteristic strength lies. He is a most potent copyist of actual nature, though not otherwise a great poet. In the case of Sir Eustace, he cannot conjure up airy To all the blurr'd subscriptions in my phantoms from a disordered imagi How fair these names, how much unlike they look book! The bridegroom's letters stand in row above, Tapering yet stout, like pine-trecs in his .grove; nation; but he makes honest Peter, the fisherman of the Borough, see visions in the mud where he had drowned his 'prentice-boys, that are This is an exact fac-simile of some of the most unlovely parts of the creation. Indeed the whole of Mr. Crabbe's Borough, from which the above passage is taken, is done so to the life, that it seems almost like some sea-monster, crawled out of the neighbouring slime, and harbouring a breed of strange vermin, with a strong local scent of tar and bulgewater. Mr. Crabbe's Tales are more readable than his Poems. But in proportion as their interest increases, they become more oppressive. They turn, one and all, upon the same sort of teazing, helpless, mechanical, unimaginative distress ;— and though it is not easy to lay them down, you never wish to take them up again. Still in this way they are highly finished, striking, and original portraits, worked out with an eye to the small and intricate folds of the nature, and an intimate knowledge of human heart. Some of the best are the Confidant, the story of Silly Shore, the Young Poet, the Painter;the episode of Phoebe Dawson in the Village is one of the most tender and pensive; and the character of the methodist parson, who persecutes the sailor's widow with his godly, selfish love, is one of the most profound. In a word, if Mr. Crabbe's writings do not add greatly to the store of entertaining and delightful fiction, yet they will remain as a thorn in the side of poetry," perhaps for a century to come. A BRIEF MEMOIR OF WILLIAM MEYRICK, WITH SOME of HIS POEMS. WILLIAM MEYRICK was born at Birmingham, about the year 1770, and was for some time house apothecary at the Dispensary there. Soon after quitting that situation, he established himself as a surgeon in the village of West Bromwich, Staffordshire. Here he wrote and published a Novel, or, as he calls it, a Miscellaneous History, in three volumes, entitled "Wanley Penson, or the Melancholy Man." The narrative is occasionally interspersed with poetical pieces, some of which have consideiable merit. The philosophy of 2 |