A convenient purchase of brick and mortar, wood, and garden, lately made by George and inspected by both, furnishes the final scene. "It is my brother's!' 'No!'[George] answers,' No! 'Tis to thy own possession that we go; It is thy wife's, and will thy children's be, Earth, wood, and water!—all for thine and thee; Bought in thy name—Alight my friend, and come, I do beseech thee, to thy proper home; There wilt thou soon thy own Matilda view : Thy speculation its reward had made in trade: it too; What reason urged, or Jacques esteem'd Before her all our views and plans were thy due, Thine had it been, and I, a trader too, Had paid my debt, and home my brother sent, Nor glad nor sorry that he came or went; Who to his wife and children would have told, They had au uncle, and the man was old; Till every girl and boy had learn'd to prate laid, And Jacques was there t' explain and to persuade. Here, on this lawn, thy boys and girls shall run, And play their gambols when their tasks are done; There, from that window, shall their mother view The happy tribe, and smile at all they do; Of uncle George, his gout, and his While thou, more gravely, hiding thy estate. delight, Without attempting any thing further in the way of an account of the contents of these, we must call them, volumes of true poetic merit, as most readers have probably ascertained, from personal acquaintance, before now; we shall proceed to such few, but free, observations on particular parts, and on the whole performance, as have occurred to us in the perusal. To these observations a passage in Mr. Crabbe's own sprightly preface may, perhaps, afford us a convenient text. It is as follows: "The first intention of the poet must be to please; for, if he means to instruct, he must render the instruction which he hopes to convey palatable and pleasant. I will not assume the tone of a moralist, nor promise that my relations shall be beneficial to mankind; but I have endeavoured, not nusuccessfully 1 trust, that, in whatsoever I have related or described, there should be nothing introduced which has a tendency to excuse the vices of man, by associating with them sentiments that demand our respect, and talents that compel our admiration. There is nothing in these pages which has the mischievous effect of confounding truth and error, or confusing our ideas of right and wrong." p. xviii. Now the questions which arise to our minds from this passage, and on which we found our observations, are these three-Does Mr. Crabbe please us? Does he instruct us? Does he rightly define the first duty of the poet as being to please, or properly disclaim the assumption that his relations shall be beneficial to mankind? " To the first of these questions we say, that the word " be taken in a large sense, in order to please must answer it, on the present occasion, in the affirmative. If the test of pleasure conferred be the general desire to purchase and to read, then Mr. Crabbe wants nothing further to prove that he is a pleasing poet; since we know no poet more generally read, or made more frequently the topic of interesting CHRIST. OBSERV. No. 214. 657 and animated conversation. But when we listen to the remarks no less frequently recurring in the course of such conversations; and when we look into the pages of our brother critics, whether of greater or humbler note, and find so many persons literally writhing under the horrors of the song, and gasping after terms to express their shocked and severely pained feelings, at many of the ideas lastingly impressed on their brain; it certainly conveys to us the notion of something the very contrary to pleasure, and we begin to think our worthy divine has failed in We hear, indeed, of the eagerness "the first intention of the poet." with which auditors will rush into the stuffed theatre, to have their sensibilities harrowed by the adventures of a Lear, or a Macbeth; and this, we are still told, is being are limits; and the Athenians of "pleased." But even here there old, those most determined playwho cruelly and unjustly murdered goers, were for hanging the poet his hero. We know, too, that people will crowd to an execution; nay, we doubt not we should have multitudes of "pleased" spectasurgery or dissecting room; and tors, were they admissible into the yet we apprehend neither the bangranked amongst the tribe of those man nor the chirurgeon would be whose "first intention is to please." Mr. Crabbe is a fine dissector: his moral knife lays open to universal gaze, with a firm and unshaken touch, and in horrible truth and fidelity, the breathing vitals, the spirantia exta of his victims. take a delight in pourtraying are The mental sufferings he seems to often worked up with a poignancy that would leave the spectator, a Domitian himself, or very cruellest a French mob, nothing more to desire; and when pursued, as it is occasionally, to the death of the unhappy sufferer, can any thing the before-mentioned unfortunate more nearly approach the merit of 4Q Athenian poet? Take, for instance, the following death-bed scene of the poor "Patronized Boy." "He then was sitting on a workhonsebed, And on the naked boards reclined his Around were children with incessant cry, Fame was his wish, but he so far from fame, That no one knew his kindred, or his name, Or by what means he lived, or from what place he came. "Poor Charles! unnoticed by thy titled friend, Thy days had calmly past, in peace thine end: Led by thy patron's vanity astray, That he required-he soon would need Thy own misled thee in thy trackless Then named a lightless closet, in a room Hired at small rate, a garret's deepest gloom: They sought the region,and they brought him all That he his own, his proper wealth, could call: A better coat, less pierced; some linen neat, Not whole; and papers, many a valued sheet; Designs and drawings; these at his desire, Were placed before him at the chamber fire, And while th' admiring people stood to gaze, He, one by one, committed to the blaze, Smiling in spleen; but one he held awhile, And gave it to the flames, and could The sickening man-for such ap. Just in his need, would not a debt con tract; way, Urging thee on by hope absurd and vain, Where never peace or comfort smiled again! "Once more I saw him, when his spirits fail'd, And my desire to aid him then prevail'd He shew'd a softer feeling in his eye, And watch'd my looks, and own'd the sympathy: 'Twas now the calm of wearied pride; so long As he had strength was his resentment strong, But in such place, with strangers all around, And they such strangers, to have some. Allied to his own heart, an early friend, journey's end; One link, however slender, of the chain That held him where he could not long remain ; The one sole interest!-No, he could not Not without comfort in the thought express'd But left his poor apartment for the bed By that calm look with which he sank to rest." Vol. I. pp. 49–52. small measure of relief afforded to We really felt grateful for the our wounded feelings, by the last exquisitely-wrought paragraph; but our impression, upon rising from "the Patronized Boy," we must bluntly own, on the whole, was far enough from that of being pleased." From ten to twelve of Mr. Crabbe's two and twenty books would afford materials for the deepest tragedies. The comparative languor of some other of the books which exhibit endeavours of an opposite description, leave us little doubt as to the style of thought most congenial to the author's own peculiar mind. We desire, however, here to speak with very large exceptions in Mr. Crabbe's favour; as we hesitate not to affirm, that some of the most pleasing descriptions of domestic happiness, and the bosom's joy, to be found any where in the language, may be traced in this author's pages. His playful efforts, likewise, or rather his playfully satirical efforts, are occasionally very happy and truly amusing. Of this the comely "Widow," in the seventeenth book, whose "thriceslain peace" had scarcely left a wrinkle on her brow, may be adduced as an excellent specimen, with all her pretty wayward infantile fancies; save and except that these also were the death, and a cruel one, of her first ruined husband! "Water was near them, and, her mind afloat, whole, we sum up our sentence on this head, by declaring our opinion, that Mr. Crabbe is not, as he stands at present in the piece, a pleasing poet; that his great power and constant inclination lie in pourtraying all the varied feelings and shadows, deeper and deeper still of woe and vice; but that he gives a sufficient indication of his power in an opposite manner to make us covet, and even demand as our right, some more pleasing and animating pictures from his pensome pictures which may, without deviating from truth, exhibit her in her fairer forms and more inviting colours. We assign, it is true, a more arduous task to our poet than any he has yet attempted, as beauty is more difficult of delineation than deformity, and the simple magnificence of wisdom and virtue and truth and peace, in their purest earthly forms, more unattainable to the ordinary pencil, than the harsh, and wrinkled, and evershifting features of falsehood and folly, and vice and wretchedness: but why should not the attempt be made, with powers of genius like those of Mr. Crabbe? The next question which demands our attention, and a very grave one, is this-Does Mr. Crabbe instruct us? To this we most readily reply, in spite of his own modest disclaimer, which we reserve as a dry question for our last topic, that it is his laudable intention to do so. We as firmly believe, that Mr. Crabbe intends to benefit mankind by his labours as to please them; and if he fails, or as far as he fails in either, we have no hesitation in ascribing both alike, rather to error in judgment than to any perversity of will. The points of instruction in which we perceive no failure in our poet's able productions, are, 1. That nice delineation of character in general, as far as his characters go, which must ever be considered as highly conducive to the cultivation of that discriminative faculty which is so useful in our intercourse with mankind; and, 2. and near akin to this,The perpetual recurrence of inimitable home-strokes in the course even of his commonest details, which go very far in assisting us to form a correct judgment of our own minds and our own motives. As an instance of the former, what can be more in point, or more admirably discriminating, than the following portion of the respective characters of "the Two Sisters," Jane and Lucy? "Lucy loved all that grew upon the ground, And loveliness in all things living found: The gilded fly, the fern upon the wall, Were nature's works, and admirable all. Pleased with indulgence of so cheap a kind, Its cheapness never discomposed her mind. "Jane had no liking for such things as these, Things pleasing her must her superiors please; The costly flower was precious in her eyes, That skill can vary, or that money buys; Her taste was good, but she was still afraid, Till fashion sanction'd the remarks she made. "The sisters read, and Jane with some delight, The satires keen that fear or rage excite, That men in power attack, and ladies high, And give broad hints that we may know them by. She was amused when sent to haunted rooms, Or some dark passage where the spirit comes Of one once murder'd! Then she laugh ing read, And felt at once the folly and the dread: Or as a patient, urged by grievous pains, Will fee the daring quack whom he disdains, So Jane was pleas'd to see the beckon. ing hand, And trust the magic of the Ratcliffe wand. Right onward, cautious in the ways of God; Nor did she dare to launch on seas unknown, In search of truths by some adventurers shown, But her own compass used, and kept a course her own." Vol. I. pp. 179–181. Instances of the latter point of instruction occur so frequently in Mr. Crabbe's pages, that it seems an injustice to select only one or two as specimens of the rest. Perhaps, however, the following fearful outline of a state of mind, as common as it is lamentable, may |