With pain I've seen, these wrangling wits among,
Faith's weak defenders, passionate and young;
Weak thou art not, yet not enough on guard,
Where Wit and Humour keep their watch and ward:
Men gay and noisy will o'erwhelm thy sense,
Then loudly laugh at Truth's and thy expence;
While the kind Ladies will do all they can
To check th ir mirth, and cry, "The good young man !”?
Prudence, my Boy, forbids thee to commend
The cause or party of thy Noble Friend;
What are his praises worth, who must be known
To take a Patron's maxims for his own?
When ladies sing, or in thy presence play,
Do not, dear John, in rapture melt away;
Tis not thy part, there will be list❜ners round,
To cry Divine! and dote upon the sound;
Remember too, that though the poor have ears,
They take not in the music of the spheres ;
They must not feel the warble and the thrill,
Or be dissolv'd in extacy at will;
Beside, 'tis freedom in a youth like thee,
To drop his awe, and deal in extacy!

In silent ease, at least in silence, dine,
Nor one opinion start of food or wine :
Thou know'st that all the science thou canst boast,
Is of thy father's simple boil'd and roast;
Nor always these; he sometimes sav'd his cash,
By interlinear days of frugal hash:

Wine had 'st thou seldom; wilt thou be so vain
As to decide on claret or champagne?
Dost thou from me derive this taste sublime,
Who order port the dozen at a time?
When (every glass held precious in our eyes)
We judg'd the value by the bottle's size:
Then never merit for thy praise assume,
Its worth well knows each servant in the room.

The Patron, Vol. I. pp. 98-99%

The Uncle died, and when the Nephew read
The will, and saw the substance of the dead-
Five hundred guineas, with a stock in trade,-
He much rejoic'd, and thought his fortune made
Yet felt aspiring pleasure at the sight,
And for increase, increasing appetite :
Desire of profit, idle habits check'd,
(For Fulham's virtue was, to be correct);

He and his Conscience had their compact made-
"Urge me with truth, and you will soon persuade;
"But not," he cried, "for mere ideal things
"Give me to feel those terror-breeding stings."

6

Let not such thoughts,' she said, your mind confound Trifles may wake me, but they never wound; VOL. VIII, 5 H

• But you will find me pliant and polite;

Not like a Conscience of the dotard kind,
Awake to dreams, to dire offences blind:
Let all within be pure, in all beside
Be your own master, governor, and guide;
'Alive to danger, in temptation strong,

And I shall sleep our whole existence long.'

The Struggles of Conscience, Vol. II. pp. 69-70.

We assure our readers, it is very seldom indeed that Mr. C.'s style in these volumes rises above these specimens. It is nothing but prose measured, whether by ear or finger, into decasyllabic lines. Nor are there any little ebullitions of fancy, bubbling and playing through the desert waste; very little of simile, or metaphor, or allusion; and what there is, of this kind.

For all that Honour brings against the force

Of headlong passion, aids its rapid course;
Its slight resistance but provokes the fire,

As wood-work stops the flame, and then conveys it higher.' II.14.
Each new idea more inflam'd his ire

As fuel thrown upon a rising fire: II. p. 101.
'As heaviest weights the deepest rivers pass,
While icy chains fast bind the solid mass;
So, born of feelings, faith remains secure,
Long as their firmness and their strength endure:
But when the waters in their channel glide,
A bridge must bear us o'er the threat'ning tide;
Such bridge is Reason, and there Faith relies,

Whether the varying spirits fall or rise. II. pp. 176—177.

"Nor good nor evil can you beings name,

"Who are but Rooks and Castles in the game;

"Superior natures with their puppets play,

Fill, bagg'd or buried, all are swept away." II. p. 17.

Our next objection to Mr. C.'s poetry, is the wearisome minuteness of his details. Every description is encumbered with an endless enumeration of particulars. He will copy a dress, a chamber, or an alley, with more than Chinese accuracy. And every circumstance is touched with equal strength,-the slightest as diligently laboured as the most important. We have heard of sculptors, who have laid out as much pains upon a shoe-tye, as a forehead. But does not Mr. C. know, that the reader of poetry must owe half his pleasure to his own fancies and associations? Some metaphysicians have as

*We shall not quarrel about names; but Mr. C's choice is somewhat odd; Dinah, Jonas, Josiah, Judith, Isaac, Allen Booth, John Dighton, Stephen Jones, Sybil Kindred, &c.

serted, that the secondary qualities of bodies exist only in
the percipient mind; that the heat of fire, and the colours of
the rainbow, and the sweetness of honey are not in exterior
things, but in the mind that receives the ideas of them. This
is very poor doctrine in metaphysics, but there is something
very much like it in poetry. Half of the beauty of the most
beautiful poem exists in the mind of the reader. He hears
of Eve, that grace was in all her steps, &c.': of Dido, that
she was pulcherrima Dido,' and he conjures up the form of
'her he loves the best.' But had Milton told us that his heroine
was little and languishing, had light hair and blue eyes, &c.
&c. what would have become of him whose mistress should be
a commanding beauty, of jet-black eyes and raven locks?
Thus, therefore, to particularize description is most grievously
to fetter the imagination. Where every thing is told nothing
can be added. Where, out of the infinity of ways from one
point to another, the poet has chosen one, the reader cannot
take another. The reader must have the setting of the poet's
air; he must lay the colours on the poet's outline. Our re-.
marks are necessarily very general; we, though not writing
poetry, follow our own rule, in leaving something to the limi-
tation of the judicious reader. Now for ar instance or two.
'Fix'd were their habits; they arose betimes,

Then pray'd their hour, and sang their party-rhimes;
Their meals were plenteous, regular, and plain,
The trade of Jonas brought him constant gain;
Vender of Hops and Malt, of Coals and Corn
And, like his father, he was Merchant born:
Neat was their house; each table, chair, and stool,
Stood in its place, or moving mov'd by rule;
No lively print or picture grac'd the room,
A plain brown paper lent its decent gloom :
But here the eye, in glancing round, survey'd
A small recess, that seem'd for china made.'

The Frank Courtship. Vol. I. p. 119.

'The lover rode as hasty lovers ride,
And reach'd a common pasture wild and wide;
Small black-legg'd sheep devour with hunger keen
The meagre herbage, fleshless, lank and lean;
Such o'er thy level turf, Newmarket! stray,
And there, with other Black-legs, find their prey:
He saw some scatter'd hovels; turf was pil'd

In

square brown stacks; a prospect bleak and wild!
A mill, indeed, was in the centre found,

With short sear herbage withering all around;
A smith's black shed oppos'd a wright's long shop,
And join'd an inn where humble traveller's stop."
'On rode Orlando, counting all the while
The miles he pass'd, and every coming mile;

Like all attracted things, he quicker flies,
The place approaching where th' attraction lies;
When next appear'd a dam,-so call the place,-
Where lies a road confin'd in narrow space;
A work of labour, for on either side
Is level fen, a prospect wild and wide,

With dykes on either hand by Ocean's self supplied s
Far on the right, the distant sea is seen,

And salt the springs that feed the marsh between ;
Beneath an ancient bridge, the straiten'd flood
Rolls through its sloping banks of slimy mud;
Near it a sunken boat resists the tide,
That frets and hurries to th' opposing side;
The rushes sharp, that on the borders grow,
Bend their brown flowrets to the streain below,
Impure in all its course, in all its progress
Here a grave Flora scarcely deigns to bloom,
Nor wears a rosy blush, nor sheds perfume;
The few dull flowers that o'er the place are spread,
Partake the nature of their fenny bed;
Here on its wiry stem, in rigid bloom,
Grows the salt lavender that lacks perfume;

slow:

Here the dwarf sallows creep, the septfoil harsh,
And the soft slimy mallow of the marsh;
Low on the ear the distant billows sound,
And just in view appears their stony bound;
No hedge nor tree conceals the glowing sun,
Birds, save a watʼry tribe, the district shun,
Nor chirp among the reeds where bitter waters run.'

The Lover's Journey. Vol. I. pp. 193, 195, 196. Lastly, a word or two with Mr. Crabbe on his carelessness. If one order of words will not do, Mr. C. will try another and another, till he makes his verse; and truly ten syllables can seldom be found so unbending, as not to form metre some way or other.

To learn how frail is man, how humble then should be.”
he would not them upbraid."

'And by that proof she every instant gives.'

'And George exclaim, Ab, what to this is wealth.'

Thus the auxiliary and the verb are continually most ungracefully separated.

'And was with saving care and prudence blest.'
He sometimes could among a number trace.'

The pronoun and the verb.

That all your wealth you to deception owe."

He is sometimes ungrammatical.

• Pain mixt with pity in our bosoms rise.'
Blaze not with fairy-light the phosphor-fly

His quantity is incorrect.

While others, daring, yet imbécile, fly.'

'The mind sunk slowly to infántine ease.'

With all these helps, however, and that of triplets and alexandrines to boot, of which he is very liberal, he cannot always get his verse.

That, if they improve not, still enlarge the mind.'

'It shock'd his spirit to be esteem'd unfit.'

His rhymes are not always of the best.

With tyrast-craft he then was still and calm,
But raised .. private terror and alarm.'

His verses are frequently as feeble as the following.
All things prepar'd, on the expected day.'

And what became of the forsaken maid.'
Blamed by the mild, approved by the severe.'

To the base toil of a dependent mind.'

Mr. C. is fond of antithetic lines, yet they are sometimes very carelessly managed.

Where joy was laughter, and profaneness wit.'

"With heart half broken, and with scraps ill fed.'

All these things individually are nothing, but much in the aggregate. A face may lose as much by being pitted with the small-pox, as by having the nose awry.

We turn with pleasure to the excellencies of Mr. Crabbe. And among the first of these, we place his power in the pathetic. Every body remembers the Dying Seaman, and the Malefactor's Dream. Such passages, indeed, will be looked for in vain in the work before us; but still there is pathos. There is something touching in the tale called the Parting Hour: the opening lines are striking.

• Minutely trace man's life; year after year,
Through all his days let all his deeds appear,
And then, though some may in that life be strange,
Yet there appears no vast nor sudden change:
The links that bind those various deeds are seen,
And no mysterious void is left between.

But let these binding links be all destroy'd,
All that through years he suffer'd or enjoy'd ;
Let that vast gap be made, and then behold-
This was the youth, and he is thus when old;
Then we at once the work of Time survey,
And in an instant see a life's decay:
Pain mixt with pity in our bosoms rise,

And sorrow takes new sadness from surprise.' Vol. I. p. 27,,

The illustration of these lines, however, is that to which we