that Crabbe, though he might have survived as one of the "mob of
gentlemen" who imitated Pope "with ease," would never have learned where
his true strength lay, and thus have lived as one of the first and
profoundest students of _The Annals of the Poor_. For _The Village_, one
of the earliest and not least valuable of his poems, was written (in
part, at least) as early as 1781, while Wordsworth was yet a child, and
before Cowper had published a volume. In yet another respect Crabbe was
to work hand in hand with Wordsworth. He does not seem to have held
definite opinions as to necessary reforms in what Wordsworth called
"poetic diction." Indeed he was hampered, as Wordsworth was not, by a
lifelong adherence to a metre--the heroic couplet--with which this same
poetic diction was most closely bound up. He did not always escape the
effects of this contagion, but in the main he was delivered from it by
what I have called a first-hand association with man and nature. He was
ever describing what he had seen and studied with his own eyes, and the
vocabulary of the bards who had for generations borrowed it from one
another failed to supply him with the words he needed. The very
limitations of the first five-and-twenty years of his life passed in a
small and decaying seaport were more than compensated by the intimacy
of his acquaintance with its inhabitants. Like Wordsworth he had early
known love and sorrow "in huts where poor men lie."

Wordsworth's fame and influence have grown steadily since his death in
1850. Crabbe's reputation was apparently at its height in 1819, for it
was then, on occasion of his publishing his _Tales of the Hall_, that
Mr. John Murray paid him three thousand pounds for the copyright of this
work, and its predecessors. But after that date Crabbe's popularity may
be said to have continuously declined. Other poets, with other and more
purely poetical gifts, arose to claim men's attention. Besides
Wordsworth, as already pointed out, Scott, Byron, Coleridge, Keats,