controlled. The same pieces were included a few years later by Vicesimus
Knox in that excellent Miscellany _Elegant Extracts_. And Crabbe was to
learn in later life from Walter Scott how, when a youth of eighteen,
spending a snowy winter in a lonely country-house, he fell in with the
volume of _The Annual Register_ containing the passages from _The
Village;_ how deeply they had sunk into his heart; and that (writing
then to Crabbe in the year 1809) he could repeat them still from memory.

Edmund Burke's friend, Edward Shackleton, meeting Crabbe at Burke's
house soon after the publication of the poem, paid him an elegant
tribute. Goldsmith's, he said, would now be the "deserted" village.
Crabbe modestly disclaimed the compliment, and assuredly with reason
Goldsmith's delightful poem will never be deserted. For it is no loss
good and wise to dwell on village life as it might be, than to reflect
on what it has suffered from man's inhumanity to man. What made Crabbe a
now force in English poetry, was that in his verse Pity appears, after a
long oblivion, as the true antidote to Sentimentalism. The reader is not
put off with pretty imaginings, but is led up to the object which the
poet would show him, and made to feel its horror. If Crabbe is our first
great realist in verse, he uses his realism in the cause of a true
humanity. _Facit indignatio versum._

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: I cannot deny myself the pleasure of here acknowledging my
indebtedness to a French scholar, M. Huchon of the University of Nancy.
M. Huchon is himself engaged upon a study of the Life and Poetry of
Crabbe, and in the course of a conversation with me in London, first
called my attention to the volume containing this letter. I agree with
him in thinking that no previous biographer of Crabbe has been aware of