earnestness and truth of the poet's mingled anger and sorrow. The misery
of irregular unions had never been "bitten in" with more convincing
force. The verse, moreover, in the passage is freer than usual from many
of Crabbe's eccentricities. It is marked here and there by his fondness
for verbal antithesis, almost amounting to the pun, which his parodists
have not overlooked. The second line indeed is hardly more allowable in
serious verse than Dickens's mention of the lady who went home "in a
flood of tears and a sedan-chair." But Crabbe's indulgence in this habit
is never a mere concession to the reader's flippant taste. His epigrams
often strike deeply home, as in this instance or in the line:--

"Too soon made happy, and made wise too late."

The story that follows of Phoebe Dawson, which helped to soothe Fox in
the last stage of his long disease, is no less powerful. The gradual
steps by which the village beauty is led to her ruin are told in a
hundred lines with a fidelity not surpassed in the case of the story of
Hetty Sorrel. The verse, alternately recalling Pope and Goldsmith, is
yet impelled by a moral intention, which gives it absolute
individuality. The picture presented is as poignantly pathetic as
Frederick Walker's _Lost Path_, or Langhorne's "Child of misery,
baptized in tears." That it will ever again be ranked with such may be
doubtful, for _technique_ is the first quality demanded of an artist in
our day, and Crabbe's _technique_ is too often defective in the extreme.

These more tragic incidents of village life are, however, relieved at
proper intervals by some of lighter complexion. There is the gentleman's
gardener who has his successive children christened by the Latin names
of his plants,--Lonicera, Hyacinthus and Senecio. Then we have the
gallant, gay Lothario, who not only fails to lead astray the lovely