contemporaries; and to us now it seems that poetry cannot have been
forgotten by any age possessing _Lycidas_. Yet that age can scarcely be
said to have in any true sense possessed _Lycidas_. There are other
things, besides poetry, in Milton's poems. We do not entirely know,
perhaps, but we can conjecture how a reader in Crabbe's late eighteenth
century, looking in Milton for authority for all that he unluckily and
vainly admired, would well find it. He would find the approval of
Young's "Night Thoughts" did he search for it, as we who do not search
for it may not readily understand. A step or so downwards, from a few
passages in "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained," an inevitable drop
in the derivation, a depression such as is human, and everything, from
Dryden to "The Vanity of Human Wishes," follows, without violence and
perhaps without wilful misappreciation. The poet Milton fathered,
legitimately enough, an unpoetic posterity. Milton, therefore, who might
have kept an age, and many a succeeding age, on the heights of poetry by
lines like these--

Who sing and singing in their glory move--

by this, and by many and many another so divine--Milton justified also
the cold excesses of his posterity by the example of more than one group
of blank verse lines in his greatest poem. Manifestly the sanction is a
matter of choice, and depends upon the age: the age of Crabbe found in
Milton such ancestry as it was fit for.

Crabbe, then, was not a poet of poetry. But he came into possession of a
metrical form charged by secondary poets with a contented second-class
dignity that bears constant reference, in the way of respect rather than
of imitation, to the state and nobility of Pope at his best--the couplet.
The weak yet rigid "poetry" that fell to his lot owed all the decorum it