traces of the model on which it was formed. Horace Smith called him "Pope in worsted stockings." It would have been more to the purpose to say he was a new poet in Pope's stockings; for the likeness is in the superficies, and the contrast is in the substance. Crabbe formed himself on Pope's style, deliberately studied his mode of expression, and sought to catch his pointed way of putting things, in which, and not in the flow of his verse, lies the characteristic excellence of Pope's style. And Crabbe did attain this excellence to a certain extent. The points are much blunter, the polish is vastly inferior: but there is the same effort to afford a share of emphasis to every sentence, to give a sharp decisive accent of meaning to correspond with the marked accent of the verse; and a considerable degree of success attends the effort. It was an excellent school for Crabbe to be exercised in; his natural bent was to be dull, minute, and prolix. The study of Pope made him look out for rest at brief intervals, for contrast and relief. If we read some of his prefaces, we shall see what he might have been in verse had he not contended against his native propensities. emancipated himself from being a proser. Poets, even good poets, have not always done this. Rogers is a refined proser; Wordsworth is a profound, a sagacious, a harmonious, and a most interminable proser. But, in substance, Crabbe differs widely from Pope. Pope is always employed in giving a specific shape to generalities; Crabbe is occupied with things as they are. Pope, except when personal, was always working out results and deductions, making up thoughts and giving them a taking form; Crabbe never wished to do more than describe graphically and agreeably (according to his notions of the agreeable in verse) what things he had seen and known. Pope's business, as he himself says, was to find rhymes for sense; Crabbe's was, to find rhymes for facts. Pope studied society, manners, and man; Crabbe studied social life, moral habits, and men. If he ever imitated Pope's matter, it was only in his very early poems; and even his style lost its influence over his later poems, and very much to their disadvantage. He is not a master of expression. His language is the very reverse of suggestive. It is so bald and dry, that the reader must furnish all accessories from his own imagination. He must give colour and shading to the thought, he must improve the hint, and clothe the naked idea. Crabbe writes like one who draws outlines with a hard pencil; and he who reads must employ a vivid fancy to fill them up. Moreover he has none of that power by which a great poet gathers up and compresses the details of his subject within the limits of the briefest general description. He is not a pregnant writer; what he has to say, he says in extenso; and

though he is often curt, it is only as a way of filling up interstices and introducing or connecting pieces of prolix detail. Yet it is wonderful how much he contrives by this process to get into a small compass. This is particularly the case in his portrait-painting. He packs a complete and characteristic picture in very small space, and after a peculiar fashion. He does not, like Ben Jonson, and sometimes Dickens, take a distinguishing humour or trait, or a set of these, and call them a man his people are real living people; mere sketches often, no doubt, but exact, defined, and likenesses. Though he may imitate Pope in his style, he has none of his epigrammatic way of pinning a character down by a single prominent trait; none of Wordsworth's habit of slowly winding it off as if it were a hank of cotton, and his poem a reel to wind it on. He sets to work in a way of his own, giving a brief, forcible, general description, and illustrating it by some dramatic speech or minor piece of description at full length. His pictures are like one of Grüner's plates of a painted ceiling, the whole drawn in outline and a corner filled up in colours. It is true, his early attempts savour more of direct and elaborate description both of things and persons, and that, where the subject suits him, he has few rivals in the skill with which he selects distinguishing points, or the aptness with which he conveys their effect through the medium of language. But when he is at his best, as in The Tales, the dramatic element holds a considerable space in his delineation of persons, and the peculiar style we have mentioned is seen in its perfection; fading down in The Tales of the Hall into something too much of prolixity and mere conversation in verse.

Our limits afford no space for a detailed survey of his various writings. It was not until he discovered that his strength lay in the minute illustration of human character that he really enrolled himself among English poets. In his early poems, often even in The Borough, he shows too clearly that he is hunting about for matter for his rhymes, and making prize of every idea he can lay his hands on. As long as he is occupied with general ideas and thoughts, Crabbe is insufferably commonplace and dull. For one sound and novel aphorism, brightly and aptly expressed, the sort of thing with which Pope's pages teem, his imitator (for when thus employed Crabbe is a direct imitator of Pope) gives us a hundred heavy disconnected sentences, which prance awkwardly up and down the verse like a cart-horse cantering after a thorough-bred. Thus, to quote the first specimen that offers:

"Law was design'd to keep a state in peace;

To punish robbery; that wrong might cease;

To be impregnable; a constant fort,
To which the weak and injured might resort.
But these perverted minds its force employ,
Not to protect mankind, but to annoy;
And long as ammunition can be found,
Its lightning flashes and its thunders sound.
Or law with lawyers is an ample still,
Wrought by the passions' heat with chymic skill;
While the fire burns, the gains are quickly made,
And freely flow the profits of the trade;

Nay, when the fierceness fails, these artists blow
The dying fire, and make the embers glow,

As long as they can make the smaller profits flow;
At length the process of itself will stop,

When they perceive they've drawn out every drop.
Yet, I repeat, there are who nobly strive

To keep the sense of moral worth alive;

Men who would starve, ere meauly deign to live

On what deception and chicanery give:

And these at length succeed; they have their strife,
Their apprehensions, stops, and rubs in life;

But honour, application, care, and skill,
Shall bend opposing fortune to their will."

The Library is pompous, pointless, and commonplace; and the only thing that men have found worth remembrance in it is the description of the binding of old folios. Once or twice only in the whole course of it is to be found some stray couplet which points in the direction of the author's real insight; such lines, for instance, as

"For transient vice bequeaths a lingering pain,
Which transient virtue strives to heal in vain."

However unadorned in statement, such a dictum indicates much of observation and something of wisdom in the writer.

The Newspaper is full of platitudes and pumped-up thought. It is a satire unrecommended by the force and brilliancy which alone can make satire endurable. The minor poems are simply unreadable. The Library, indeed, was published under the auspices of Burke; but if upon this poem alone he had formed his estimate of the author's genius, one would have said either that he had a very low idea of the requisites of poetry, or an almost supernatural insight into the germs of future success which lay hidden in the poem in question. But it seems it was on some very different lines, in The Village, that Burke rested his high opinion of the powers of his young client. They are lines which amply justify the prophecy of success; and, indeed, The Village stands quite alone among Crabbe's earlier writings. In it he spoke straight from his own personal convictions, he described directly what he had seen and known. The complexion of it differs from that of his other poems. It alone of

his writings may with some degree of justice be called stern and gloomy. The struggle and the painful experience through which he was himself passing coloured the medium through which he looked. His picture of the life and sufferings of the poor in this poem leaves an indelible impression on the mind of every reader. It is not only that it is uncompromising, that it tears off and scornfully casts aside the old stage-costume of Corydon and Phyllis; but that it keeps aloof from all the sources of comfort and consolation, the common assuagements which are not denied even to the lowest aspects of human life, and builds in its forcible lines so sad a picture of unrequited and incessant toil, deserted old age, and miserable death, as none can look at without a shudder. And when, in the second part, he turns professedly to contemplate the

"Gleams of transient mirth and hours of sweet repose," the subject leads him instantly to the vices which form or accompany the amusements of the poor, and he immediately becomes absorbed in this, to him, more attractive subject. For force, aptness of language, fervour, and directness, the first part of The Village stands unapproached among Crabbe's early

poems.

The Borough, with many parts and detached passages of first-class excellence, is a very unequal performance; and it is not until the first series of The Tales that Crabbe's genius displays itself in its full power, and maintains a sustained and unwavering flight. It is on The Village, on detached parts of The Borough, and on The Tales (the second series of which is less fresh, graphic, and pointed than the first), that the permanent reputation of Crabbe rests. The posthumous poems cannot be said to be destitute of his peculiar merits; but they must be confessed, on the other hand, to be very unworthy of what had preceded them.

The common feature throughout all his works which gives this author his hold upon his readers is his singular insight into the minute working of character, his wondrous familiarity with so vast a number of various dispositions, and the unerring fidelity with which he traces their operations and discerns their attitudes under every sort of circumstance. It would be difficult in the whole range of literature to point to more than two or three who have rivalled him in this respect. Chaucer is one; and a curious and not uninteresting comparison might be instituted between the two, though the old poet far surpasses the modern one in love of beauty, liveliness of fancy, and breadth of genius. Crabbe knew where his own strength lay, and in some lines in The Borough has aptly described both the bent and the animus of his poetic powers:

"For this the poet looks the world around,
Where form and life and reasoning man are found;
He loves the mind, in all its modes, to trace,
And all the manners of the changing race;
Silent he walks the road of life along,
And views the aims of its tumultuous throng:
He finds what shapes the Proteus-passions take,
And what strange waste of life and joy they make,
And loves to show them in their varied ways,
With honest blame or with unflattering praise :
'Tis good to know, 'tis pleasant to impart,
These turns and movements of the human heart;
The stronger features of the soul to paint,
And make distinct the latent and the faint:
MAN AS HE IS to place in all men's view,

Yet none with rancour, none with scorn pursue :
Nor be it ever of my portraits told—

'Here the strong lines of malice we behold.""

One great source of his strength is, that he dared to be true to himself, and to work with unhesitating confidence his own peculiar vein This originality is not only great, but always genuine. A never-failing charm lies in the clear simplicity and truthfulness of nature which shines through all his writings. Nothing false or meretricious ever came from his pen; and if his works want order and beauty, neither they nor his life are destitute of the higher harmony which springs from a character naturally single and undeteriorated by false aims and broken purposes..

ART. II. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CATHERINE II.

Mémoires de l'Impératrice Catherine II; écrits par elle-même, et précédés d'une Préface par A. Herzen. Londres: Trübner et Cie. 1859.

La France ou l'Angleterre?

Variations Russes sur le thême de l'Attentat du 14 janvier. Par Iscander (A. Herzen). Londres: Trübner et Cie. 1858

A Handbook of the principal Families in Russia. Originally written in French by Prince Paul Dolgorouky; translated into English, with Annotations and an Introduction, by F. Z. London: James Ridgway, 1858.

"WHEN the fields of ice which imprison the waters of the Neva during five months of the year begin to break, the bridge of boats is immediately taken away, and all communication be