There was, too, another growth in those days in that northern capital of Great Britain; Dr. Robertson had written his History of America and his History of Charles V. Adam Smith (the friend of Hume) was busy on his _Wealth of Nations_ (published during the year in which Hume died). Hugh Blair, the eloquent doctor, was delivering his lectures on rhetoric. Henry Mackenzie, the amiable Dean of the Edinboro' literati, was writing his _Man of Feeling_ and his _Julia de Roubigné_,--books of great reputation in the early part of this century, but with graces in them that were only imitative, and sentiment that was dismally affected and over-wrought; and there was Lord Kames, the _Gentleman Farmer_, with a fine great house in the Canongate, who wrote on criticism, with acuteness and taste. You will not read any of the {231} books of these last-named people; 't were unfair to ask you to do so; but they were preparing the way for that literary development which will find expression before many years in the columns of the _Edinburgh Review_ (established at the beginning of this century), and in the border minstrelsy of Scott. _George Crabbe._ [Sidenote: Crabbe.] We step back into England now, to find two poets whose principal work belonged to the closing years of the last century; and with echoes, fresh and strong, trailing over into the beginning of this. Neither their work nor their lives belonged to the noises or to the atmosphere of London. City sounds do not press into their verse; but instead are the sounds of sea-waves or of winds on woods, or of church bells, or of the clink and murmur of the lives of cottagers. The first I name to you of these two is George Crabbe[7]--a name that {232} may sound strangely, being almost unknown and unconsidered now; yet fifty years ago there was not a reading-book in any of the schools, nor an album full of elegant selections, which was not open for the story of Ph[oe]be Dawson, or a glimpse of the noble peasant, Isaac Ashford. But all that is gone:[8] "I see no more those white locks thinly spread Round the bald polish of that honored head; No more that awful glance on playful wight Compelled to knee and tremble at the sight, To fold his fingers all in dread the while Till Mister Ashford softened to a smile." This gives the manner and strain of Crabbe; it is Pope, but it is Pope muddied and rusticated; {233} Pope in cow-skin shoes, instead of Pope in prunella. Crabbe was born in the little shore town of Aldborough--looking straight out upon the North Sea; and the rhythmic beat of those waves so stamped itself on his boyish brain, that it came out afterward--when he could manage language, in which he had great gift--very clear and very real; there's nothing better, all up and down his rural tales, than his fashion of putting waves into his rhythmic measures--as you shall see:--