"It is thy wife's, and will thy children's be, Earth, wood, and water! all for thine and thee. * * * * * There wilt thou soon thy own Matilda view, She knows our deed, and she approves it too; Before her all our views and plans were laid, And Jacques was there to explain and to persuade. Here on this lawn thy boys and girls shall run, And play their gambols when their tasks are done, There, from that window shall their mother view The happy tribe, and smile at all they do; While thou, more gravely, hiding thy delight Shalt cry, 'O! childish!' and enjoy the sight." FitzGerald's selections are made with the skill and judgment we should expect from a critic of so fine a taste, but it may be doubted whether any degree of skill could have quite atoned for one radical flaw in his method. He seems to have had his own misgivings as to whether he was not, by that method, giving up one real secret of Crabbe's power. After quoting Sir Leslie Stephen's most true remark that "with all its short-and long-comings Crabbe's better work leaves its mark on the reader's mind and memory as only the work of genius can, while so many a more splendid vision of the fancy slips away, leaving scarce a mark behind." FitzGerald adds: "If this abiding impression result (as perhaps in the case of Richardson or Wordsworth) from being, as it were, soaked in through the longer process by which the man's peculiar genius works, any abridgement, whether of omission or epitome, will diminish from the effect of the whole." FitzGerald is unquestionably in sight of a truth here. The parallel with Wordsworth is indeed not exact, for the best of Wordsworth's poetry neither requires nor admits of condensation. _The Excursion_ might benefit by omission and compression, but not _The Solitary Reaper_, nor _The Daffodils_. But the example of Richardson is fairly in point. Abridgments of _Clarissa Harlowe_ have been attempted, but probably without any effect on the number of its readers. The power of Richardson's method does actually lie in the "soaking process" to which FitzGerald refers. Nor is it otherwise with Crabbe. The fascination which his readers find in him--readers not perhaps found in the ranks of those who prefer their poetry on "hand-made paper"--is really the result of the slow and patient dissection of motive and temptation, the workings of conscience, the gradual development of character. These processes are slow, and Crabbe's method of presenting them is slow, but he attains his end. A distinction has lately been drawn between "literary Poetry," and "Poetry which is Literature." Crabbe's is rarely indeed that of the former class. It cannot be denied that it has taken its place in the latter.