But at least, if this incongruity is to exist, it is on the more hopeful side. The characteristic of so much poetry of our own day is that the manner is uncommon, and the commonness resides in the matter. When Crabbe had completed his revisions to his own satisfaction and his adviser's, Burke suggested the publication of _The Library_ and _The Village_, and the former poem was laid before Mr. Dodsley, who only a few months before had refused a poem from the same hand. But circumstances were now changed, and Burke's recommendation and support were all-sufficient. Dodsley was all politeness, and though he declined to incur any risk--this was doubtless borne by Burke--he promised his best endeavours to make the poem a success. _The Library_ was published, anonymously, in June 1781. The _Monthly_ and the _Critical Reviews_ awarded it a certain amount of faint praise, but the success with the general public seems only to have been slight. When Burke selected this poem to lay before Dodsley, he had already read portions of _The Village,_ and it seems strange that he should have given _The Library_ precedence, for the other was in every respect the more remarkable. But Burke, a conservative in this as in other matters, probably thought that a new poet desiring to be heard would be wiser in not at once quitting the old paths. The readers of poetry still had a taste for didactic epigram varied by a certain amount of florid rhetoric. And there was little beyond this in Crabbe's moralisings on the respective functions of theology, history, poetry, and the rest, as represented on the shelves of a library, and on the blessings of literature to the heart when wearied with business and the cares of life. Crabbe's verses on such topics are by no means ineffective. He had caught perfectly the trick of the school so soon to pass away. He is as fluent and copious--as skilful in spreading a truism over a dozen well-sounding lines--as any of his predecessors. There is little new in the way of ideas. Crabbe had as yet no wide insight into books and authors, and he was forced to deal largely in generalities. But he showed that he had already some idea of style; and if, when he had so little to say, he could say it with so much semblance of power, it was certain that when he had observed and thought for himself he would go further and make a deeper mark. The heroic couplet controlled him to the end of his life, and there is no doubt that it was not merely timidity that made him confine himself to the old beaten track. Crabbe's thoughts ran very much in antithesis, and the couplet suited this tendency. But it had its serious limitations. Southey's touching stanzas-- "My days among the dead are passed," though the ideas embodied are no more novel than Crabbe's, are worth scores of such lines as these--