Crabbe then proceeds to deal with the question, evidently implied by the _Quarterly_ reviewer, how far many passages in _The Borough_, when concerned with low life, were really poetry at all. Crabbe pleads in reply the example of other English poets, whose claim to the title had never been disputed. He cites Chaucer, who had depicted very low life indeed, and in the same rhymed metre. "If all that kind of satire wherein character is skilfully delineated, must no longer be esteemed as genuine poetry," then what becomes of the author of _The Canterbury Tales_? Crabbe could not supply, or be expected to supply, the answer to this question. He could not discern that the treatment is everything, and that Chaucer was endowed with many qualities denied to himself--the spirit of joyousness and the love of sunshine, and together with these, gifts of humour and pathos to which Crabbe could make no pretension. From Chaucer, Crabbe passes to the great but very different master, on whom he had first built his style. Was Pope, then, not a poet? seeing that he too has "no small portion of this actuality of relation, this nudity of description, and poetry without an atmosphere"? Here again, of course, Crabbe overlooks one essential difference between himself and his model. Both were keen-sighted students of character, and both described sordid and worldly ambitions. But Pope was strongest exactly where Crabbe was weak. He had achieved absolute mastery of form, and could condense into a couplet some truth which Crabbe expanded, often excellently, in a hundred lines of very unequal workmanship. The _Quarterly_ reviewer quotes, as admirable of its kind, the description in _The Borough_ of the card-club, with the bickerings and ill-nature of the old ladies and gentlemen who frequented it. It is in truth very graphic, and no doubt absolutely faithful to life; but it is rather metrical fiction than poetry. There is more of the essence of poetry in a single couplet of Pope's: "See how the world its veterans rewards-- A youth of frolics, an old age of cards." For here the expression is faultless, and Pope has educed an eternally pathetic truth, of universal application.