But, spite of all, a book was a book, and therefore it was read. At every page the same struggle went on in the mind between all the old notions of poetry, and the vivid pictures of actual life which it unfolded. When I had read it once, I told the lender that it was the strangest, cleverest, and most absorbing book I had ever read, but that it was no poem. It was only by a second and a third perusal that the first surprise subsided; the first shock gone by, the poem began to rise out of the novel composition. The deep and experienced knowledge of human life, the sound sense, the quiet satire, there was no overlooking from the first; and soon the warm sympathy with poverty and suffering, the boldness to display them as they existed, and to suffer no longer poetry to wrap her golden haze round human life, and to conceal all that ought to be known, because it must be known before it could be removed; the tender pathos, and the true feeling for nature, grew every hour on the mind. It was not long before George Crabbe became as firmly fixed in my bosom as a great and genuine poet, as Rembrandt, or Collins, or Edwin Landseer are as genuine painters. Crabbe saw plainly what was become the great disease of our literature. It was a departure from actual life and nature. "I've often marveled, when by night, by day, I've marked the manners moving in my way, And heard the language and beheld the lives Of lass and lover, goddesses and wives, That books which promise much of life to give Should show so little how we truly live. To me it seems, their females and their men Are but the creatures of the author's pen; Nay, creatures borrowed, and again conveyed From book to book, the shadows of a shade. Life, if they'd seek, would show them many a change; The ruin sudden and the misery strange; With more of grievous, base, and dreadful things, Than novelists relate, or poet sings. But they who ought to look the world around, Spy out a single spot in fairy ground, Where all in turns ideal forms behold, And plots are laid, and histories are told." To these home-truths, succeeds that admirable satirical description of our novel literature, which introduces the sad story of Ellen Orford. My space is little, but I must give a specimen of the manner in which the Cervantes of England strips away the sublime fooleries of our literary knight-errantry. "Time have I lent--I would their debt were less-- To flowing pages of sublime distress; And to the heroine's soul-distracting fears I early gave my sixpences and tears; Oft have I traveled in these tender tales, To _Darnley Cottages and Maple Vales_. * * * * * *