I was curious to know what an American, and of your Quality, would say of Crabbe. The manner and topics (Whig, Tory, etc.) are almost obsolete in this country, though I remember them well: how then must they appear to you and yours? The 'Ceremoniousness' you speak of is overdone for Crabbe's time: he overdid it in his familiar intercourse, so as to disappoint everybody who expected 'Nature's sternest Poet,' etc.; but he was all the while observing. I know not why he persists in his Thee and Thou, which certainly Country Squires did not talk of, except for an occasional Joke, at the time his Poem dates from, 1819: and I warned my Readers in that stillborn Preface to change that form into simple 'You.' If this Book leaves a melancholy impression on you, what then would all his others? Leslie Stephen says his Humour is heavy (Qy is not his Tragedy?), and wonders how Miss Austen could admire him as it appears she did; and you discern a relation between her and him. I find plenty of grave humour in this Book: in the Spinster, the Bachelor, the Widow, etc. All which I pointed out (in the still-born) to L. S. . . . He says too that Crabbe is 'incapable of Epigram,' which also you do not agree in; Epigrams more of Humour than Wit; sometimes only hinted, as in those two last lines of that disagreeable, and rather incomprehensible Sir Owen Dale. I think he will do in the land of Cervantes still. When my Copy of Tennyson's Lover's Tale comes home I will send it to you. . . . As to Gray--Ah, to think of that little Elegy inscribed among the Stars, while ---, --- & Co., are blazing away with their Fireworks here below. I always think that there is more Genius in most of the three volume Novels than in Gray: but by the most exquisite Taste, and indefatigable lubrication, he made of his own few thoughts, and many of other men's, a something which we all love to keep ever about us. {270} I do not think his scarcity of work was from Design: he had but a little to say, I believe, and took his time to say it. . . . Only think of old Carlyle, who was very feeble indeed during the winter, having read through all Shakespeare to himself during these latter Spring months. So his Niece writes me. I do not hear of his doing the like by his Goethe. I had another shot at your Hawthorne, a Man of fifty times Gray's Genius, but I could not take to him. Painfully microscopic and elaborate on dismal subjects, I still thought: but I am quite ready to admit that (as in Goethe's case) the fault lies in me. I think I have a good feeling for such things; but 'non omnia possumus, etc.;' some Screw loose. 'C'est egal.' That is a serviceable word for so much.