Thomson, we have seen, had not been altogether successful in his personification of the seasons: here they are brought vividly and fittingly before us. When we think of the hosts of puppets that in the guise of personified abstractions move mechanically through so much of eighteenth century verse, and compare them with the beautiful visions evoked by Blake, we know from this evidence alone that the reign of one of the chief excesses of the poetical language of the time is near its end. It is not that Blake’s conceptions are all flesh and blood creations: often they are rather ethereal beings, having something in common with the evanescent images of Collins. But the rich and lofty imagination that has given them birth is more than sufficient to secure their acceptance as realities capable of living and moving before us; the classical abstraction, cold and lifeless, has now become the Romantic personification clothed in beauty and animated with life and inner meaning. In the year of the “Poetical Sketches” (1783) George Crabbe published “The Village,” his first work to meet with any success. But whilst Blake gloriously announces the emancipation of English poetry, Crabbe for the most part is still writing on in the old dead style. The heroic couplets of his earliest works have all the rhetorical devices of his predecessors in that measure, and amongst these the prevalence of personified abstractions is not the least noteworthy. The subject of his first poem of any length, “Inebriety” (1775), afforded him plenty of scope in this direction, and he availed himself fully of the opportunity.[235] The absence of capital letters from some of the instances in this poem may perhaps be taken to reflect a confusion in the poet’s mind as to whether he was indulging in personification or in mere abstraction, to adopt Coleridge’s remark anent Gray’s use of this figure.[236] In “The Village,” Crabbe’s first poem of any real merit, there is a more sparing use, yet instances are even here plentiful, whilst his employment of the device had not died out when in the early years of the nineteenth century he resumed his literary activities. Among the poems published in the 1807 volume there is a stiff and cumbrous allegory entitled “The Birth of Flattery,” which, introduced by three Spenserian stanzas, depicts Flattery as the child of Poverty and Cunning, attended by guardian satellites, “Care,” “Torture,” “Misery,” _et hoc omne genus_. They linger on to the time of the “Posthumous Tales,” where there is a sad, slow procession of them, almost, we might imagine, as if they were conscious of the doom pronounced years before, and of the fact that they were strangers in a strange land: Yet Resignation in the house is seen Subdued Affliction, Piety serene, And Hope, for ever striving to instil The balm for grief, “It is the heavenly will.” (XVIII, 299 foll.)