III. Perhaps it may be said that the subject of my lecture was after all rather a commonplace old gentleman, and if what I have said leaves this view, it is because I have failed to convey the effect which the study of his works has left upon me. He certainly made a great impression in his time, and was hailed as a true poet in an age of poets. Nor is an age always wrong when it acclaims a man in whom posterity sees little merit. To compare Crabbe with Byron as a poet would be as absurd as to place his little stories on a level with the romances of Scott, whether in prose or verse. But in his own time men rated him very highly, and this is the more remarkable because he was essentially a man of the eighteenth century, who achieved his reputation in the nineteenth. He saturated himself in Pope and Dryden, and the wits of a bygone age, and never conformed to the taste of his own. The romantic movement, much as he admired Scott’s writings, never influenced Crabbe nor does he seem to have been affected by the Lake Poets. He was simply himself: simple-minded if sensitive, full of courage, and with a quiet dignity of his own. Unworldly, yet remarkably shrewd, curiously blind to the beauties of Nature and of art, yet wonderfully alive to the marvels of the world and the pathos of life. Stern and uncompromising as a realist, he lacked neither sympathy nor imagination, and possessed a saving sense of descriptive humour. Lord Thurlow said of him, “He’s as like Parson Adams as twelve to a dozen, by G--d,” and he has much of the winning simplicity of Fielding’s charming clerical creation. And yet he had the elevation of character and the genius with fearless hand to tear the veil which hid the lives of the poor from their richer neighbours, to expose the cruelty, injustice, and rapacity of an age which for all its greatness was singularly callous and unsympathetic of weakness and suffering; and Crabbe may take his place not only with the poets of his time, but with the Clarksons, the Howards, the Frys, and the good men and women who succeeded in inaugurating an era of practical humanity. We need not grudge him the generous commendation of the greatest among his contemporary poets-- “Nature’s sternest painter and her best.” FOOTNOTES: [2] My father’s first cousin, the Ven. Robert Groome, Archdeacon of Suffolk, the intimate friend of Edward Fitzgerald, was the grandson of a native of Aldeburgh who owned the _Unity_ smack in which Crabbe sailed to London in 1780. My maternal great-grandparents, as will appear, also knew the poet. [3] One cannot fail to recall Horace’s generous acknowledgement of the liberality of his father, “macro pauper agello,” in sending him to Rome to be educated. _Sat._ I. vi. 71. [4] In the “Life” by his son it is implied that Crabbe was Maskill’s assistant; but this is denied in Huchon’s “George Crabbe and his Times,” p. 63.