Book I

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‘To put our taste in poetry, and the fairness of our opinion of Mr. Crabbe’s in particular, to the test at once, we will confess, that we think the two lines we have marked in italics:

‘“Him now they follow to his grave, and stand Silent and sad, and gazing, hand in hand”—

worth nearly all the rest of his verses put together, and an unanswerable condemnation of their general tendency and spirit. It is images, such as these, that the polished mirror of the poet’s mind ought chiefly to convey; that cast their soothing, startling reflection over the length of human life, and grace with their amiable innocence its closing scenes; while its less alluring and more sombre tints sink in, and are lost in an absorbent ground of unrelieved prose. Poetry should be the handmaid of the imagination, and the foster-nurse of pleasure and beauty: Mr. Crabbe’s Muse is a determined enemy to the imagination, and a spy on nature.

‘Before we proceed, we shall just mark a few of those quaintnesses of expression, by which our descriptive poet has endeavoured to vary his style from common prose, and so far has succeeded. Speaking of Quarle he says:

‘“Of Hermit Quarle we read, in island rare, Far from mankind and seeming far from care; Safe from all want, and sound in every limb; Yes! there was he, and there was care with him.”[87]

· · · · ·

‘“Here are no wheels for either wool or flax, But packs of cards—made up of sundry packs.”[88]

· · · · ·

‘“Fresh were his features, his attire was new; Clean was his linen, and his jacket blue: Of finest _jean_, his trowsers, tight and trim, Brush’d the large buckle at the silver rim.”[89]

‘To compare small things with great, this last touch of minute description is not unlike that in Theseus’s description of his hounds:

‘“With ears that sweep away the morning dew.”[90]

· · · · ·

‘“Alas! your reverence, wanton thoughts, I grant, Where once my motive, now the thoughts of want. Women like me, as ducks in a decoy, Swim down a stream, and seem to swim in joy.”[91]

· · · · ·

‘“But from the day, that fatal day she spied The pride of Daniel, Daniel was her pride.”[92]

‘As an instance of the _curiosa felicitas_ in descriptive allusion (among many others) take the following. Our author, referring to the names of the genteeler couples, written in the parish register, thus “morals” on the circumstance:

‘“How fair these names, how much unlike they look,” etc. [_The Parish Register_, II. 283–300.]

‘The _Library_ and the _Newspaper_, in the same volume, are heavy and common-place. Mr. Crabbe merely sermonises in his didactic poetry. He must pierce below the surface to get at his genuine vein. He is properly himself only in the petty and the painful. The _Birth of Flattery_ is a homely, incondite lay. The author is no more like Spenser than he is like Pope. The ballad of Sir Eustace Grey is a production of great power and genius. The poet, in treating of the wanderings of a maniac, has given a loose to his conception of imaginary and preternatural evils. But they are of a sort that chill, rather than melt the mind; they repel instead of haunting it. They might be said to be square, portable horrors, physical, external, not shadowy, not malleable; they do not arise out of any passion in the mind of the sufferer, nor touch the reader with involuntary sympathy. Beds of ice, seas of fire, shaking bogs, and fields of snow, are disagreeable matters of fact; and though their contact has a powerful effect on the senses, we soon shake them off in fancy. Let any one compare this fictitious legend with the unadorned, unvarnished tale of Peter Grimes, and he will see in what Mr. Crabbe’s characteristic strength lies. He is a most potent copyist of actual nature, though not otherwise a great poet. In the case of Sir Eustace, he cannot conjure up any phantoms from a disordered imagination; but he makes honest Peter, the fisherman of the Borough, see visions in the mud where he had drowned his ’prentice boys, that are as ghastly and bewitching as any mermaid. We cannot resist giving the scene of this striking story, which is in our author’s exclusive manner. “Within that circle none durst walk but he.”[93]

‘“Thus by himself compell’d to live each day,” etc. [_The Borough_, Letter XXII. 171–204.]’

The last paragraph, following this quotation, is the same as in _The Spirit of the Age_ (vol. IV. pp. 352–3).

HAYDON’S CHRIST’S AGONY IN THE GARDEN

483. _Matthews._ Charles Mathews (1776–1835), the comedian, whose famous ‘At Homes’ Hazlitt refers to.

‘_Sea, earth, and air._’ Cf. ‘And shot my being through earth, sea, and air.’ Coleridge, _France, An Ode_, 103.

_He bestrides his art, etc._ Haydon was pleased with these words which he quoted in a letter to a friend extracted in Mr. W. C. Hazlitt’s _Four Generations of a Literary Family_ (I. 234). Haydon wrongly refers to Hazlitt’s article as having appeared in _The New Monthly Magazine._ See also Haydon’s _Life, etc._ (ed. T. Taylor, I. 418), where, speaking of this picture, Haydon says ‘Except the Christ’s head and the St. John sleeping it was the worst picture ever escaped my pencil.’

_‘Ample room,’ etc._ Gray, _The Bard_, 51.

484. _‘A hand,’ etc._ Donne, _The Storm_, 3–4.

485. _The celebrated Madonna, etc._ See vol. IX. p. 67.

POPE, LORD BYRON, AND MR. BOWLES

For Byron’s Letters to Murray ‘On the Rev. Wm. L. Bowles’s Strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope’ and a full account of the controversy see Byron’s _Letters and Journals_ (ed. Prothero), V. Appendix iii. Cf. a passage in Hazlitt’s essay ‘On the Aristocracy of Letters,’ vol. VI. (_Table Talk_), pp. 210, 223, and notes.

487. _Jem Belcher._ James Belcher (1781–1811), who defeated Andrew Gamble in 1800.

_In the Preface to his Tragedy._ _Marino Faliero._

‘_A tale of bawdry._’ _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.

488. ‘_Our sweet voices._’ _Coriolanus_, Act II. Sc. 3.

489. ‘_Most small faults._’ Cf. _King Lear_, Act I. Sc. 4.

_‘Ends of verse,’ etc._ Butler, _Hudibras_, I. iii. 1011–2.

490. ‘_Sternhold and Hopkins had great qualms._’ The Earl of Rochester, _On a Parish Clerk with a bad voice._

492. _‘Full of wise saws,’ etc._ _As You Like It_, Act II. Sc. 7.

494. _‘So perfumed,’ etc._ _Antony and Cleopatra_, Act II. Sc. 2.

495. ‘_Roaming the illimitable ocean wide._’ Cf. ‘Roaming the illimitable waters round.’ Wordsworth, _The Female Vagrant_, 175.

‘_Ill at these numbers._’ _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.

‘_Damnable iteration in him._’ _1 Henry IV._, Act I. Sc. 2.

‘_Keeps distance due._’ _Paradise Lost_, III. 578.

496. _‘Luscious,’ etc._ _Othello_, Act I. Sc. 3.

_The grand-daughters of Mr. Coutts._ The two Misses Burdett, presumably the daughters of Sir Francis Burdett and therefore grand-daughters of Thomas Coutts the banker, were presented at court on May 3, 1821, but Hazlitt’s meaning is a little obscure.

_The Editor of the New Monthly Magazine._ Campbell, the poet.

_‘High arbiter,’ etc._ _Paradise Lost_, II. 908–9.

‘_All the art of art is flown._’ Cf. the note on ‘all the life of life was flown’ in vol. VI. (_Table Talk_), p. 24.

497. _‘The stones and tower,’ etc._ Cf. _Peter Bell_, 856 _et seq._

497. ‘_Host of human life._’ Byron in his Letter speaks of having met Bowles at the house ‘of our venerable host of _Human Life_,’ _i.e._ Rogers, the Poet.

498. _‘Of amber-headed snuff-box,’ etc._ Pope, _The Rape of the Lock_, IV. 123–4.

499. ‘_Denote no foregone conclusion._’ _Othello_, Act III. Sc. 3.

_‘How far,’ etc._ _The Merchant of Venice_, Act V. Sc. 1.

500. _‘So was it,’ etc._ Cf. Wordsworth’s ‘My heart leaps up,’ etc.

501. _Almanach des gourmands._ See _The Edinburgh Review_, XXXV. 53.

502. ‘_Circumscription and confine_,’ _Othello_, Act I. Sc. 2.

‘_The poor man’s only music._’ Coleridge, _Frost at Midnight_, 29.

503. _‘The earth hath bubbles,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 3.

‘_Loud-hissing urn._’ Cowper, _The Task_, The Winter Evening, 38.

_‘Enforc’d to seek,’ etc._ _The Faerie Queene_, I. i. 7 and 8.

504. ‘_A thing of life._’ ‘She walks the waters like a thing of life.’ Byron, _The Corsair_, I. iii.

_‘Behold the lilies,’ etc._ Cf. _S. Matthew_, vi. 28–9.

_‘Daffodils,’ etc._ _A Winter’s Tale_, Act IV. Sc. 4.

505. _‘Hail, adamantine steel,’ etc._ Erasmus Darwin, _The Botanic Garden_,