Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/574

540 for some time at Swefling, county of Suffolk, officiating as curate to the minister of Great Yarmouth. About 1789 he was presented, through the instrumentality of the duchess of Rutland, to the rectories of Muston in Leicestershire and West Allington in Lincolnshire. In. 1813 he was preferred to the rectory of Trowbridge, county of Wilts, which, together with the smaller living of Croxton Kerrial, in Leicestershire, lie held to the time of his death. After The Village, published in 1783, which had received the correc tions and commendations of Dr Johnson, Crabbe next pro duced The Newspaper, published in 1785. After this time his poetical labours were long suspended, owing probably to the dedication of his time to domestic affairs and the duties of his profession, or, as he himself ascribes it, to the loss of those early and distinguished friends who had given him the benefit of their criticism. He had, however, the satisfaction of seeing his next work, The Parish Register, published in 1809, read aud approved by Fox. The suc cess obtained by these poems, which far exceeded that which had attended his earlier efforts, encouraged him to write again ; and in 1810 he published one of his best poems, The Borough, and in 1812 Tales in Verse. His last pub lication was entitled Tales of the Hall, and appeared in 1819. The latter years of his life he spent in the tranquil aud amiable exercise of his domestic and clerical duties, at his rectory of Trowbridge, esteemed and admired by his parishioners, among whom he died, after a short illness, on the 8th February 1832, aged seventy -seven. He was buried in the chancel of Trowbridge Church. Crabbe s only prose publications were a Funeral Sermon on Charles, duke of Rutland, preached at Belvoir, and an essay on the natural history of the vale of Belvoir, written for Nichols s History of Leicestershire, in which it is thankfully acknow ledged. His fame rests solely on his poems, of which The Parish Register and The Borough are destined to a reputa tion, if not as brilliant, yet probably as enduring as that of any other contemporary productions. Crabbe is one of the most original of our poets ; and his originality is of that best kind, which displays itself not in tumid exaggeration or flighty extravagance not in a wide departure from the sober standard of truth but in a more rigid and uncompromising adherence to it than inferior writers venture to attempt. He is pre-eminently the poet of reality in humble life ; and to its representation he has applied himself with a rigorous fidelity which startled the timid fastidiousness of many readers. He discarded the aid of those pleasing illusions with which humble life had previously been enveloped ; condemned as fictitious the prevalent representations, and in their stead fearlessly exhibited the stern, harsh, naked truth, and determined to rely for popularity on the fidelity and vigour of his delinea tions. His chief characteristics are force and accuracy; and through these, and the originality of his style, he com pels us to bestow our attention on objects that are usually neglected. His poetry, unlike that of others, directs our sympathy where it is well for the cause of humanity that it should be directed, but whence the squalidness of misery and want too frequently repels it. Much of his success arises from his graphic delineation of external objects, but more from his knowledge of the human heart, and his powerful treatment of the passions. Both the milder and the more violent emotions are portrayed with ability, but in the latter he is most strikingly successful. Despair and remorse are exhibited with a tragic strength that has been rarely equalled ; and madness has been seldom drawn with a more powerful hand than in his poem of Sir Eustace Grey. He has been called the satirist of the poor ; but we must be careful lest we attach to this expression too harsh an acceptation. It is true he discountenances those romantic day-dreanis which associate virtue inseparably with poverty, and an Arcadian innocence with rural life. He shows that demoralization is the attendant of distress, and that villagers may be equally dissipated, and more dishonest than the profligates of a wealthier class ; but he shows this in a spirit rather of pity than of anger ; and whilst he denounces and exposes crime, he makes us interested not so much in its punishment, as, what is still better, in its prevention. He spares not the vices of the poorer classes ; but at the same time he does more justice to their virtues, and renders them more important objects of consideration than perhaps any other imaginative writer. With many sterling merits as a poet, Crabbe has numerous defects. His descriptions are forcible and exact, but they are too detailed. They have too much of the minuteness of a Dutch picture ; and it is a minuteness exhibited in the representation of disgusting objects. He never shrinks from the irksome task of threading the details of vice and misery. Abject depravity is a too favourite subject of his pen ; and he does not seem sufficiently aware that there is a species of wickedness shich counteracts our sympathy with suffering, and a degree of insignificance which extinguishes our interest in. guilt. His skill in displaying the morbid anatomy of our moral nature has rendered him too prone to that unpleasing exercise of his talents ; and his habit of tracing tho deformities of character has given to his expositions too much the appearance of invective. His taste is very inferior to his other powers. Even with subjects naturally pleasing he is apt to blend disagreeable images. His descriptions of natural scenery, graphic as they are, havo little in them of elevation. There is no genial glow about them, as if the contemplation of nature had warmed and inspired him. His deficiency cf taste displays itself also sometimes in his humour, which is apt to verge upon buffoonery. His style is little to be commended. It ia too often clumsy and ungraceful, diffuse without freedom, homely without being easy, and antithetical without being pointed. His diction is frequently harsh and quaint, and compels us to feel that the merit of his works resides rather in their ideas than in the dress in which he clothes them. His lines are deficient in refinement and polish, and frequently offend the ear by something uncouth and prosaic in the sound, and the absence of musical rhythm. Such are the defects which have conduced to deprive him of that popularity which his merits would otherwise have obtained for him.

1em  CRACOW (Polish, Krakov; German, Krakau), a city of the crownland of Galicia, Austria, the capital anciently of Poland, and more recently of a small Polish republic which bordered on the Prussian, Austrian, and Russian dominions where they meet. The city stands in a fertile plain on the left bank of the Vistula, where the stream of the Rudowa joins it, nearly 200 miles north-east of Vienna in latitude (of observatory) 50 3 50&quot; N., longitude 19 57 30&quot; E., and at an elevation of 650 feet above the sea. The main railway line of Galicia, called the Carl Ludwig s Bahn, uniting the system of Germany along the outskirts of the Carpathian range with the lines about the Lower Danube, crosses the Vistula at Cracow. A line of detached forts has been built round the city, and a castle on a height commands the town. Promenades occupying the place of the old walls, planted with trees, divide the old town from the seven extensive suburbs of Stradom, Ribaki, Kleparz, Piasek, Wesola, Smolensk, and Wielopole ; and an arm of the Vistula cuts off the Jewish quarter of Kasimierz. In the old town the extensive castle of the Polish kinca on tho 