Page:The spirit of place, and other essays, Meynell, 1899.djvu/81

Rh best—the couplet. The weak yet rigid "poetry" that fell to his lot owed all the decorum it possessed to the mechanical defences and props—the exclusions especially—of this manner of versification. The grievous thing was that, being moved to write simply of simple things, he had no more supple English for his purpose. His effort to disengage the phrase—long committed to convention and to an exposed artifice—did but prove how surely the ancient vitality was gone.

His preface to "The Borough, a Poem," should be duly read before the "poem" itself, for the prose has a propriety all its own. Everything is conceived with the most perfect moderation, and then presented in a form of reasoning that leaves you no possible ground of remonstrance. In proposing his subject Crabbe seems to make an unanswerable apology with a composure that is almost sweet. For instance, at some length and with some nobility he anticipates a probable conjecture that his work was done "without due examination and revisal," and he meets the conjectured criticism thus: "Now, readers are, I believe, disposed to treat with more than common severity those writers who have been led into presumption by