For his purpose, and with his subjects and special gifts, none probably would have served him better.

For narrative largely blended with the analytical and the epigrammatic method neither the stanza nor blank-verse (had he ever mastered it) would have sufficed.

But in Crabbe's last published volumes it was not only the metre that was to seem flat and monotonous in the presence of new proofs of the boundless capabilities of verse.

The reader would not make much progress in these volumes without discovering that the depressing incidents of life, its disasters and distresses, were still Crabbe's prevailing theme.

John Murray in the same season published Rogers's _Human Life_ and Crabbe's _Tales of the Hall_.