Byron in the most hackneyed of all eulogies upon Crabbe defined him as "Nature's sternest painter yet the best." The criticism would have been juster had he written that Crabbe was the truest painter of Nature in her less lovely phases.

Crabbe was not stern in his attitude either to his fellow-men, or to the varying aspects of Nature, although for the first years of his life he was in habitual contact with the less alluring side of both.
But it was not only through a closer intimacy with Nature that Crabbe was being unconsciously prepared for high poetic service.

Hope deferred and disappointments, poverty and anxiety, were doing their beneficent work.

Notwithstanding certain early dissipations and escapades which his fellow-townsmen did not fail to remember against him in the later days of his success, Crabbe was of a genuinely religious temperament, and had been trained by a devout mother.

Moreover, through a nearer and more sympathetic contact with the lives and sorrows of the poor suffering, he was storing experience full of value for the future, though he was still and for some time longer under the spell of the dominant poetic fashion, and still hesitated to "look into his heart and write." But the time was bound to come when he must put his poetic quality to a final test.