In yet another respect Crabbe was to work hand in hand with Wordsworth.

He does not seem to have held definite opinions as to necessary reforms in what Wordsworth called "poetic diction." Indeed he was hampered, as Wordsworth was not, by a lifelong adherence to a metre--the heroic couplet--with which this same poetic diction was most closely bound up.

He did not always escape the effects of this contagion, but in the main he was delivered from it by what I have called a first-hand association with man and nature.

He was ever describing what he had seen and studied with his own eyes, and the vocabulary of the bards who had for generations borrowed it from one another failed to supply him with the words he needed.

The very limitations of the first five-and-twenty years of his life passed in a small and decaying seaport were more than compensated by the intimacy of his acquaintance with its inhabitants.