To the end of his days Crabbe, like many another, regarded sobriety and moderation in the expression of religious feeling as not only its chief safeguard but its chief ornament.

It may seem strange that the poetic temperament which Crabbe certainly possessed never seemed to affect his views of life and human nature outside the fields of poetic composition.

He was notably indifferent, his son tells us, "to almost all the proper objects of taste.

He had no real love for painting, or music, or architecture, or for what a painter's eye considers as the beauties of landscape.

But he had a passion for science--the science of the human mind, first; then, that of nature in general; and lastly that of abstract qualities." If the defects here indicated help to explain some of those in his poetry, they may also throw light on a certain lack of imagination in Crabbe's dealings with his fellow-men in general and with his parishioners in particular.