His epigrams often strike deeply home, as in this instance or in the line:-- "Too soon made happy, and made wise too late." The story that follows of Phoebe Dawson, which helped to soothe Fox in the last stage of his long disease, is no less powerful.

The gradual steps by which the village beauty is led to her ruin are told in a hundred lines with a fidelity not surpassed in the case of the story of Hetty Sorrel.

The verse, alternately recalling Pope and Goldsmith, is yet impelled by a moral intention, which gives it absolute individuality.

The picture presented is as poignantly pathetic as Frederick Walker's _Lost Path_, or Langhorne's "Child of misery, baptized in tears." That it will ever again be ranked with such may be doubtful, for _technique_ is the first quality demanded of an artist in our day, and Crabbe's _technique_ is too often defective in the extreme.
These more tragic incidents of village life are, however, relieved at proper intervals by some of lighter complexion.

There is the gentleman's gardener who has his successive children christened by the Latin names of his plants,--Lonicera, Hyacinthus and Senecio.