No one can doubt the earnestness and truth of the poet's mingled anger and sorrow.

The misery of irregular unions had never been "bitten in" with more convincing force.

The verse, moreover, in the passage is freer than usual from many of Crabbe's eccentricities.

It is marked here and there by his fondness for verbal antithesis, almost amounting to the pun, which his parodists have not overlooked.

The second line indeed is hardly more allowable in serious verse than Dickens's mention of the lady who went home "in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair." But Crabbe's indulgence in this habit is never a mere concession to the reader's flippant taste.