But now, in reviewing the new volume, a note of warning appears.

The critic finds himself obliged to admit that the current objections to Crabbe's treatment of country life are well founded.

"His chief fault," he says, "is his frequent lapse into disgusting representations." All powerful and pathetic poetry, Jeffrey admits, abounds in "images of distress," but these images must never excite "disgust," for that is fatal to the ends which poetry was meant to produce.

A few months later the _Quarterly_ followed in the same strain, but went on to preach a more questionable doctrine.

The critic in fact lays down the extraordinary canon that the function of Poetry is not to present any truth, if it happens to be unpleasant, but to substitute an agreeable illusion in its place.