He cites Chaucer, who had depicted very low life indeed, and in the same rhymed metre.

"If all that kind of satire wherein character is skilfully delineated, must no longer be esteemed as genuine poetry," then what becomes of the author of _The Canterbury Tales_?
Crabbe could not supply, or be expected to supply, the answer to this question.

He could not discern that the treatment is everything, and that Chaucer was endowed with many qualities denied to himself--the spirit of joyousness and the love of sunshine, and together with these, gifts of humour and pathos to which Crabbe could make no pretension.
From Chaucer, Crabbe passes to the great but very different master, on whom he had first built his style.

Was Pope, then, not a poet?
seeing that he too has "no small portion of this actuality of relation, this nudity of description, and poetry without an atmosphere"?
Here again, of course, Crabbe overlooks one essential difference between himself and his model.

Both were keen-sighted students of character, and both described sordid and worldly ambitions.