But the resultant effect, it must be confessed, is often the reverse of cheering.

The fine lines of Wordsworth as to "Sorrow that is not sorrow, but delight; And miserable love, that is not pain To hear of, for the glory that redounds Therefrom to human kind, and what we are," fail to console us as we read these later stories of Crabbe.

We part from too many of them not, on the whole, with a livelier faith in human nature.

We are crushed by the exhibition of so much that is abnormally base and sordid.
The _Tales of the Hall_ are full of surprises even to those familiar with Crabbe's earlier poems.

He can still allow couplets to stand which are perilously near to doggerel; and, on the other hand, when his deepest interest in the fortunes of his characters is aroused, he rises at times to real eloquence, if never to poetry's supremest heights.