He discerned moreover that even those who had read in their youth _The Village_ and _The Borough_ had been repelled by the length, and perhaps by the monotonous sadness, of the _Tales of the Hall_.

It was for this reason apparently (and not because he assigned a higher place to the later poetry than to the earlier) that he was led, after some years of misgiving, to prepare a volume of selections from this latest work of Crabbe's which might have the effect of tempting the reader to master it as a whole.

Owing to the length and uniformity of Crabbe's verse, what was ordinarily called an "anthology" was out of the question.

FitzGerald was restricted to a single method.

He found that readers were impatient of Crabbe's _longueurs_.