His knowledge and observation of human nature were not perhaps inferior to Jane Austen's, but he could never have matched her in prose fiction.

He certainly was not deficient in humour, but it was not his dominant gift, as it was hers.

Again, his knowledge of the life and social ways of the class to which he nominally belonged, does not seem to have been intimate.

Crabbe could not have written prose fiction with any approximation to the manners of real life.

His characters would have certainly _thou'ed_ and _thee'ed_ one another as they do in his verse, and a clergyman would always have been addressed as "Reverend Sir!" Surely, it will be argued, all this is sufficient to account for the entire disappearance of Crabbe from the list of poets whom every educated lover of poetry is expected to appreciate.