"They give Heaven thanks, and make no boast of it." These are they to whom the "unruly wills and affections" of their kind are eternally interesting, even when studied through the medium of a uniform and monotonous metre.
A Trowbridge friend wrote to Crabbe's son, after his father's death, "When I called on him, soon after his arrival, I remarked that his house and garden were pleasant and secluded: he replied that he preferred walking in the streets, and observing the faces of the passers-by, to the finest natural scenes." There is a poignant line in _Maud_, where the distracted lover dwells on "the faces that one meets." It was not by the "sweet records, promises as sweet," that these two observers of life were impressed, but rather by vicious records and hopeless outlooks.

It was such countenances that Crabbe looked for, and speculated on, for in such, he found food for that pity and terror he most loved to awaken.
The starting-point of Crabbe's desire to portray village-life truly was a certain indignation he felt at the then still-surviving conventions of the Pastoral Poets.

We have lately watched, in the literature of our own day, a somewhat similar reaction against sentimental pictures of country-life.

The feebler members of a family of novelists, which some one wittily labelled as the "kail-yard school," so irritated a young Scottish journalist, the late Mr.George Douglas, that he resolved to provide what he conceived might be a useful corrective for the public mind.

To counteract the half-truths of the opposite school, he wrote a tale of singular power and promise, _The House with the Green Shutters_.