Like all reactions, it erred in the violence of its colouring.

If intended as a true picture of the normal state of a small Scottish provincial town and its society, it may have been as false in its own direction as the kail-yarders had been in theirs.

But for Mr.
Douglas's untimely death--a real loss to literature--he would doubtless have shown in future fictions that the pendulum had ceased to swing, and would have given us more artistic, because completer, pictures of human life.

With Crabbe the force of his primal bias never ceased to act until his life's end.

The leaven of protest against the sentimentalists never quite worked itself out in him, although, no doubt, in some of the later tales and portrayals of character, the sun was oftener allowed to shine out from behind the clouds We must not forget this when we are inclined to accept without question Byron's famous eulogium.