life, never to be forgotten, alone, beneath a twilight of wondrous lustre, on the wide sands,-the sea, coming in with its calm majestic boom, advancing momently as if to receive me into the very heart of its world of wonders-I well remember the rich procession of images, varied with all the hues of past, present and future, while the superb symphony of the waves, infused into the mind, through which they passed, a delightful calm and benevolence, untinged with hope or enthusiasm, the pure result of a perception of the infinite.

To a common mortal, existence may afford one such hour; to the boy-poet, amid all his wearying, uncongenial tasks, doubtless came many such, full of solace, and the germs of future creations. This communion, stolen hours of strange mixed reading, and the book of human nature always before him, stood to Crabbe in the place of colleges and lecture rooms. The annals of this period, must be read in detail, in order to comprehend fully his situation.

As he advanced towards manhood he formed an attachment which was of infinite value to him, by giving a home to his thoughts and wishes. The object of his affections is not in this biography depicted with any distinctive traits, but the woman who could appreciate the yet undeveloped mind of Crabbe, under his then disadvantages, must have possessed no common character. The home in which he wooed this lady is described with a minuteness very gratifying, as it was afterwards adopted as the scene of one of his admirable tales, and furnished studies for several.

The most interesting part of his life is where, after his engagement, he goes up to London alone, unfriended, but resolved to hew his way to fortune, and fulfil the oracle he feels within him. The resolute cheerfulness with which he strives through this most forlorn and distressing period, evinced above all in the letter he wrote when living on fourpence, and goaded by repeated repulses and disappointments which threatened to deprive him not only of fame, but of bread, we recommend to the consideration of all those sorrowful geniuses who are forever telling their friends and themselves what they might have been and done if some slight check, forsooth, had not blighted the hopeful bud. Let them look at Crabbe and know the genuine power of the much-mistaken human will. The letter to Burke, which induced that noble-minded man to raise him from his low estate, into his own luminous and genial atmosphere, is not the least remarkable of his productions. The humility of the suppliant never infringes on the dignity of the man, and in the ambitious beggar addressing

the celebrated orator, we feel only that a not unequal soul asks as a boon, what fate should have granted as a right. The manner in which the appeal was made, and that in which it was answered, are alike honorable to human nature.

Here is not the place to speak of Crabbe's literary character, his truth to nature, alike in her sublime and squalid aspects, his original style, his strong impartial judgment, his stern pictorial power, his keen moral sense, are they not written on the English mind in characters never to be effaced, while that mind retains national unity?

Three things we would speak of in relation to his life, which we have not space to examine at length. First, his devoted love of nature. He was never ungrateful to his nurse and teacher, but always preferred her to the world and all its allurements. Twenty-two years of mature life, after the public admiration had opened to him a wide and brilliant scene, he passed, from choice, in quiet intercourse with her, in woods, fields, streams, with all their myriad inhabitants, and among those lower orders of the human family, who had not skill to hide from his eye the heart with its mingled good and ill. And richly did she reward him, preserving his taste unspoiled, and his power of creation unimpaired to the last.

Second; his reserve, not shown by boldness, but by a natural keeping back of the peculiar treasures of his mind, to be worked up in his peculiar form. Accordingly, the few letters of his by which the biography is illustrated, are neither worthy nor expressive of his genius; neither does he appear to have been fascinating in the daily walks of life. We neither blame nor approve this. The mantle of reserve, required by the sensitive frame of one man of genius, is a weight and burden to another. In one, the vital principle, as in the vegetable kingdom, can put forth leaves and blossoms while perfecting the growth of the main stem; in another, it must, like precious ore, be separated, in depth and in darkness, from the foreign substances which obscure its refulgence. Versatile or concentrated, of intense or diffusive glow, true genius is welcome in all its manifestations.

Third; his independence, unshaken through all the vicissitudes of his life, against the temptations of poverty and celebrity, his shield and his spear. Here the life of Crabbe corresponded perfectly with his writings. For the rest, his life, though apparently unspotted, is unmarked by any phi lanthropic schemes, or active plans of any note. Let us be content, for by his pen he amply redeemed the talents confided to him, and performed his duty towards his race.

The biographer of Miss More, is a man without one ray of talent, consequently only knowing that others possess it on hearsay, and by perceiving it result in fame or money. He writes in a confused, awkward style, and whenever he does undertake to tell a story, places its subject in rather a ridiculous light. However, as he has favored us with a great number of letters which leave but few gaps, and seldom obtrudes himself upon us, except to repeat what Miss More has just said, or announce what she is about to say, it is not worth while to be very severe on the author of "The Portraiture of a Christian Gentleman," but leave him to enjoy in peace the fame he must have won from the work of which he announces himself the writer.

Hannah More was the youngest, but one, of five sisters, who, when she was still very young, set up a boarding-school at Bristol, leaving (apparently) their parents quite alone and unattended. But, as we find them to have been through life excellent women, we cannot but suppose that they did their duty to those parents, although the biographer has not thought necessary to explain where or how. He tells of an engagement which took place about the age of twenty-two, and which ended in the lover settling an annuity on Miss More to compensate for the robbery he had committed on her TIME, in a way which would leave an unpleasant or ludicrous impression on our minds, if the good sense and disinterestedness, evinced by the lady ever after, did not oblige us to lay all the blame on the folly and bad taste of her biographer.

Here she resided, making various attainments, becoming known to a few literati, and writing the Search after Happiness, and other things of some merit, till she was nearly thirty, when she visited London, (for what purpose, and under whose protection we are not told,) and, in consequence of a letter of her's shown to Garrick, expressing ardent and tasteful admiration of his Lear, she was introduced by that very vain and very generous great man, to the fashionable, and what was then the same,-how are times changed,-the literary world of gorgeous London. And here we cannot help quoting an alluring description of that great city, in reading which, we have almost been guilty of the child-like folly of wishing for a monarchy, that we might have such a metropolis to which to resort. We have an indistinct recollection of having seen it quoted before in some popular book, but no matter; to many readers it will be new.

"In my youth, and through the prime of manhood," says Sir Humphrey Davy, "I never entered London without feelings

of pleasure and hope. It was to me as the grand theatre of intellectual activity, the field of every species of enterprise and exertion, the metropolis of the world of business, thought and action. There I was sure to find the friends and companions of my youth, to hear the voice of encouragement and praise. There society of the most refined kind offered daily its banquets to the mind, with such variety that satiety had no place in them, and new objects of interest and ambition were constantly exciting attention, either in politics, literature, or science." What a fair foreground? it is very difficult to remember that there are corruption and misery behind.

On this grand theatre, Hannah More made her debut under the wing of Garrick, and was received with a degree of cordiality, which cannot but excite some surprise, when we consider how many far superior in talent to herself, inferior only in that moral excellence, so rarely appreciated by the world at large, have been long left to shiver in the shade.

If we compare the merits of her early productions, and her pretensions to notice, as assistant in a provincial boardingschool, with her reception in the most brilliant circle of that brilliant capital, when we see her taken at once to the hearts and homes of the Garricks, the Johnsons, the Reynolds, and the Montagues, we are led to think (not uncharitably, we hope,) that something may be attributed to her being, at that time, though unconsciously, a great flatterer. She had the sort of talent which, next in grade to genius, is peculiarly fitted to be its eager recipient and interpreter, while her country education gave to her expressions of admiration, a naivete and warmth, which must have been highly gratifying to the magnates of that new land in which she had become a denizen. We are far from wishing to derogate from Miss More, we do not believe her to have been capable of intentionally winning the favor of any one by such means, and we look upon her natural ardor of temperament as most fortunate, since it secured to her those fostering influences which were so desirable to her. She was by nature formed for the sunny side of the world. And here commences a bright era. Twenty years she divided between London, where she had all the benefits of the most cultivated society, and the command of fine libraries, of which she availed herself to a surprising degree, and the comparative seclusion of Bristol, where she methodised the large stock of new ideas thus acquired, and digested them for new works.

This is the most interesting portion of her life to readers in general. Her own letters, and those of many illustrious

friends to her supply a new and entertaining comment upon that epoch in England's mental history, whose fragrant ripeness seems to have been the precursor of a trying transition state, at least, if not of a total decay. Some of her best works belong to this period.

About 1789, begins (we perfectly agree with good Mr. Roberts here,) the more noble portion of her career. Having retired from those dazzling scenes, in which, though so much caressed, she had never obtained perfect satisfaction of mind, she began and continued, through the remainder of her days, that system of active and wise benevolence, by which she so honorably illustrated those precepts of piety and morality, which she still inculcated with the pen,-for the larger half of her works (tremble ye idlers and weak lamenters over want of time to execute your designs,) belong to this period. It is worthy of note, that her only novel, Colebs, was one of her latest productions.

We could not but wonder that Miss Moore, so philanthropic and generally so discriminating, should not feel something wanting in that religious establishment, of which she was the stanch partizan, when she found twelve parishes of her vicinity in the state she describes, while her friends, the right reverend bishops and arch-bishops were residing in palaces, and had the incomes of princes. We extract one or two passages upon this point.

"It is grievous to reflect, that, while we are sending missionaries to our distant colonies, our own villages are perishing for lack of instruction. We have in this neighborhood thirteen adjoining parishes, without so much as even a resident curate. We have established schools and various little institutions over a tract of country of ten or twelve miles, and have near five hundred children in training. As the land is almost pagan, we bring down persons of great reputation for piety from other places. But how we shall be able to keep up these things with so much opposition, vice, poverty, and ignorance as we have to deal with, I cannot guess."

Again,-"On Sunday I was enabled to open the school. It was an affecting sight. Several of the grown-up youths had been tried at the last assizes, three were the children of a person lately condemned to be hanged, many thieves! all ignorant, profane and vicious beyond belief. Of this banditti we have enlisted one hundred and seventy, and when the clergyman, a hard man, who is also the magistrate, saw these creatures kneeling around us, whom he had seldom seen but to commit or punish in some way, he burst into tears."

"Six large parishes without so much as a resident curate. Three commonly gifted curates cannot serve eight churches."

"At Cheddar we saw but one bible in all the parish, and that was used to prop a flower-pot. No clergyman had resided in it for forty years.

One rode over three miles from Wells to preach once on a