"Yet in all companies will Laughton feed, deed." It is, we may suppose, to be Nor care how grossly men perform the regarded as a happy ending when the sufferers forget the interesting part of their lives, and are dismissed with this gentle playfulness. There is, however, some irony in such an ending, of which Crabbe seems well aware. This irony is well suited to a tale, but in a drama it would be an anti-climax. Such are a few of Crabbe's narratives. Their variety, which cannot further be illustrated here, is somewhat concealed by the style in which they are told. The history of that style, which is not monotonous as it seems at first, is straightforward enough. Allowing for a few excursions, he remained throughout "classical" in his form. He slowly escaped from the fetters of the classical verbiage. He never, indeed, quite escaped, but then he never had been quite enslaved. From the first he has a habit of swinging his moralist's ferule vaguely in the air, and then suddenly letting it whistle down on a concrete pair of shoulders It was not, however, for his acres of declamation that Crabbe was mocked in "Rejected Addresses," but for the dead prosaic minuteness, of which there are acres also. It is needless to quote James or Horace Smith, for Crabbe is often his own parodist. He was always ready to write "meanly," in a kind of rhyming prose, if the phrase is allowable, - in which not the prose but the rhyme seems to be the intruder. He could write"Mamma look'd on with thoughts to these allied; - She felt the pleasure of reflected pride;" or even thus— "But how will Bloomer act When he becomes acquainted with the fact?" Much of the meanness of such passages is due to their thick and lumbering rhymes. Act, fact; all, scrawl; aunt, grant; flood, mud! The whole weight of a couplet lies upon its rhymes, and Crabbe does not "I, like yon wither'd leaf, remain be- wind; on ; mind making the worst of associations. We can trace the There it abides till younger buds come After a while this kind of "Ah, brother Isaac -What! I'm in Am fond of peace, and my repose must buy fitted. The motion is some- On any terms-in short, we must My spouse had money-she must have quicker than might be feared. her will After a time the sensation is pleasant, and we can watch the life of the roadside and the inn-parlour. The hardest task of Crabbe was to manage the speeches of his prosaic dramatis a medium so full of rhetorical Ah! Brother-marriage is a bitter George tried the lady'Sister, I 'Me?' she replied—'Oh no! you may On my regard—but watch your personæ in Whom I, like you, must study and obey."" Crabbe's versification likewise grew in freedom, though he remained faithful to his distich. In his handling of it, he remembers the finish and balance of Pope, but aspires to the nobler sweep of Dryden, freely using the triple rhymes and alexandrines. His lines are more continuous than Pope's, and in their overrunning and interlacing come to resemble what Johnson, speaking of "The Hind and Panther," calls Dryden's "deliberate and ultimate scheme" of verse. Only, Crabbe goes further still, since he has to forge a rhythm that accords with natural domestic talk. He is therefore the last great writer of the couplet in its "classical" form. Its later uses by Keats and William Morris for romantic narrative are coloured by memories of the Jacobeans and of Chaucer. Nothing could be more skilful technically, or better done, than some lines from "Procrastination." Dinah has waited many years for her absent lover Rupert, but has become meanwhile rich, avaricious, and sanctimonious. He returns, poor as he went, to claim her, and she rebuffs him. "She ceased;-with steady glance, as if to see THE NEW JUNE. BY HENRY NEWBOLT. XLVII.—FROM WESTMINSTER TO TOWER HILL. JOHN had made a fortunate stroke as well as a bold one: his confidence in his lord not only advanced him with Margaret, it was completely justified by the event. When the business of arranging for a foundation at Bordelby came before the lawyers they advised that the title to the property was not good enough to proceed upon, and Lord Kent accordingly invited the Ingleby family to become joint-patrons with him of the proposed monastery. Το this they readily consented; their interest was divided among a number of relations, the cost to each would be but small, and the honour considerable. Sir John Ingleby, the head of the house, though in general opposed to the king's party, was a devoted adherent of the Staffords, and could refuse nothing to the new Lady Kent. The project, therefore, needed only the royal licence, and as this was to be had for the asking the work was put in hand at once. under the roof of the Great Hall of Westminster, which had just been rebuilt and enlarged: but neither within nor without was there any room to spare. London and Westminster were crowded beyond all experience: every one of the king's party had brought a small army with him, and the bulk of them-horse, foot, and followers-were quartered by hundreds in every village within a dozen miles of the capital. Richard himself lay at Eltham, surrounded by his new bodyguard of two thousand Cheshire archers. These men, the most loyal and disciplined soldiers in England, were the admiration of John and all his friends; to the other side they seemed "very rude and beastly people, few or none of them gentlemen, but very proud." The words are an apt illustration of the sharp and bitter difference of feeling between the two parties in the country, and it was but natural that the bitterness should be most keen against the Cheshire men, for the contending powers had been far more nearly balanced than at present appeared, and the scale had been turned decisively in Richard's favour by this one reliable force of yeomen. The second of John's conjectures was even more signally confirmed by Warwick's complete admission of his own and his fellow-conspirators' guilt. Parliament had been summoned for September 17, and the Lords had been warned to For the time, then, the and attended. king's triumph was undisThey met, for the first time, puted. He was able to an come armed nounce to the two Houses that they would be spared the painful necessity of trying the Duke of Gloucester, who, after making a full confession in writing, had very opportunely died on the 27th August, "of the disease of which he had been labouring at the moment of his arrest." He was to be brought home from Calais immediately, and buried in state in his own chapel at Pleshey. The impeachment of the remaining conspirators would be proceeded with in three or four days' time. The trial, when it came, was a short one. Warwick pleaded guilty, and the high-spirited denials of Arundel, left alone to answer the eight Appellants, only made his case the more hopeless. If anything could have saved him it would have been his fierce reply to Derby, who could not let slip an opportunity of bettering his own credit by attacking lion already in the toils. But the lion's wrath spared no one, from the king downward, and the end was not long delayed. When the formal verdict of "Guilty" had been recorded against all four of the traitors, the dead and the living, the Duke of Lancaster, as High Steward of England, pronounced sentence in the presence of the king, who listened with the serene and pitiless face of an avenging angel. The Duke of Gloucester's estates and honours were forfeited; the Earl of Warwick was banished to the Isle of Man, and all his possessions confiscated; the Archbishop was exiled for life-another touch of poetic justice, for his predecessor, Archbishop Neville, had suffered the same penalty at the hands of the old Lords Appellant in the days of Richard's humiliation. For Arundel there could be nothing but death, sudden and exemplary; and Lancaster, in the customary form, sentenced the traitor to be drawn, hanged, burned, beheaded, and quartered. Then, after a pause, he added: "The King our Sovereign Lord, of his grace, because thou art of his blood and one of the Peers of the realm, hath remitted all these pains unto the last, so only that thou lose thy head." To John, who was waiting outside with other officers, the news was no surprise in itself; but it was a shock to find that the execution was to take place immediately, and to hear his lord's voice giving orders for all his people to attend him to Tower Hill. Huntingdon was close behind him, and Nottingham was ordering out one battalion of the mounted archers. Lord Kent's horse was brought, and the crowd of retainers fell back: John stood by the stirrup and looked his master in the face. "Must we go this errand?" he asked, as he pretended to busy himself with the girth. Tom's face was pale and set; there was nothing ignoble in it. "Yes, John, we must," he said. "Nottingham is his son-inlaw, and I am his nephew; no one will suspect us of revenge." "My lord of Huntingdon?" "He has no command," re |