Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV TO THE IMMORTAL MEMORY OF GEORGE CRABBE An Address delivered at the Crabbe Celebration at Aldeburgh in Suffolk on the i6th of September, 1905. I Have been asked to say something in praise of George Crabbe. The task would be an easier one were it not for the presence of the distinguished critic from the University of Nancy who is with us to-day. M. Huchon1 has devoted to the subject a singleminded zeal to which one whose profession is primarily that of a journalist can make no claim. Moreover it has been well said that the judgment of foreigners is the judgment of -posterity, and I fully believe that where a writer has secured the suffrages of men of another nation than his own, he has done more for his ultimate fame than thepassing and fickle favour of his countrymen can secure for him. In any case Crabbe has been praised more eloquently than almost any other modern, and this in spite of the fact that he was not read by the generation succeeding his death, nor is he read much in our own time. 1 M. Ren6 Huchon, who addressed the visitors at the Crabbe Celebration, published his George Crabbe and his Times: A Critical and Biographical Study, through Mr. John Murray, early in the present year, 1907. I.M. 7 If you want to read Crabbe to-day in his entirety, you must become possessed of a huge and clumsy volume of sombre appearance, small type and repellant double columns. For fully seventy years it has not paid a publisher to reprint Crabbe's poems properly.1 When this was achieved in 1834, the edition in eight volumes was comparatively a failure, and the promised two volumes of essays and sermons were not forthcoming in consequence. Selections from Crabbe have been many, but when all is said he has been the least read for the past sixty or seventy years of all t... --This text refers to the Paperback edition.