Now in our Hands we wish our noisy Tools,
To drown the hated Names of Rogues and Fools;
But, wanting these, we just like Schoolboys look,
When angry Masters view the blotted Book:
They cry, ‘Their Ink was faulty, and their Pen;’
We, ‘The Corn threshes bad, ’twas cut too green.’”
He might have equalled Bloomfield, he might have been a much lesser Crabbe, if he could have thrown Cuddy and Chloe on to the mixen and kept to the slighted homely style. Instead of merely writing as if he had been to Oxford, he might have reached men’s ears with his appeal,—
“Let those who feast at Ease on dainty Fare,
Pity the Reapers, who their Feasts prepare.”
As a rule his work—I mean his writing—is so remote from Wiltshire and Duck, or the sort of reality connected with them which we to-day look for, that even the grain or two about Salisbury Plain or the Pewsey Vale not quite dissolved in his floods of Alexanderpopery delight us, as when he calls the lambs bleating,—