But a late visitor (Mr. George Dodd) expresses a doubt whether
the Leasowes, even in its comparative decay, is not a finer bit of
landscape, a more delightful place to lose one-self in, than even its
larger and better preserved neighbour.
[024] Coleridge is reported to have said--"There is in Crabbe an
absolute defect of high imagination; he gives me little pleasure. Yet no
doubt he has much power of a certain kind, and it is good to cultivate,
even at some pains, a catholic taste in literature." Walter Savage
Landor, in his "Imaginary Conversations," makes Porson say--"Crabbe
wrote with a two-penny nail and scratched rough truths and rogues' facts
on mud walls." Horace Smith represents Crabbe, as "Pope in worsted
stockings." That there is merit of some sort or other, and that of no
ordinary kind, in Crabbe's poems, is what no one will deny. They
relieved the languor of the last days of two great men, of very
different characters--Sir Walter Scott and Charles James Fox.
[025] The poet had a cottage and garden in Kew-foot-Lane at or near
Richmond. In the alcove in the garden is a small table made of the wood
of the walnut tree. There is a drawer to the table which in all
probability often received charge of the poet's effusions hot from the
brain. On a brass tablet inserted in the top of the table is this
inscription--"_This table was the property of James Thomson, and always
stood in this seat.
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